Online meeting… the aftermath
Last week (14/01/2009) SOHO Solo West Cork held it’s first ever online meeting. We chose the free online meeting service “DimDim” as the platform, and went through a series of tasks including a short presentation, desktop sharing / screen-casting, collaborative white-boarding, all using the public and private text chat and Voice over IP (VoIP) functions to communicate.
It all went surprisingly well.
While there were the inevitable hiccups surrounding microphone and webcam permissions, which meant that some people couldn’t use the voice feature, the presentation and screen-cast elements went off without a hitch.
Positive feedback
Given that this was our first attempt at using the online medium everyone who joined the meeting (we had between 8 and 13 attendees at various points – Dim Dim’s free virtual meetings can accommodate up to 20) everyone seemed impressed and feedback we’ve garnered via a PollDaddy survey (more on PollDaddy in another post soon) has been very positive. Everyone who responded said they’d be very keen to incorporate online meetings and webinar-style presentations into the SOHO Solo West Cork programme moving forward on either a regular or occasional basis.
Online meetings certainly have lots of potential for SOHO Solos for client meetings, demonstrations, training and plenty of other applications. We’ve only just scratched the surface, and I’m looking forward to exploring the opportunities further with other SOHO Solo members in 2009.
The power of online connections
Before the SOHO Solo meeting I’d been tweeting (posting on twitter) about what we were planning to do, and received great encouragement and advice from online meeting specialists like Meri Walker in the US and Joe Garde here in Ireland.
It’s a great example of how our little local network can reach out beyond geographical boundaries through online connections.
In fact right after we finished up the SOHO Solo event Joe invited me along to another online meeting (again via twitter), during which he kindly offered to sponsor an online meeting room for SOHO Solo to use for a few hours each month as we experiment and explore the potential of this exciting medium.
So, watch this space for details of upcoming online events for SOHO Solo members.
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Hi Calvin,
As you may remember I helping out with testing out a few online meeting systems with you prior to the SSWC online meeting. I’m sorry I didn’t get around to completing the online feedback, I must have missed the link.
I thought your chairing of the meeting was excellent and the presentation was very good and the meeting itself was a useful demonstration.
I experienced a little frustration at the meeting; not knowing who was who I found difficult. As this particular meeting system (Dimdim) only allowed for firt names to be displayed on the chat window it was tricky for me to keep up with who was who.
As I didn’t know the people attending maybe more introductions with images, either static mug shots would have been handy or having video enabled.
Lastly I did think we where struggling at the edge of the technology infrastructure here in West Cork. Even without video connections at the meeting I found the sound quality was barely adequate and often broke down. I think we agreed that this is down to the infrastructure and not the technology available.
I wrote yesterday on http://beara.ie/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=76&Itemid=1 about the announcement about the inadequate broadband coverage proposals for Ireland and I think this is exactly an area that SSWC should be putting pressure on the powers that be.
All in all a very useful experiment, thanks for trying it Calvin and well done.