Opportunity for Collaboration

[Bruce_Withrow]

I am currently working with a prospective client who wants to utilize both face to face meetings and moderated online meetings. I have not moderated any online forums (synchronous) and I am therefore looking for an experienced facilitator who has a lot of experience in this area to work with me on this project.

If you have a lot of experience facilitating online forums and are interested in pursuing this please contact me directly.

I am also interested in hearing if anyone knows of any particularly good training in this area or has strong feelings as to which online meeting tools are best suited to facilitation.

[Eleonore_Pieper]

I wouldn't style myself the ultimate guru of online meetings, but here are a couple of things I learned (sometimes the hard way) while facilitating my fair share of conference calls and online collaborative meetings.

Environment: IT service company with offshore groups and groups/clients in various locations around the US


Tools used: Microsoft Net-Meeting and phone bridges

If possible, start out with a few face-to-face meetings, then switch to online, this builds trust and lets participants know each other and put faces to voices. Use the first few meetings for some intense team-building activities that add depth and interest to the various participants
Keep your online meetings short: after about 1.5 to 2 hours max people will "switch off", walk away from their computers etc.
I'd rather have a series of shorter meetings punctuated by sending out documents and artifacts created during the meting and gathering feedback than one long monster-meeting where I "lose" half the group
Set clear technical ground-rules from the start: about when to mute and unmute phone connections - a bad line can be very distractive to the point where it makes the meeting impossible
Use tools provided by your software, like text messaging or instant polls to get feedback and take the temperature of the group. Having a "producer" sit in with you and just monitor and alert you to the message feed can be very helpful.
If you're used to checking on people's reactions to things being said by visual cues, you won't have that luxury (unless you can also use video conferencing). So ask for verbal feedback until you are blue in the face. Some people will only speak up after several prompts. Also allow for some silence if people need a little time to think.
Always come well prepared with visual materials - 70% of the population assimilate information visually as their first choice, conference calls can become very abstract for people very quickly. So be prepared to share documents collaboratively via Net Meeting or other software. Pass out these documents before and after the meetings as well for people to review and give feedback after the meeting (email, call you up etc.).
Online you can use tools like text-markers or pop-out comment boxes to work with the documents and take notes or highlight text in a way that is visible to the group.
If your meeting has multiple presenters, do a dry-run first to make sure that the folks you set up as presenters in the software can switch modes from one live presenter to the next, alternatively you can load all the materials onto one machine, use that for presentation and just have the speaker switch while the same person (you or your producer) drives the slides and other documents.
These are not in any particular order, but I hope they help you get started and avoid some of the frustrating pitfalls I experienced. If you think these experiences are valuable and would serve you in your meetings, I'd be happy to help.

All the best, Eleonore

[Bruce_Withrow]

Eleonore,

Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It looks now that we will likely be holding a short virtual meeting to gather issues prior to the first major face to face. This is something that I often do on the phone one to one so that I can focus on each person and ladder up or down their responses to get to a common level of granularity. I am going to be interested to see the differences between the two approaches.

On a related note:

I suspect that as time goes on one new application or a class of applications will start to stand out as the tools of choice for the facilitation of virtual meetings. WebEx for example strikes me as an application whose main strength is for someone to make a presentation to others or to show others how a piece of software works. Perhaps we will see some of the GDSS software finally breakthrough in virtual meetings by providing superior methods to brainstorm, priority rank, sort, summarize etc.
Bruce

[Ethan_Mings]

An interesting question and some great input.

Here are some thoughts for your consideration......

First, I find "GoToMeeting" a very helpful and power tool to use when running meetings. The trick is to have a practice session in advance of your meeting to ensure people can connect. You can use the trial period to see if things will work well with you.

Second, I like the point raised earlier of having a "person sit in" just to monitor things. I like to have a person who can receive phone calls and help participants who "can't connect" or "forgot the connection information. I think that reduces the stress for people.

Third, when I'm on-line, I run a second machine so I see exactly what the participants see. I've been surprised that sometimes my nice big monitor causes problems for others.

Fourth, I am a big fan of the software, Mindmanger by Mindjet for working through clustering and sorting our random ideas. You can find it at http://www.mindjet.com.

Fifth, If possible test your virtual meeting in advance with a few trusted friends. This will help sort out any technical bugs.

I hope that helps.

All the best,

Ethan J Mings.