My Blog

April First Thursday Follow-up April 1, 2010

Everyone - I have done a group email as follow up. I have tried to make it easy for you to find the bit relevant to you by putting your names, or "everyone" in bold.

Tobias, John I, Kezia, Elaine
Thanks for your various emails and skypes to me before/during/after First Thursday - sorry you couldn't join in at all, or as much as you'd hoped to - but thanks for wanting to be with us, and for updating me.

Everyone who did make it to the meeting
Thank you joining our First Thursday meeting today - I hope you will be back again - please keep putting First Thursday in your diaries.

Graham
Thanks for bringing Lino and Clement along. Please forward this to Clement I can't see his email address in the chat and he has not emailed me directly.

Fred and Tom
Sorry people were getting ready to leave  when you arrived and I did not manage to greet you well. I realise you are both in East Africa - I hope it was just coincidence you both arrived at that time. I hope I had not made mistake with East Africa Time on the notice about First Thursday  and caused confusion. Fred I hope you and everyone at the deaf school will have a wonderful school leaving party. Will you send a photo? Nikki and I are learning how to add photos to our dadamac blogs. Perhaps you would like us to add it to our blog about this meeting. I love the idea of sign language and music. In the UK there is a famous musician who is deaf. She plays percussion and feels the vibrations of the music through her feet. http://www.evelyn.co.uk/Evelyn_old/homepage.htm

Everyone  - EXTRA DATE -  FOURTH Thursday meeting on - April 29th on stoves. Graham and Clement (our stoves experts) thanks for agreeing to come back and continue the discussion at a meeting dedicated to stoves - usual time, usual place - just like today - but FOURTH Thursday. Lino - sorry you will be flying then - but keep in touch and we will give you feedback. Bala - glad you can make it - it will be excellent if you and Clement know more about each others work given you have similar objectives and are both dealing with practical issues in the same country. Everyone is welcome. Stoves are not really "my thing" but I intend to come along to "listen in" and gain general knowledge from your discussions.

Marcus and Vijay
Thanks for additional information afterwards (copied below).


Fola
I am glad you could make it, but feel our discussion today did not cover your interests so much. Did you get all the information that you needed from Bala? Please email me  - or better still, add a comment under the April First Thursday blog to let me know what your special interests are at the moment. Things that I know about in advance are easier to include (and of course the topic we start with reflects the interests of whoever arrives at the beginning).

Dary and Vijay
Thanks for you ideas about improving the First Thursday experience, and creating 'knowledge banks" or "information cupboards" to support the meetings, with links and definitions of certain words.

Dary
Thanks for volunteering to help me with the first collection - about stoves - based on the links from today's meeting and those above. Let me know once you've made a start and we'll work out the best way to do it.

Chat archive
I captured the  main session and published it

Vijay
Thanks for volunteering to help me with information later about permaculture. Marcus already has lots of good information about that, following his trip to Songhai and then Fantsuam. He has given some of it to Nikki.


Nikki and Marcus
Please help Vijay to find any information that you would  like him to include (wait until after April 15th when Vijay is not so  busy)

Andy
Dary and Vijay suggest we put these collections of  information on the website. I guess we can start off by putting them in a blog initially, but that will not be the best permanent place once the knowledge banks/information cupboards grow. Can you think about this for us  please and be ready to advise.

Vijay, Dary, John I, Andy, Nikki, Elaine - twitter

  • Let' s do something about twitter before May First Thursday.
  • We didn't get to twitter in today's meeting  - partly because I was thinking of it as John I's special interest and waited for him but he could not make it to the meeting (my fault - I thought I had sent him the link in a skype message beforehand -  but I had failed to press return - Doh!)
  • Andy is our original "twitter mentor" - but I think Elaine very twitter-aware as well and can help us too
  • We have collected up a few useful twitter links etc (They are in stored in Dadamac's Moodle at present)
  • Andy I think you found a useful "getting started session" for John I - I couldn't see it in Dadamac's Moodle - could you send it to Vijay please?
  • Dary do you want it too?
  • Dary - you asked when Andy is around - well - once you are happy with twitter you will find that he is usually available via twitter. 
  • Meanwhile - well Andy and I try to get together to work one afternoon a week - and when we do it is on Thursday afternoon. (We will be working on the website etc, but we can be interrupted for part of the time). 
  • You can try us via skype then.
  • We will be able to use some of our time for building twitter skills for people who are active in dadamac
Everyone
  • Would it be good to have an April 8th Second Thursday Meeting for the people who have a special interest in twitter?  Who could turn up for that?

Knowledge banks/information cupboards?
We will have to find the right description at some point. I am not completely happy with my old description of "information cupboard" - but I am not completely happy with "knowledge bank" either - I think I feel that it is not easy to get things out of banks - they are locked up - and I want our information/knowledge to be very easy for people to have.

Improving First Thursdays
Thank you everyone for your contributions - questions as well as answers.  I hope you all got something of interest from the meeting. I am experimenting with the format so if you want to give me feedback it will be most welcome. I am sure that together we can gradually work out the best way fo running First Thursdays. These are the kind of things I'm interested to know about

  • Information aspects - The topics we covered
    •  Did you like the subject area - and if so was it the right kind of detail and depth?
    •  Did you expect something different that was not covered?
    • What would you like us to discuss in future?
    • NB - If I know your interest before the meeting, and I know that you plan to attend, then it helps me to choose the topic(s)
  • Communication aspects i.e. how we were communicating with each other
    • Did people feel welcome?
    • Did they get introduced to each other well enough?
    • Did they know what was going on?
    • How can we make the "people" side of things work well for everyone?
  • Technology
    • Any problems or glitches?
    • Did you get into the chatroom easily?
    • Did everything work ok when you were there?
    • Any delays or other difficulties?
    • Did you loose the connection or have problems sending your messages at any point and have to log in again? 
    • Do you have any thoughts about the benefits and disadvantages of the chat room compared to skype etc?
Dates to remember
Second Thursday April 8th - possible twitter meeting
Fourth Thursday April 29th - Special Interest meeting on stoves - this is our first meeting dedicated to one topic. Clement and Graham are both experts so there will be the opportunity for an interesting discussion.
First Thursday May 6th - topics to be agreed

Sorry this is long - but one long email covering everyone is the easiest way to share follow up - and I hope you could find your own bit without too much difficulty.

Pamela