On 20 Oct 2009, at 12:28, Thomas Dalton wrote:
2009/10/20 Thomas Dalton
<thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com>om>:
2009/10/20 Michael Peel
<email(a)mikepeel.net>et>:
The first hour of the meeting, 8.30-9.30pm, will
be held by Skype
conference. This part of the meeting will be discussions, not
decisions, and will essentially be focused on making sure that
all of
the board members are on the same page, and to identify issues that
need resolution or deciding upon. Due to technical limitations, it
won't be possible to have this part of the meeting open to the
public.
What technical limitations? Skype can handle public voice conferences
with some people voiced and some just listening.
I take back that last bit - that required the now discontinued
Skypecast. You'll just have to ask non board members to mute
themselves.
That technical limitation. :-) Also, there are concerns about the
required connection speed for hosting a multi-way conference like
this (as I understand it, the calls are all routed through the host
computer), and also the quality of the connections (I believe this
degrades as more people are added in?). Additionally, in order to
join in a conference call, they would need to skype call the person
hosting the meeting, who would then have to put the conference on
mute to answer the call and conference them in. That can really slow
down the conference.
These may not be problems - in which case we can relax that
restriction in the future - but for the first attempt, it's logical
to keep things as simple as possible. The aim here is definitely not
to exclude people, or become any less transparent, it's to become
more effective as a board.
Mike