InCommon Library Services

At 4:34 PM -0400 4/2/09, Dean Woodbeck wrote:
> There will be a jabber chat room available during the call. 
> Depending on your client, use:
>
>
>
> OR
>
> room:inc-librsvcs, server:conference.mit.edu

As I'm sure everyone noticed on the first call, a lot of sites + 
people have expressed interest in participating in this group. That's 
great news, and would seem to indicate that there's broad interest in 
these topics, and that there's broad interest in helping each other 
move forward. And that the time is right to begin this work. I think 
that if this group can leave behind some documentation describing 
what we've learned, and why certain decisions and choices were made, 
we'll leave a valuable set of resources for the next wave of sites 
travelling down this path.

That's all good stuff. The down side is that because of the size of 
the group, we shouldn't use our "traditional logistics". Over the 
last several years, smaller workgroups have used conference calls to 
great advantage; I'm concerned that for a group this large conference 
calls alone may not be the best way to facilitate direct 
communication.

This is also the age of new technologies. I'm seeing some groups make 
effective use of technologies such as Adobe Connect to present and 
share visual materials. Its impossible these days to avoid news 
stories about twitter (no, I'm not suggesting that we use twitter to 
tell each what we're having for lunch...). Mushing all of that 
together, I think we have an opportunity with this group to begin to 
experiment with some new approaches.

Tod Olson from Chicago sent me an out-of-band note mentioning many of 
these issues, and suggesting that we experiment with a chat room 
parallel to the call.

At 10:04 AM -0500 4/2/09, Tod Olson wrote:
> maybe establish a chat room where we can call out, make some quick 
> responses, or what have you.  Might speed up roll call, even 
> blatting out use cases.  Plus the chat log could help with notes.

I'd like to try this out during today's call. The first step would be 
to use the chat room in place of a roll call, to the extent possible. 
As you can see above, Paul Hill at MIT has set up an XMPP/ jabber 
chat room for us. Jabber clients are available for many desktop 
clients:

http://xmpp.org/software/clients.shtml

I'll leave it to others to make specific recommendations. In 
addition, Google's gmail web based service also supports jabber. I 
happen to use my gmail id with a desktop client.

I would like to suggest that people use IDs that would allow others 
to easily identify them when they sign in to the chat room.

For this call, there will be a phone roll call, but only for people 
who haven't signed in to the chat room. We'll also read out the names 
of the signed in users.

Secondly, I'd also encourage people to pick up on Tod's other 
suggestions --  use the chat room as an adjunct to the voice 
conversation, providing quick comments and answers.

We'll post a log of the chat room to the wiki after the call.