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Another club has suggested a virtual meeting. See below . I am just throwing it out there, it may not suit us. I definitely haven’t got the teccie (or indeed the social!) skills to take this on.
From Derwent MC:
As Greg said in his email, I’ve offered to try and set up a “virtual pub” to replace the banter we have at the crag, climbing wall or pub afterwards. As outdoor enthusiasts, we’re potentially going to find the coming months tough both physically and mentally.My Initial thoughts are that we “meet” at an agreed time (9 on Wednesdays?) on a video app (which one to be decided) and have a virtual get together, beer in hand.
It probably needs a bit of a theme each week, and possibly someone to “lead” each get together.Eg.
Quiz
What are people doing to keep exercised?
Anybody having a tough time/ill?
Short climbing stories either their own or reading others stories?
Tell your best joke.
Future plans.
__,_._,___
Good idea as long as we don’t have to have virtual rodents, turn the heating off or a crack in the walls. (Although we do have a roof leak).
Who’s got the technical expertise, not me for sure.This seems an excellent idea, perhaps allowing us to recreate something of the old Thursday evenings at the clubroom atmosphere. I have no particular technical expertise, but apparently a online video conferencing system called Zoom has become very popular in recent years.
A quick look at its website (https://zoom.us/) suggests that it might be suitable. So far as I can work out it allows:
– meetings with up to 100 participants (of which up to 25 can be shown on the screen at one time)
– meetings of up to 40 minutes duration are free
– longer meetings require the host to have a paid-for subscription (£11.99 per month – probably within the club’s budget)
– unlimited number of meetings (so presumably we can all go to the “bar” (fridge) every 40 minutes, and then start again)
– only the “host” needs to be registered on the system
– participants can join by desktop, mobile or tablet
– there seems to be some feature for joining in by dialling in on an ordinary telephone, but I’m not certain that that’s available in the UK, and it may involve a premium-rate number. Could be useful for our loyal and long-standing member without internetIs there anyone in the club who has experience of this system in a work context?
JBLast Thursday I took part in a teleconference using Zoom
and it worked very well. There were 12 participants
(including one in Australia). 10 were on video, one audio
only and one on telephone. (It was a of the meeting of the
committee of the British Antarctic Survey Club). I think
it could work for a virtual clubroom. Andy. 23 Mar 2020I’m trying Zoom for the first time tonight with the Glasgow Song Session crowd. I’ll report back re ease of use, any pitfalls etc.
RussGreat suggestion from John Barnard with recreating the Thursday club room nights – especially since me and Kial can’t get to them anyway.
I’ve just been on a Teams video call with screen sharing since 9am – 3pm and it worked really well – which ever platform we use, hopefully it will have screen sharing so we could even have the slide shows!Zoom worked very well last night. A really good app – recommended, although I can’t comment on ease of set-up as I was just one of several participants.
Laptops, large tablets perhaps, and PCs with webcams are the best hardware. Each participant’s video feed can be displayed as an individual tile on your screen so for large groups you need a large screen. I found on my small tablet (applies to a phone, too, presumably) the screen only displayed three members with the rest on different pages, so a bit fiddly. My PC has no webcam, but I logged on with it as well so its large screen displayed all tiles, while the audio and video comms. went through my tablet logon. Only other drawback was a contention issue as the number sharing the bandwidth increased – much latency and some audio drop-off.
Usually, we meet in a bar in Glasgow’s west end. Zoom provided an alternative for the times, and it was a lot of fun singing songs to each other over cyberspace. A welcome hour or two of lightness. A virtual clubroom? Yes, give it a go.
Is the committee organising something along these lines, or does it want some of the people who’ve contributed to this thread to do so?
JBI have ‘hosted’ small groups on zoom and it is easy to set up. I have used WebEx once – both are very similar. It does rely on your internet connection. I have had only a failure on one occasion – others could talk but I kept disappearing. You just have to download the app, be invited to the meeting and click on the link on your invite at the time. If that doesn’t work then you have a meeting ID you can copy and paste. WebEX has no time limit apparently. With Zoom you can just end meeting and go straight into another one and you can split into subgroups in theory which begins to sound a bit complicated. People could experiment with the different apps in little groups and feed back which they prefer. Stay safe folks.
MaryCastle and I would definitely be up for this; we haven’t been to the clubroom for decades! Microsoft Teams is another possibility and they have just made it free too. I use it for work every day; it works very well.
Also very good at screen sharing so slide shows would work well.
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