Last night, Esther, Robert, and Chris tried ShoePhone. We had hoped to use it for a larger conference call today. But it was a complete failure: None of us ever heard the others.

So today, Stephen, Robert, Ernie, and Chris instead made a 90 minute Skype conference call. (Mineko and Esther were also present, but partipated little. Rowane was on and quite vocal for a short while.)

Technically, Skype worked so-so. Most of us enjoyed very good voice quality, but sometimes we had bad echos, and about half of us experienced catastrophic failures: At some point we lost the ability to hear anyone else, or to be heard. About half of these bugs were repaired by hanging up and then reconnecting. I’d estimate we spent about 30 of our 90 minute conference working on getting and keeping everyone connected.

Socially, the meeting was pretty good. I’ve just read that email, text chat, and instant messaging are less valuable than phone calls, which are in turn less valuable than face to face conversations. Of course email is easier to set up than face to face conversations, so email is potentially enjoyed more frequently. Researchers found that if electronic networking is used to supplement face to face meetings, it adds happiness, but if it’s used to replace face to face meetings, it makes people less happy. In summary,

value & effort: chat/IM < phone < f2f

happy: email or f2f < email and f2f

I noticed this during our conference call. Making the call was much less work than meeting people face to face, which for me involves getting dressed, spending a couple hours on the train, and paying dozens of dollars. On the other hand, I did miss seeing everyone’s body language, and the conference call wastes time getting set up and working out turn-taking.

Our meeting was a free-form Q&A bull session, which worked well for some things. It was a pretty good chance to catch up with Stephen, who, having moved thousands of miles away, we don’t see anymore. Other parts of the meeting seemed to involve an active pair – one person asking a personal question about their own computer set-up, and another person attempting an answer – while the other members seemed to ignore the exchange, perhaps finding it irrelevant. I heard something similar happened at our physical July meeting. But this time, online, sometimes these other members used text chat to discuss unrelated items. I enjoyed having the two channels – text and voice – going simultaneously, but imagine it could be even more stressful and confusing that the typical chat session.

For our future meetings, I’m looking forward to viewing a more structured presentation, with perhaps a concurrent Q&A text chat, and seeing how that works.

One technical thing I got out of the conference was Robert’s advice to use tumblr to collect all our feeds. I set up geeks.tumblr.com to show all our photos and blog posts. Enjoy!