[OSList] technology mix no-no?

[Magdalena Valderrama Hurwitz]

For the past year, I've been chairing a group of 13 people all living far
from each other (Missouri, California, Toronto, East Coast, Hawaii etc) who
have been meeting nearly weekly over the past 4 years over the phone and
with the intermittent help of private online chats and video calling when
these resources were available.  One of our tasks is to mobilize a
community of interest--about 1200 people scattered all over the world--to
engage in various cooperative actions. Now it's time for the annual working
retreat (last weekend in Sept) which the group has expanded from 2 into
2-1/2 days (3 nights) so we can have more working time together.  It's
normal for our working retreats that people who can't attend in person call
in and we work to make sure "calling in" is an unavoidable option.

The group has voted to use OST. A couple of years ago a member of the group
introduced OST and later left, and I became empathetic to the point of
taking a training, joining this listserve, and trying out one of the
Blackboard Collaborate gatherings (clunky but interesting)  etc.  Two of
our members are very eager to use OST for this retreat, and the rest are
very interested, with one abstention. I recused myself from the vote but
after the group voted yes, I contacted the former member and she is willing
to facilitate.

We figured out we could use a projector and Google Docs to post the OST
agenda wall, and we are also using Google Docs for the breakout session
reports. We plan to have the callers use Skype for the main sessions as
well as the breakout sessions so that we all have visual contact with each
other.

We had a majority coming in person, but the two strongest proponents have
said they won't be able to come, one participant is personally
uncomfortable with the facilitator, etc, and now we are down to 6 people in
the room and 5 sure callers.

We're a pretty determined bunch of people--not energetic necessarily--and
OST is best done in person, so should we just give up on using OST now or
is there still hope to be had?

-- 

Magdalena Valderrama Hurwitz
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