Re: [Wikimedia-Canada] Conference calls for meetings

Have you considered IRC? It is free, it is very familiar to most wikimedians, channels can be actively managed to allow only invited and digitally identified participants (including the possibility of wikimedia.ca cloaks given out only by Wiki Canada Inc), allows moderated or open discussion meeting formats, and is readily loggable (which means less work for a secretary.) Most users have an IRC client, or there are a range of web-based gateways which allows almost any user who has internet access to be involved. Of particular benefit is the ability to use URLs to link discussions to relevant internet resources. As it is a purely text interface it does not allow as rich a communication stream, but at the exact same time this improve decision-making speed by reducing digression tendencies. IRC is extremely scalable as it is a very low bandwidth protocol. With Skype and similar voice meeting software, unmoderated discussions will be punctuated with periods of dropped sound when multiple people try to speak at once - this is an artifact of the high bandwidth use and will unequally harm users who have lower bandwidth connections. IRC can be too fast when many people are typing rapidly; screens can scroll too rapidly to be fully read and understood. Amgine On Sat, 2 Apr 2011 16:31:21 -0700 (PDT) Doc James <jmh649(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Amgine <amgine(a)wikimedians.ca>