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Scheduled chat
  • IRC chat room here: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/IRC_channel

    It will accelerate communication for self organizing and brainstorming.

    In order for people to meet up, we need a set time where everyone joins. Lets chat on Fridays at 8 am and 6 pm pacific time. This will get everyone on the same page before the weekend begins, where most people will have free time to work on the project. Perhaps we can meet on Tuesday mornings and evenings as well to give an update on accomplishments and time to gather materials during the week. The morning sessions are for those in Europe or East coast US, evening sessions are for those in the US.

    So the first scheduled chat session will be this Tuesday at 8 am pacific time. I'll be in in the evening session, probably close to 8 pm pacific time (best time for me). I don't want to push the scheduled time back too far for those who are on the East Coast however.

    Chat summary:
    Where: http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/IRC_channel
    When: Tuesdays and Fridays @
    UTC time: 3:00 pm and 1:00 am
    US East: 11 am and 9 pm
    US Central: 10 am and 8 pm
    US Mountain:9 am and 7 pm
    US Pacific: 8 am and 6 pm
    *or anytime someone else is in chat, which can be anytime
    Discussion topic: Organizational, program managers, current active projects, crowd map, resource pools
     
  • 7 Comments sorted by
  • This sounds good, I'll bookmark it and pop in from time to time just for kicks.
     
  • I've updated the contact page to link to our IRC channel:

    http://openfarmtech.org/wiki/Contact_us
    (click on "OSE IRC chat room")
     
  • Updated the OP with IRC link.
     
  • I tried to do this sort of thing once, with a much bigger(thousands of people) but less motivated community.  No one came essentially, and those who did come did not come back.

     There are many dynamics involved which I think help to explain why. I think the main problem is that it is too slow to communicate over IRC for most people, who are not very fast typists. 

    People also don't like the idea of a "meeting" with no defined agenda. And yet if you pick only one thing then a lot of people won't find it interesting enough and won't come.  In the end I concluded that better software and ultimately some money to entice people to come in some way was needed.  Once enough people come I think it could snowball as it would be more interesting and people would com back next time.

    When it came to software I looked through essentially all the options for videoconferencing available, and the best I found by far was Vsee.  Google it.  But it still has major issues with handling the sound input etc. and there is too much configuration needed.

    The next best was tinychat.    There are other platforms which looked better but had no free trial so I chose not to try them - there is so much crappy software out there it makes no sense to pay for something before you know it works as you need it to.  See my blog and search "virtualtinyhouseconference"


     
  • I had actually been thinking about doing something like this (weekly meeting time) with skype.  Wikipedia has several podcasts about the encyclopedia that are recorded by just having everyone connect to a single skype channel and have 1 or more people participating record the conversation.  I don't know if we want to record it or not (although searchable transcripts might be kind of nice), but I think it would be a good way to quickly resolve lots of issues.  I think you can have up to 12 or 16 people in a chat at once, and there can be a "moderator" who runs the chat that can mute people, kick people, etc, so you can enforce some kind of order.  You can also have people in the channel who are text chatting (like IRC) and I think you can have many more than 16 people if most of them are text-only at any one time.  A common way of doing it is everyone who joins is automatically muted, they introduce themselves and ask for time to speak with the text chat, then eventually the moderator "gives them the floor" and they get unmuted and can say their piece.

    The team culturing survey has a place for a skype name and of the 10 or so I have looked at, about half of them seem to have skype details so a lot of people already have what they need to join these chats.
     
  • Something else to think about, with our busy lives, it may be hard to put aside a particular time like this.  In my case, it's nice to be able to reply on the Forum at my convenience.  But Skype might not be a bad way to go in the end.  At the project level this will be important.  A project cell would need to communicate as efficiently as possible in order to get anything done.

    I agree, the IRC may not be the best in the end, but it's an option.  Lets see if it gets used.  Besides, I type pretty fast for a two finger pecking wonder...:)

    The Dawg
     
  • I don't think we had any participation on Tuesday, but its good to have an 'official' scheduled time so that if there are a couple people that want to drop in they will meet each other.
     

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