Yesterday I discover a new use for a technology: The conference call in heaven, enabled by a call on skype and a “Google Doc” that everyone in the conference can edit.
With two persons, it worked flawlessly: we were discussing and writing the notes on the fly, agreeing on specifications for a project and also on next actions to be done, prioritizing actions and subprojects. All enabled by the common text document, as if we had a virtual blackboard. To top it up, by the end of the conference call, everything was in writing and everyone had a copy of it.
Technical notes: The refresh ratio on Google Docs is good enough to edit simultaneously, but it can become a mess if everyone is editing the same line at the same time. So the best practices is to say, “wait, now I am editing” and coordinate verbally.
If you want to try it out, I loved it:
http://www.skype.com  and http://docs.google.com/
April 11th, 2007 at 12:41 pm
I am semi-obsessed with both those programs and have used them simultaneously for non-business reasons! I’m glad someone finally wrote an appropriate homage. The only thing I would say is sometimes the video on Skype has been a bit slow for me (I do have an old computer) so I either use eyeball or just the voice on Skype.
April 11th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
Hairtwirler, in this case, we just used the voice, partly because the eyes were on the common document.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:30 am
[…] his love of the simulation models he’s been using at Yale, and Patxi shared his gratitude to Skype and Google Docs for making conference calls such a pleasure. In a potentially related post, Mbwana offered a […]