Recent discussions about holding a physical meeting have gotten me thinking. Someone mentioned skyping as a possibility, and I can tell you that another retro computing group (the CoCo group) have held online-only events in the past. These were very informal and low-key, and while they were repeated only a handful of times, they were extremely easy to coordinate.
Along that line, I'm offering for your consideration two proposals: -- The informal approach is that I will lead an effort to determine the most common IM program used among interested parties (hopefully Skype). I will collect contact information and then schedule a first call. I'll try to gather consensus on a schedule and an agenda. In other words, I will facilitate and then happily let others lead discussions they are interested in. -- The Big Bang approach is to model after what the virtual tabletop role-playing conventions do -- they host schedules for individual tables, and allow interested parties to lead those "tables". They allow signup for these tables and coordinate all of the interested parties into a (essentially) private meeting space. These are essentially a large online, virtual convention -- but focused on smaller interest topics (in this case, individual role playing game sessions). I could perhaps leverage websites that cater to this type of convention and, again, help facilitate smaller groups to get together at various times over some pre-planned convention weekend. I do not intend to step on Quantas toes here as I know they are separately trying to schedule a more robust and higher scale venture. I'm more interested in seeing if there is interest in something a lot less formal, on the side, and not necessarily tied to any Quanta business -- global in scale. I have very little to no budget to do this, although I believe there isn't much need for such a budget. This is mostly a volunteer time kind of thing for all parties. _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
