Talk:User group meeting agenda & minutes 21 May 2008

I looked at a couple of things related to the last user group meeting, and the item on how to get people involved got me looking at Skype a little more.

You can have up to nine people in on a Skype conversation, and I think there is now a video feature too, although I'm not sure what will work with it other than some webcams, where things might be able to be demonstrated.

While a group is discussing things with Skype, the conversation can be recorded, and then distributed later via mp3 file. I found a small fooprint software applet called 'Freecorder', but to get the most of this you have to pay for it, even there it is very cheap. You need the paid version to record more than two minutes of a Skype call or to get high-bitrate output.

In other words, that way we could have a small group in a room, with a microphone, and pass that around as people have questions, and the leader of that group giving answers and instruction, and it going out to a small number of others, then posting the file somewhere later. Could prove to be a very popular way of doing things.

One of the remote users, preferably one of the managers, could be using Freecorder to capture the audio remotely, the other seven would be on the call itself. The 'live' audience would also be small and it could be held in a conference room if there was no slot available at the FS Library or JSMB, etc.

dsammy 06:55, 21 May 2008 (UTC) in case, the above part isn't mine, thank you!

One item got my attention - careless creating of category portions as well as the naming. I cleaned up Louisiana and left Mollie to fix the bad ones within the Category section for the "St." group and to add missing "parish" in the W group of parishes. Please take time before making it final to be sure. The categories can not be moved unless done by the admins. We don't need to create extra work for the admins when the admins could use time to do other wiki work. Louisiana wasn't the only one I found problems with. At least 3 other states had category problems. dsammy 06:55, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

First off, the Skype part was mine Dave.

And thanks for the comments about the categorization problem, I'm not sure myself how the issue you nentioned happened, but it is certainly a concern. And thanks also for your efforts in setting up the page structures on many of the county pages, keep that going. JamesAnderson 20:11, 21 May 2008 (UTC)

This discussion looks like a mess. I see someone mentioned that Skype now has video capability. I must say that the video many times is just as important as the audio. An MP3 by itself would be nearly useless in my opinion. The nice thing about what we are using is that it does not require a separate install like Skype. Okay, I have not used Skype, so do not know if they have an applet that gets used right in the browser. Although nine remote users might be okay for now, I would hope that would not be the case for long. How many users can be on an Adobe Connect at once? Thomas Lerman 06:54, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, Tom there were two separate discussions, and for whatever reason the two got interleaved, making it look more messy.

And you're right on Skype, you can do video and audio both, a webcam is all you need at minimum for video, and you can lift the audio from the video later without removing the audio from the video file for mp3 podcasts, so its easy to handle the needs of those who want video and those who only need the audio. Video podcasts, sometimes called 'vodcasts' are also a popular way of disseminating things like this. JamesAnderson 14:48, 27 May 2008 (UTC)