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.