On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Milos Rancic <millosh@gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 00:33, Aaron Halfaker <aaron.halfaker@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm strongly in favor of voice conferencing of some sort (Skype or
> otherwise) due to the difference in the amount of time text and speech take
> to convey ideas. For example, recently, I have been exit-interviewing some
> enwp editors. Of those interviews I've done over the phone or skype, I was
> able to complete the entire question set in about 30 minutes. Whereas, the
> same question set took about 4 hours to complete over gtalk and IRC. In
> other words, conveying roughly the same ideas over text took about 8 times
> longer than voice.
> For the sake of keeping our synchronous meetings both brief and effective, I
> feel strongly that we should pursue some voice communication system.

The most productive way of group communication is asynchronous, which
puts mailing lists and wikis at the first place:

* Writing (typing) is slower than talking. However, it is faster to
read, than to listen. And it is, actually, better, as group
communication is "many-to-many": we need to read/listen a lot and
write/talk much less.
* Thoughts are well structured, unlike in any synchronous communication.
* It is not necessary to wake up at 4:00 [at the morning] to be able
to participate in discussion because it is the most acceptable time
for meeting for all participants.
* Communication flow is much slower, but the nature of our job is not executive.
* Publicly archived mailing list is more transparent than Skype conference.

So, I prefer to have the most important communication and the most of
communication via mailing list. (To be honest, I can't imagine what we
can do better by talking instead of writing [asynchronously].) But, if
there is a need for conferences, except technical issues which I've
mentioned, I am fine with any type of synchronous communication.

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