Meeting to develop a proposal

Activity - Meeting to

develop a proposal



Participants - 4 participants



Technologies - skype http://www.skype.com/was used as a telephone conferencing tool a Microsoft Word document had been distributed by e-mail prior to the meeting.

Joining the meeting - The consultant who was facilitating and 2 participants had Skype. The consultant called the two Skype particpants simultaneously using a conference group. This worked reasonably well. The third particpant was using a landline in the Phillipnes and was called from within the Skype group, this was the only part of the call that had a financial cost attached to it.

During the meeting

One thing I found really useful was that Skype shows boxes around each of the participants and so you can see when someone is about to speak or if you might be getting some interference. I've also noticed that it is often useful as faciliator to direct the flow of conversation around the participants at time to try and prevent over-talking, however sometimes it is also good to take a step back and let the conversation flow. It feels uncomfortable at times it isn't as good as face to face but then when you are across a few time zones it is a lot easier :-)

We went through each participant expressing their view one at a time and as faciliatator a bit of summing up meant that some actions were clarified to finalise the development of the proposal.

One of the participants seemed to be having some bandwidth problems and was lost a couple of times. As the host I've learnt to ensure that I've closed down any other programs that might use bandwidth and make the connection flakey for all the participants.

It also occurs to me that being able to share the document on screen might have been useful, also some tools to measure the bandwidth usage.