Re: EMC Cookbook

["Matt Shaver" <mshaver-at-erols.com>]

I sat for about an hour typing up a big reply to this post, and I got maybe
25% through what I wanted to say. We have GOT to come up with a better
communication system than e-mail!!!!!!! Something like a big conference call
with the ability for someone to moderate it so that everyone doesn't talk at
once. How about a whiteboard (that you can save periodically), video, etc.
Video would be good so that you could control the conversation more since you
could see who was speaking like you were in the same room even if the picture
quality was really grainy. Maybe it could be a server that you connect to
like IRC on steroids and also with archiving so that anyone who missed a
meeting could replay it and be up to speed for next time. People involved in
the project could agree to meet (in the virtual sense) either as a whole
group, or just a few folks, or you could just stop by to see what the state
of things was at the moment sort of like having a dedicated meeting room. An
hour long conference call would do more good than a month of e-mail. How many
folks out there have two phone lines? I do, and if most everybody did they
could talk on one and draw on a whiteboard on the other. The reason I bring
that up is that the voice-over-IP setups I have tried have some delay in them
that makes you feel like you're on the phone with someone on the moon. I
realize that there is a time zone issue as well (Hi Arne), but I'd be willing
to adapt my schedule to suit the meeting schedule and I think after one or
two marathon sessions they'd get a little shorter and be between smaller
groups focused on particular tasks with only periodic "consolidation"
meetings.

What I really want is something like this:

http://www.holodesk.com/

Unfortunately, it's not multiplatform (IE4.01 only), and, don't get me wrong
I really want to get past the e-mail stage, but I'm not sure if I'm ready for
an avatar yet...

This looks good:

http://www.wpine.com/products/CU-SeeMe/index.html

It's available for Microsoft, Mac and Linux (Qseeme)

A list of sites to download it from:

http://www.rocketcharged.com/cu-seeme/download.html

More info:

http://www.cu-seeme.net/

Anyone want to try this? Let me know (send me an e-mail... ;))

Matt