First Thursday August 2010 - The People and Trying Skype Public Chat August 7, 2010
We had a lively and informative conversation, despite techie glitches and accidentally leaving at least one potential participant stuck outside.
I’ll introduce the people, and give some techie notes here, then share the conversations afterwards (edited down and slightly re-ordered for ease of reading Conversations Part 1 (items 7-12) Conversations Part 2 (items 13-15)..
I’ve marked the start of each section clearly and numbered them, so you should be able to scroll down easily to whatever bit most interests you:
- People
- Apologies
- Techie Glitches
- The Skype Problem and Workarounds
- Feedback Request
- Introducing the Conversations - then see separate links for items 7-12 and items 13-15
- Roles at Fantsuam
- Health
- Computers, Internet and Fantsuam Foundation (FF) Services - including vulnerable children
- Open Source
- Delayed Replies About Orphans and About Open Source
- Observations on Typed Chat Versus Audio
- Edi and Pamela Tidying up Some Loose Ends
- How can Individuals Make a Difference? - Some Practicalities
- End note - how to connect with us if you want to get involved
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1 - People
The participants logged in from these countries (given in order of first appearance):
Norway - Julius
England - Nikki, Phil, Pamela (i.e. me)
Ireland - Elaine
Nigeria - Edi, Chollom, Kelechi, Oluniyi (Oluniyi is based in Ghana but in Nigeria for a few days)
Germany - Franz - who commented - its great I am sitting in an orchard in Germany, we just introduced WLAN to this house, and this wonderful company..;-)
There are ways of classifying the participants other than country. For instance:
- Edi. Chollom, Kelechi, Nikki and I all meet during the regular weekly Dadamac UK-Nigeria team meetings on Skype - reported on Nikki’s blog at Dadamac http://www.dadamac.net
- Edi. Chollom, Kelechi are all based at Fantsuam: http://www.fantsuam.org/
- Nikki, Elaine and I are all part of the Dadamac team over here in the British Isles.
- Elaine - is fairly new to the team and isn’t able to attend the weekly online UK-Nigeria meetings so she was keen to learn more about everything. She was our “guest of honour” leading the direction of our chat through her questions.
- Julius, Phil, Franz and I are all part of a community created by Franz in January this year at a workshop in Vienna - Video bridge - see http://www.dorfwiki.org/wiki.cgi?VideoBridge/GrundtvigWorkshop. They were joining us for the first time for a “First Thursday” and were mainly in “greeting and lurking mode” - so you won’t read much from them.
- I think Phil and Franz both came because I mentioned it on Gobal Villages
- Julius and Oluniyi came to the meeting from curiosity when they saw the invitation as my mood message on Skype
- Oluniyi and I originally met through an online chat organised by Wayan Vota. Oluniyi can be found here: www.davidajao.com - he was also mainly in “greeting and lurking mode”
Please forward this to anyone who might like to copy Elaine’s example and give us some of their spare time.
(If they prefer to give money, that can be done online through Dadamac Foundation)
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2 - Apologies
Apologies to Graham who sent me an email part way through asking for help to find the right link to join the conversation - but I didn’t check my inbox until it had finished.
Apologies to you if you hoped to join us and did not get included (see 4 - The Skype Problem and Workaround).
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3 - Techie Glitches
There were a few techie glitches as it was my first attempt to set up a public chat on Skype. (We are used to private Skype chats, where you invite people individually). I was grateful that Nikki stayed on at my place when she saw I was going to have problems, and glad Andy was around later too. That meant we could look at our three laptop screens and see three different versions of Skype showing various user experiences of what was happening while we tried to bring people together.
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4 - The Skype Problem and Workarounds
I had hoped to set up the link well advance - but that failed. I thought I had copied the link properly, but when I went back I got a “link not available” message from Skype. I tried setting things up several times but always got the same problem. However the link did show successfully on Skype as my mood message. That was how Nikki accessed the chat and Julius and Oluniyi. We were surprised to discover that way in didn’t work on Andy’s version of Skype, nor on Phil’s and Franz’s (Phil and Franz both Skyped me personally to request help when they couldn’t get in to join the conversation. I quite enjoyed those two requests as they used their video channels - which gave me a rare chance to see them.) Nikki and I did a workaround for people who we knew planned to attend. We simply added them one by one, but obviously we could only do that if we already had their Skype addresses and were fairly sure they planned to be there, so it was more like a private Skype chat than a public one..
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5 - Feedback Request
If you have additional information about trying to get in to this session, or about Skype public chats in general, please let me know. Email - pamela.mclean(at sign)dadamac.net.
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6 - Introducing the Conversations
Several conversations overlapped each other, and there was much in the way of general greetings and people getting to know each other (which I have omitted). I have picked out the key themes and quotes to make it easier to you to see what was covered and slightly re-ordered the comments for clarity.
You can read them in my next posts Conversations Part 1 (items 7-12) Conversations Part 2 (items 13-15).
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