Thanks, Rebecca,

I am - in the NCUC group, probably the one who has almost always had 
problems - an sometimes I stay online (and can catch only some peices), and 
sometimes it is just oo bad and I drop out.

There were also mostly some nice people who tried to help me during the 
meeting - but when the next thick cloud is over Cambodia ("rain degradation 
in the Q-Band" or whatever, I am not part of the party again.

Of course it is nice to have a voice conversations program, with separate 
participants display - but if it excludes participants, it is bad.

So if we cannot use lower bandwidth software, to have a continuous running 
text summary, provided by a person with good connectivity, would be really 
helpful.


Norbert
  

On Tuesday, 4 August 2009 16:02:50 Rebecca MacKinnon wrote:

> Sorry I will be unable to make any meeting next week as I will be off the
> grid.
> I'd like to make one suggestion, however, as NCUC's membership grows to
> include more and more people not living in Western developed
> countries. Global Voices, which has regular online meetings with community
> members and editors all over the world, has generally stuck to IRC because
> holding meetings with anything that takes up more bandwith ended up acting
> as a barrier to participation for people joining from slow or unreliable
> connections in far-flung corners of the globe. The lesson that we have
> taken from almost 5 years trying to run an international grassroots media
> organization in as inclusive a manner as possible is that 

! ! !

> inclusiveness 
> requires defaulting to meeting technologies that are accessible to those
> whose bandwith is lowest 

! ! !

> and who may be running old operating systems - or 
> not using MacOS or Windoze.
>
> Some people tried to join last time but had problems: some because they
> couldn't get the conferencing software to work, and others because their
> Internet connections were not high speed enough to hear the audio
> discussion clearly. Isaac Mao's connectivity that day in Shanghai was bad,
> and he could only see the text chat- he couldn't make out anything that was
> being said vocally, which meant he couldn't follow the discussion properly
> or participate meaningfully. As we get more members who are joining from
> places where Internet connectivity may not be as reliable as it is in North
> America and Western Europe (where even some of us have been having bandwith
> problems) I suggest that somebody should volunteer to post a continuous
> running text summary of what's being said in the audio discussion into the
> text chat box - so that people who can't hear can still participate. Either
> that or switch to text-only if too many people are having problems with
> your current system.
>
> Best,

> Rebecca

-- 
If you want to know what is going on in Cambodia, please visit 
The Mirror, a regular review of the Cambodian language press in English.

This is the latest weekly editorial:

Different Bits of Information – Questions for All to Consider – Sunday, 
1.8.2009
http://tinyurl.com/mlo4dp

(To read it, click on the line above.)

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