Member POV - LITA Town Meeting virtual participation

LITA

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Today’s town meeting consisted of a brief introduction followed by three separate discussion groups that focused on different issues. To facilitate participation from those who were not able to come to Midwinter, we streamed audio from three of the discussion tables and used ALA Connect’s chat feature to solicit comments from and interact with the listeners. We got a lot of positive feedback on this, and it took one conference call, some member-owned equipment, and wifi to get it done.

What we used:

• Laptop, external microphone, reliable wireless.
• The LITA Group on ALA Connect.
• Ustream.tv to stream audio. People could listen directly from the ustream channel, but to make the stream more widely accessible in a space our users are familiar with, we used ustream's embed code to place the streaming audio on the LITA blog.
• Google docs. One of the tables created a google document to keep notes in. It was shared publicly so that everyone could follow along.
• A hashtag to bring it all together. We used #litatm12 when tweeting about the meeting, and remote participants did the same. We can go back and search for the tag to make sure that we didn't miss any comments or questions.

Important to know:

• If the wireless is flaky or slow, streaming video will not be possible, and streaming audio might also be spotty. YMMV.
• Anyone can create a Connect account.
• We used ustream.tv, but smaller groups have easily made use of skype.
• An external microphone is important if the person streaming the audio will also want to type.
• It was helpful to the people in the room to have flip charts on which to take notes, though remote participants could not see or make use of them. Wider use of Google docs would have included remote participants, but not everyone in the room had a laptop.

-Cindy Trainor