Virtual hosting

Pasted from different emails:

 

Juanita: Berkana Stewards recently held a lovely conference call with around 30 people which they actually organized as a World Cafe--they used some technology that allowed people to both look at documents as well as several conference call lines and then to have "table anchors"  and they knew who was going to be on the call (more or less) in advance.  Then those people were pre-assigned to rotate to different conference call lines (I think it was one rotation because of time constraints) and then we all got back together on the original call line and someone was doing simultaneous graphic harvesting which, as I recall people could see happening on their computers, or at least had available shortly after.

 

Bob Stilger:

We did this fairly easily and economically.  Using GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com) for the computer interface and FreeConferenceCall.com for the telephony.  GoToMeeting is a comparatively inexpensive technology that allows people to see the desktop of the host (or designated other).  We began using a slide show of photos that was playing as the call began – images to ground us in Berkana’s work.  Then we shared some simple illustration slides to explain some key points Debbie and I were using to frame Berkana’s work. 

 

Our first long distance world café was outstanding.  And, as Juanita said, Aerin did great graphic illustration on one of our tablet computers to bring the harvest visually into the call.  Krista did a great job of setting this all up.

 

Maria:

 

Krista:

One of the vital things that I would say is necsesary in this kind of virtual gathering, when pulling in up to 30 individuals all using different technologies and going from one virtual "table" to another is that it is very important to have a central technological person, someone who can participate in the conversations, but who is the kind of "center of communications". In the Berkana Stewards sessions, this was me - I was a central contact for people who couldn't "find" their virtual World Cafe or Open Space tables, for people who had trouble connecting onto conference calls or the online environment that allowed us to all share certain visual representations. I probably spent about 20-25% of the call troubleshooting difficulties for participants, which I think helped them feel hosted and I know helped keep the flow of the calls.

In terms of the technologies used, Bob has pretty much covered that. All of our phone numbers for the virtual World Cafe and virtual Open Space sessions were simply registered with a free conference calling system (freeconferencecall.com) and holding a common set of numbers.