Hello,
Is much cheaper to improve the [online] communication up to become good
enough than to spend most of the budget on transportation and
accommodations.
I agree very much with that and vote no, also. I'm not seeing a case
for using the budget on transportation in this particular instance. In
general, fuel prices increase almost daily and air travel is embroiled
in a lot of trouble, to put it mildly, so a better solution is needed
for the long term.
I see your points, but I disagree out of three reasons:
- People who had been invited to this meeting and can not attend are
able to join via voice conferencing and/or Skype.
- It is much better to meet "in person" than only in the virtual world.
We see this every year at OOoCon. If meeting virtually is enough, why
have there been so many requests on phone conferences? Mailing lists
would do as well, or IRC chat -- but more and more people want to
interact better, "live".
- Don't expect everyone to be able to take part in virtual meetings. In
my case, the infrastructure would be available, but I have no own office
and surely would not be able to have two days of meetings from home
without being disturbed. Meeting at one place, with no one disturbing
around, is much better for some cases, especially when the agenda is
planned for two days.
I agree that we should be reasonable on how often and where to meet, and
for which reasons. But again, given that the agenda is planned for two
days, I think it is worth the trip and will be much more effective than
a virtual meeting (which I could not attend that length).
Let's use this meeting as a means to get some of the online conferencing
tools off the ground instead. Somewhere there must be a machine we can
use to host Asterisk or another tool.
If you remember, we had been planning a bit since the end of 2009, but
feedback has been, well, silent. Most people told me it even was
impossible for them to join via Skype, so no thinking about video at
all. As you can see, we try to establish virtual communication (e.g.
with the planned marketing phone conference), but again, it's not the
right solution for all things.
Florian
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