Recommendations:

 

Speaking from exclusively my experience, I would

recommend the following preparatory actions for the Thursday meeting:

 

1. Steve, you need to explain before the meeting, how the URL field needs to

be used.  I am still unclear, how to bring pictures or text into the

discussion with using the link.  What I finally did, was to past the URL of

my short text on a web site in Denmark into the text I transmitted.  I did

not touch the URL field.  It showed up either as a link or as the text or

not at all - this behavior is not acceptable, most likely I was doing

something wrong.

 

2. If more people participate actively in the discussion, the screen becomes

small and the text disappears from view quickly.  I have a bigger monitor at

work, I will re-set the resolution so that I can see more messages.  Steve,

please advise people how to change the number of retained messages on the

screen - it is obvious, but we tend to think that the number is empirically

the best which is not necessarily true.  Also, what do the 10 seconds mean ?

See ...

 

3. If anybody asks a question, and somebody sends an answer, the 2 messages

are most likely far apart and the context is not obvious - I recommend we as

the participants to start their answer with the name of the person who asked

the question - this allows to quickly find the question.  The asynchronous

way of Q and A and interspaced other traffic needs a bit of getting used to.

 

4. What does it mean to grab the chair ?  Is it a possibility to hold

messages, give the word to a specific person, or what ???

 

5. Be prepared to cut in, when personal dialog with no relation to the

subject is going on - advise these people to use the private exchange and

tell them how to do that.

 

6. If everything else fails, moderate !  Even if it slows down the

discussion significantly.  Unless there is "the chair's way" to do this

electronically, we need to agree on a signal to slow down and wait for the

queue to be read and processed before sending new stuff. 

 

Most of these recommendations need to be communicated before the meeting,

otherwise we just contribute to the "noise" and clutter.

 

I like the tool, it works great when used properly, possibly with a little

bit of moderation.  I believe, Steve ought to give the instructions, if you

agree.