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Beat the high cost of gas with online meetings
June 27, 2008 03:56 PM | AutomationDonovan Lambright, Automation Librarian
SELCO entered the brave new world of online meetings this week at the joint meeting of the ILS Operations and Technology Policy committees. Two committee members, Renée Lowery of Buckham Memorial Library in Faribault and Stephanie Silvers of Harmony Public Library, joined the meeting remotely via the internet.
We used GoToMeeting for the online display portion of the meeting. Using this software, which was developed by Citrix, the meeting presenter's laptop display was made available to Renée and Stephanie on their PCs. For the audio, they each phoned into a call center which is also maintained by Citrix as part of the service. In the meeting room, we phoned into the same call center with a speakerphone. The call center set up a teleconference for us and, In this way, Renée and Stephanie were able to fully participate in the meeting.
SELCO has one GoToMeeting license on a free 30-day trial. At the end of that time, we will make a decision on how to proceed. With high fuel costs and staff budget cuts making it harder for libraries to send people to SELCO for meetings, it is clear that we need to offer a solution in this space. While we still have a lot to learn about running an online meeting, a few insights have already become clear:
- Visual cues are lost from the conversation. Nuances of facial expression, hand gestures, etc. cannot be seen by the remote participants. This requires everyone to be a little more descripitve when they speak. It helps a lot if the speaker introduces themselves before every comment with a simple "This is <stateyourname>".
- The meeting chair is required to be more formal in running the meeting. Moving from one agenda item to the next must be announced clearly and should be prefaced by a request for further discussion. Sidebar conversations should be discouraged as they muddy the conversation and make it even harder for the remote participants to follow.
- The mute button is your friend and should be used when you are not speaking.
- SELCO needs more microphones and speakers for its' teleconferencing phone system. We're working on that.
- The Citrix call center is available at no extra charge and works great. To make this possible, however, the calls are all toll calls. For the moment, SELCO is reimbursing meeting participants much as we do for milage. It may be more cost-effective to work with a teleconference service that charges an upfront fee and provides toll-free numbers for the meeting participants. We're working on some cost analysis to see what is cheapest.
SELCO will be offering remote participation for more meetings in the near future. Just watch the meeting announcements for further details. I would encourage those who participated in the meeting to add comments with their thoughts on how things went.
