A Distributed Meeting
Since July 2009 I have organized a monthly business forum. Since it is a distributed event, it is useful to see what is different about how it works.
Our November Business Forum focused on “Compassionate Communication” This technique allows you to better work with people by understanding their feelings and needs. We brought in two guest speakers, one who has taken over 7 workshops, and the lead speaker has more than two years of study in this field, completed a year long immersion program as well as many workshops.
| Distance of speaker to organizer | 670 miles |
| Distance between farthest participants | 2,700 miles, 3 timezones, 2 countries |
This covered at least 5 states, from shore to shore.
If you look at the picture, does it seem that disbursed? Once you get over the hassle of learning the tool, and your mind begins to focus on content, you forget you are all the people in the meeting are in different cities, some as far as 3,000 miles apart. We have the “Four Pillars of Presence”
- Sense of Place
- Sense of Self
- Sense of Others
- Collaborative Object
The invisible dimension is the flow of the meeting and timing considerations.
For fun – Can you find these
There are a lot of elements that make up a good event. In particular, staff contributed including our Immersion specialist, Executive Admin, Security lead, event host, and two speakers.
Look for the following items
- Slides statically placed in ‘Gallery’ mode
- Slides dynamically placed in a projector programmed by an educator. I supports pre-caching of images for performance, screen reset, advance, retreat, and screen locking.
- Someone from a Northern city that is so cold you can see their breath on their avatar
- Our chief of cyber security, who appears as a wolf and turned his seat upside down.
- Our executive admin
- AgileBill with his yellow helmet
- Our Two speakers
- A programmed talking stick – which turns green when the floor is available for questions
- Circular seating to facilitate small group communication
- Low resource seating (optimized for best use of server resources)
- A wheelchair to show we support
- A banner for theconference
- Rockcliffe’s tip jar
- Formal Conference hall
