Harvesting tools

Title: Harvesting Conference Calls

Pattern number: 0001

Last update: 06/05/15

Stakeholders: Participants in voice conference calls with access to simultaneous text chat, who can be teams, contracting parties, mission- or discipline-oriented communities, etc.

Keywords: Call recording, collaboration tools, collective intelligence, conference call, harvesting, meaning-making, summarizing, synch/asynch synergy, text chat, voice chat.

Context: Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony enabled millions of web users to conduct local and international phone conversations free of charge, beyond the cost of their net-connection. The increased ease with which individuals and groups can conduct conversations free from the constraints of distance and money, may both enrich, and fragment the larger network of conversations occurring in their communities or organizations. The use of text chat windows concurrently with the voice chat adds another opportunity for value creation by and for the call's participants and other stakeholders.

Problem: (1) Inspired voice conversations occurring on the net frequently don't get recorded in any format, thus essential insights and knowledge nuggets don't become object of the participants shared reference and often fade out from their memory or get buried under newer observations.
(2.a) When meeting minutes are made by a participant, it frequently doesn't reach the interested parties but days, sometimes weeks later; (2.b) its organization is rarely optimized for follow up conversation or action.
(3) If the call is recorded by some voice recording device that can capture not only some keywords but the energy of the moment, the highlights from those records don't get analyzed and made available to the participants for the simple reason that under time pressures, it is almost impossible to find time for listening again to the whole1 or 2 hr long conversation to do the harvesting.

Solution: Use for the call a VoIP or conference call service that allows the voice recording of the call, and supportive it collaborative note taking in a text chatroom. Invite participants to jot down a few words whenever something strikes them in the flow of the conversation. Create a voice recording of the call, selected segments of which can easily be identified and transcribed, or re-purposed for a well-indexed podcasting library, by any or all participants. Free voice-recording service is provided by the "open source" Gizmo.

Rationale: Writing down in the text window key points of the conversations, by various participants according to what strikes them in what the others say, they enact a form of collaborative filtering that will become the reference to find the corresponding full text in the voice recording. Thus the richness of the original expression can easily be reviewed and captured, both enabled by, and enabling the group's emergent collective intelligence. Excerpts can also be conveniently inserted into any co-authored document, invitation, web site, etc. developed by the participants.

This practice breaks down several barriers that were in the flow of feeding insights emerging from small groups back to the group itself for later processing, or to the larger whole of which the group is a part. It is addressing the need to go from fragmentation to higher-order integration of self-organizing projects and initiatives. That’s how fast discoveries of good practices in a small group can travel to global audiences. The "Harvesting Conference Calls" practice can be especially useful in enabling the “local-to-global-to-local” dynamics, one of the drivers of large-scale collective intelligence.

Method: The audio file of the call is saved by Gizmo to the user's desktop. The text chat software stamps the time (hour and minute) of the every comment made in the text window. The time stamp associated with any comment serves as the reference to locate the corresponding segment of the audio file, the timeline of which is visible and accessible as the users try to locate segments uttered at a certain time in the call. Then only the selected segment(s) need to be listened to, transcribed or chosen for podcast, as opposed to a long conversation, much of which may not be of interest for re-use.

Limitations: This practice is not applicable when: (1) Participants don't have simultaneous access to voice chat and recording, and text chat; (2) Participants don't trust each other about the use that they may make of the recording. This practice has very limited usefulness if the conversation is about ephemeral or trivial content.
Additional information/miscellaneous: Long conversations with very rich content can be summarized, using the text comments, and posted in a blog or wiki, if all participants agree, with links to the selected podcasts made from it.

Example of use: "[A] community found that their meetings on a phone bridge were productive, but that note-taking was a chore. They developed a practice of taking notes together using chat or instant messenger sessions during their phone calls; chat or IM transcripts were good enough for collaborative note-taking so that, when distributed, absent members felt they were in touch with the rest of the community." Reported in: Technology for communities, by Etienne Wenger, Nancy White, John D. Smith, and Kim Rowe .

Links: You can download Gizmo here. Another service, Free Conference Calls,  also offers free recording but the file cannot be saved to one's desktop. Macintosh users can record even Skype calls with the free Audio Hijack.

The “local-to-global-to-local” dynamics of large-scale collective intelligence is written about here.

Categories: Collective Intelligence, Collaboration Tools.

Pattern author: George Pór 

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