Virtual face to face meetings

Dear Forms Team,

The current economic situation is making the cost of travel very 
difficult. 

It seems a bit late in the game to change the February meeting to virtual, 
though we could still do that if there is strong group support and no 
objections, so I will need to know and hope to discuss on the telecon.

Either way, looking a bit further out to June, it seems a good idea to 
discuss if/how we should hold a virtual meeting.

For either or both of Feb and June, if the group would like to try a full 
virtual meeting, then the next thing is to talk about how.

We've gotten some pretty decent progress using the 9am to 3pm eastern 
timeslot, though that gives us only 5 hours to work with.  It also is 
probably not sustainable for more than two days at a shot.

Given that N.A. west coasters have to start at 6am, it is hard to start 
any earlier to get more time.  However, in the grand scheme of things, 
going one extra hour later does not seem to produce an end time that is 
too late in the evening (well, it is cruel, but no more so than 6am and 
perhaps overall less cruel than the added burden and cost of travel).

Anyway, adding an extra hour to the end gives us the following 
possibility:

What if we held four meetings at 9am-4pm eastern with 1 hour break at 12pm 
eastern.  This would give 4 days of 6 hours, or 24 hours.
What if we held these four meetings on the Tuesday and Wednesday of 
consecutive weeks, or perhaps even with a week or two in between?
Having only two days at a time and a week in between would make virtual 
meeting more tolerable and productive.  Also, the Wednesday meetings would 
consume our normal 90 minute telecon.

If we did this in February, I would suggest we would cancel the Thursday 
Feb. 5 virtual day.  Instead, we could proceed with virtual days on Feb. 
10-11 and then again on Feb. 24-25, having a normal weekly telecon in the 
week in the middle that could help us do a post mortem on the first 
session and better plan for the second.

If we do this in June, then we could proceed with June 10-11 as that 
already intersects with the week we planned for, but then have the 
secondary pair of days on June 23-24, again leaving one week between.

Finally, note that if there are date conflicts, we can play with those, 
but please in responses be sure to separate overall opposition from 
schedule management.  I need to get a sense of whether there are any 
strong objections versus "Supportive of idea but such-and-such date won't 
work because of  the XYZ conference."

Thank you,
John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM, Interactive Documents and Web 2.0 Applications
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer
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