Open Call has been running for over a year - wow! With its weekly "same time, same place" routine and casual, drop-in format, it's ideal for onboarding newcomers and inviting collaborators in for impromptu check-ins.
Lately, Open Call has been getting crowded, and international folks are speaking up to say that they need meetings in their own timezones. These are both good signs of increasing participation, but they require that we revisit how and when we support meeting times in Public Lab community. Here are some ideas i've heard:
- Support organizers in other timezones who want to host an Open Call at 3pm local time Tuesday (or another time)
- Teach more people how to facilitate meetings and help project teams
- Open up more timeslots on Tuesday so that there's room for more project teams to grab a meeting
- Same as above, but 9am-6pm on Tuesday to create a virtual "Barnraising" feeling (allow pre-booking so people can make plans)
- Same as above, but for a 24 hour period of whenever Tuesday is happening around the world to support Public Labbers in all timezones
- Use some kind of online schedule board to make it easier for project teams to book meetings on Zoom
- Use Google Calendar to make public facing events that automatically start google hangouts. For instance, you could create a public event on the Google Calendar for Public Lab Events calendar, then share links and/or directly invite others, and it would sit on our events page where anyone else could join in at the time of the event.
- host a monthly community-wide "status update" meeting. This might be similar to how the Public Lab staff hold weekly "Monday meetings" where everyone gives a rundown of what they have completed since last meeting and what their next goals are. I've seen formats where the status updates are on an individual basis or on a project team basis.
What do you think?