It can be very hard for a group of people who work together in one of the many facets of life to take out common time to meet, outside of their already allotted time. Hell, my group has been trying it for two weeks now with no success. Who knew everyone is so busy?!
Last night, Warren suggested that we just sit online, which we do anyway, like all the time, and just call each other. We decided to use the conference call feature on Skype. This is how it went…..
I got a message saying to be online on Skype at ten in the night. I made it, no pressure. So did everyone else, even Fleur who was at her bar job in Geelong!
All you have to do to initiate the call is click on the group icon on the left hand side of your messenger, add your friends to the group (drag and drop, doesn’t get easier than that) and press the call button.
So, we started out, getting straight to the point. What are we going to do about this project?? We all had a myriad of ideas which were just all over the place – Fleur wanted to do cuisines, Warren was set on music, Sabine wanted to do travel and I, well I like fiction – a mix of comedy and some hardcore drama.
On Fleur’s end, it was a little noisy, so she ended up muting her microphone and just typing out in the messenger. Yes, you can do that too….send out IMs to your group members while you speak to them. It was really helpful because we got to share links of videos and blogs which we thought were great examples. I even wrote down some words I had difficulty pronouncing. It was so much cooler than a normal phone conference call.
You can also add people later to your call, same drag and drop method. This is really helpful because it can get tedious redoing a call every time someone wants to join in.
But, it wasn’t all dandy. Skype can also mean you need perfect connectivity, updated messengers, perfect working order audio and video wares. Like dealing with the background noise from the bar till we decided to mute out one person entirely was painful for her. Sabine has bad connection as she lives out really far. But, if these issues are not something you are likely to face it, go for it!
We did end up coming to some conclusions and narrowing down to mix all we wanted in one idea…for which you just have to stay tuned!
Prachi Daga 