On 20 Oct 2009, at 14:25, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/10/20 Michael Peel <email(a)mikepeel.net>et>:
That technical limitation. :-) Also, there are
concerns about the
required connection speed for hosting a multi-way conference like
this (as I understand it, the calls are all routed through the host
computer), and also the quality of the connections (I believe this
degrades as more people are added in?). Additionally, in order to
join in a conference call, they would need to skype call the person
hosting the meeting, who would then have to put the conference on
mute to answer the call and conference them in. That can really slow
down the conference.
IRC meetings have gone perfectly smoothly when no-one has remembered
to moderate the channel, so I expect voluntary muting would work. The
call would need to be hosted by someone with a good internet
connection, that is true. People could ask to be added through skype
chat, there is no need for a voice call.
That wasn't no-one remembering; as there hasn't been a problem so
far, I was choosing not to +m the channel, as it makes things easier
if someone loses voice, or we want to ask someone to speak. You're
correct in saying that voluntary moderation would probably work. From
my experience hosting skype conferences before, a separate call needs
to be established, and then that merged into the conference - there's
no way to have someone join a conference directly - although that may
have changed in the last year or so.
These may not
be problems - in which case we can relax that
restriction in the future - but for the first attempt, it's logical
to keep things as simple as possible. The aim here is definitely not
to exclude people, or become any less transparent, it's to become
more effective as a board.
It is worth a try. It will be interesting to see how well it works -
there may be problems with people talking over each other. Will a
recording of the meeting be made public? I would also ask that more
detailed minutes be produced, since there would be searchable IRC logs
to get the detail from.
I'm not aware of a way to record a Skype conference without requiring
an external device (i.e. recording the signal to the speaker, rather
than digitally within the computer); if anyone knows a way to do
this, then the meetings should definitely be recorded. It remains to
be seen what the reduction in information in the IRC logs will be -
the signal to noise should greatly increase, which may offset the
reduction in time that the logs go on for.
Mike