Thoughts on synchronous communication (calls)

[s_ben]

@burrrata

First, I don’t (atm) have a Discord profile. Is there a way to just join the call via a link?

Researched this a little. It appears that you used to be able to join a Discord server/call w/o registering, but now it’s difficult to impossible. Do you not want to join Discord for some particular reason? We could do the call elsewhere (we’ve done Google hangouts before), but find Discord works well for calls, and the Craig bot is convenient for recording.

@burrrata

Second, I don’t know when the calls are. Is this data somewhere on the forum?

Third, the format of the calls makes it hard to participate, both synchronously and async. Would be great if every call had it’s own thread. The initial post would be a wiki with the date, time, link to the call, agenda, and a notes section. Then people would have 1 place for all the info on the call. This would make it easier to participate, esp if community members wanted to weigh in on topics asynchronously pre or post call. This would also make it easier to flow Cred to call discussion topics and distributions…

So we have this general post Weekly SourceCred Community Call, which has the call info. But just now it took me several minutes to find myself…not ideal. Your idea of putting call info in each agenda template makes sense. Have incorporated most of your template into next week’s agenda post: Weekly Community Call (12/17/2019). Will just use this as the new template moving forward. Wondering the appropriate way to give your cred, aside from responding to this and 'ing. I agree to champion in a comment here, but I don’t believe it’s a proper initiative. @Beanow am I missing something? Should I create an initiative/artifact?

@burrrata

…Also, it would be cool if the calls were not recorded. You can edit and update a post, but you can’t edit and update a call (at least not without significant effort). Just doing the notes would make it easier to contribute, easier to flow cred to, and easier to edit/update.

I think we should keep the community calls public and record them, as a general rule. This allows more people to follow the project and increases transparency. I’ve already had a couple people thank me for posting calls, as they weren’t able to join live. That said, I do think there will be a need for having calls that are not public and aren’t recorded. For that, we may want to do calls differently (different platform, permissions, etc.).

@burrrata

Also, are the suggestions to move effort from recording/editing to note taking something we want to explore? And if so, is the template provided here of interest (I’ve found it works for lots of the calls I lead, but happy to discover other templates too )

Creating notes from the call usually takes me a bit of time (~30 mins - 1hr depending on how much re-listening I have to do), and I think is valuable. Your template (now included) I think is a good place for that. Keeping it in one place makes it easier for people to participate async, as you mentioned, and improves discoverability.

@burrrata

And finally, would it make sense to rename the Office Hours category to Community Calls? Might be more specific and helpful for new community members who want to get involved.

Ha. Have thought of this a number of times but was too lazy to bring it up I think it’s a good idea. Am wondering if changing labels will cause issues on the backend with the Discourse plugin? @Beanow are we messing you up if we do that?