May Town Hall Event a Success

By Paul Pehrson on Wednesday, May 26, 2010

On Wednesday, May 26, we held our first chapter town hall meeting, and I’d like to thank the participants who joined in. We had five people on the call, and I hope that we will be able to increase that number in the coming months.

We are using DimDim as our web conference provider, and technically, things went smoothly with one exception. Apparently you cannot record the phone bridge conversation. If you want to record the meeting, you have to have all your attendees use the VOIP (using headphones and microphones attached to their computer) feature. And if people are connected via VIOP, they cannot be heard on the conference call. So you have to have everybody use either VOIP or phone bridge. For next month, we’ll try to work out some of those kinks so things run even better.

The down side of that glitch is that we didn’t get a recording of today’s meeting. Next month, I’ll use my computer’s microphone to pick up the speaker phone audio, which should at least provide SOME ability to record the call.

Speaking of next month, I’m about to schedule our next town hall. In June we are going to be discussing STC Certification. We’ll talk about what it is, why it matters, and what you need to know. We’ll also have an open forum where you can bring your own questions or comments to the table.

Please remember — you don’t need to be a member of the chapter to join in our conference call (one of our participants today was not a chapter member). This town hall is open to all technical communicators who want to participate.

See you next month. Watch the site for a date and time announcement.