[Sigia-l] When will you buy one?

[Andrew Boyd]

On 6/4/07, Will Parker <wparker at channelingdesign.com> wrote:
> Personally, I'd bet the unpopularity of electronic meetings is
> largely due to the lack of body language cues. In a face-to-face,
> most people can pick up the reaction of the group to any given event
> or proposal just from everyone else's posture. In most situations,
> voice alone is not enough to persuade the audience to go along with
> your proposals.
>
> I can tell you from personal experience that adding in a video
> channel that shows you to your audience and vice-versa does much to
> get around this shortcoming. I landed a contract job at Apple in
> part, I think, because I proposed an interview via iChat rather than
> having them fly me down from Seattle, and in part because I could
> keep all the interviewers engaged visually.

Hi Will,

just to repeat something from an earlier posting in this thread:

"When I say "electronic meeting" people think "net meeting" - and while
people do come from all over Australia for these things, it is more
that the sheer waste of electronic preparation, printing to hard copy,
then digitising annotations and decisions, then printing another set
of documents for a sub-committee, then digitising the decisions of
that body, then... you get the picture :)"

Picture this - 30 people sitting in a hotel conference room with 17
laptops and 20-odd observers - and not one document shared other than
manually (hard copy or thumb drive) between them onsite, the sure
knowledge that every annotation made by a delegate to the meeting
would be shared manually, a pile of lever arch folders that quite
literally could not be jumped over, a wireless mouse that worked
intermittently connected to the one laptop connected to the projector,
on top of an interstate flight each way, and you have an idea of my
yesterday. When I tell you that I look forward to helping these
particular clients have a better tomorrow, I *really* mean it :)

Cheers, Andrew

---
Andrew Boyd
http://facibusreviews.com