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.) And here is something new every day: http://cambodiamirror.wordpress.com