Annalisa Roger: Okay, well I think we should go ahead and start. So is there anybody on the call right now whose name I have not mentioned? Okay. So Seth, do you have that? It looks like we have four people on the line, is that correct?
Seth Greene: Yes.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. So number two is review of the AIs from the February 9th meeting. Sorry Seth, where would I see those action items?
Seth Greene: If you’re on the agenda page the Confluence agenda page you can just click right on the link under item number two there is a line you’ll see. That will take you them. Alternatively, on the Adobe Connect page, everyone on the lower left pod called web link to, you can highlight “Work Team B’s AIs” and then click on browse to at the bottom and they’ll come up either way.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, I’m connecting on there now.
Seth Greene: Is everyone able to find them?
Yaovi Atohoun: Yep.
Seth Greene: Okay, thanks Yaovi.
Yaovi Atohoun: Yep, I got it.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Hi Seth, it’s Olivier I finally made it here. Sorry.
Seth Greene: Hi Olivier.
Annalisa Roger: Hi Olivier.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond: Cheryl is also going to come in a moment; she was also on another call before.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Now they’re dialing out for me and I’ve eventually managed to dial in.
Seth Greene: Hi Cheryl.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I’ll be back eventually.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, so Seth, if you don’t mind I’m going to actually ask you to do the action items since I cannot get in there.
Seth Greene: Oh sure, no problem. Actually I didn’t even have to get in there, I believe there was just two. Dev is going to write up a brief summary of how the ALS survey applies to Work Team B’s recommendations in particular, the recommendation asking about obstructions within the ALS, RALO, ALAC structure. That’s in progress; he’s going to get us that. Unfortunately Dev was not able to make this call today, but he will get us that and it is in progress.
Secondly, and I’m just opening it now as well, was an action item for myself which is completed, I just can’t remember what that action item is but let’s see. Oh yes, I was actually to check on some technical items regarding offering the AC rooms to the ALSes and in fact to that end, we have as our guest Roman, the head of ICANN IT on the call with us today and we’ll be able to discuss in as much detail as the Work Team would like.
He can brief us on offering AC rooms to the ALSes also the Confluence pages for the ALSes and in fact in general rolling out any new technology such as Posterous or anything else that we would like for the ALSes. So I think it will be very useful to have Roman on the call today. Actually may I just ask Roman, are you on the call now?
Roman Pelikh: Yes I am.
Seth Greene: Hello, Roman, and welcome from Work Team B. Thank you for being here.
Roman Pelikh: Thanks, guys, for having me.
Seth Greene: And that’s everything, Annalisa.
Annalisa Roger: Thank you, Seth. And Roman, thank you for joining us on this call, we appreciate it. And we’re going to move right to number three which if we could hear from Roman, that would be great. Thank you so much.
Roman Pelikh: Hi guys. So as a brief, let me kind of go over the brief understanding of what you guys are looking for and it’s intended to be more of a discussion to understand what your needs are around collaboration tools and see how we can fulfill that within the account that we currently have and are able to support you guys in that request. So if you guys could briefly outline what you guys are looking for the ALSes to do, who would be the participants and then I’ll go over some of the account settings that we currently have and use within ICANN and how we could potentially meet those needs with you guys.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, well thank you Roman. I think some of the ideas that were discussed in previous meetings were the possibility of offering an Adobe Connect room to ALSes and what we imagined were that the various ALSes may be using these rooms for different purposes. So we haven’t heard from all the ALSes – a couple of us have investigated and talked to a couple of specific ones – but I think sort of a general idea was the members within an ALS would be able to hold meetings in an Adobe Connect room on a regular basis.
And with that purpose we would be able to maybe forward initiatives and projects that they’re working on that would result in new information that would come up through ALAC, through the RALOs and through ALAC. So it would be a means of them forwarding the business that they do that would also come back through ALAC. Does that make sense?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah. So let me understand a little of the structure of who will be, will there be one person responsible for the room or it’s going to be a groups of people that will be able to share the room; what type of access level do they need; what type of functionality do they need within the Adobe Connect?
Annalisa Roger: Okay. So Roman I guess one of the main questions we should ask you right off the top is do you have any recommendations or ideas on how we could, I mean this is information that we don’t have at this time in a large scale, in terms of all of our ALSes, but maybe what would be a useful use of our time would be to find out from you just what you had mentioned. What it is that you’re looking for and then maybe we can narrow down some of those answers at a later time?
Roman Pelikh: Sure. Let me give you a brief overview of our Adobe Connect account and what seems reasonable for us to accomplish and then you guys can take that as an input and work with the ALSes to see if that will work or if we need to come up with any other solutions. How does that sound?
Annalisa Roger: That sounds great. And I heard you mention like an access person, so that would be an example of the type of info that we should get and bring back to you.
Roman Pelikh: Right. So, our Adobe Connect accounts are set up, our licensing setup for the organization is in the following way: we have an unrelated number of rooms with ability up to 100 participants to participate in an Adobe Connect room. And we can set those rooms up fairly easy. The challenge becomes, in the Adobe Connect room there is as you guys are aware, there are three types of participants – there is a host that has full control of the meetings and full control of the layout and everything else; and presenters that are capable of sharing material, adding the notes, chatting and some support; and the participants that are just essentially an observer – so these are the three roles.
So the challenge becomes assigning the host permissions to a particular person. So the host permissions can be assigned but they can only be assigned to a user account. So the person who will be hosting the meeting must have an Adobe account. A couple of challenges that we are going to have is that the account is in use for internal ICANN staff as well and therefore if we issue it to the public we’re potentially issuing accounts access to some of the internal rooms as well, which would be a concern.
There is a way to set up a room where everybody who’s joining is automatically promoted to a presenter level. What that would mean is people that, the host is not required to be at the meeting. For that the layouts would have to be done in advance, people are not able to switch the layouts, they’re not able to end the meeting. So the meetings, once the meeting room is created the meeting room essentially lives in perpetuity until it’s actually deleted. So the same room can be reused over and over again for multiple meetings and multiple purposes. I see Cheryl raised her hand.
Annalisa Roger: Yes, Cheryl, go ahead please.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Thanks Annalisa, and thanks, Roman. Just from a practical point of view I would think the last scenario that you put forward is not a problem. At the moment we’ve got some 125 ALSes, we intend to have at least one in every country worldwide, and I would think the nightmare of having people with varying levels of competency and in the curiosity of playing around with the makeup of a given room while an At-Large structure, which at this point may not even know how to spell Adobe let alone how to use an Adobe Connect room.
Fiddling around while they’re trying to utilize it as a collaboration tool to discuss a piece of policy or background material so that they can put in public comment to an ICANN process is somewhat scary.
We have regional staff support, we have admin staff if in some future point in time there is an overwhelming desire for a block of central western and Asian countries to have their Adobe rooms set up in a different way, then they should be able to apply on a template to have whoever is our ALAC staff support on this to change it to meet the need. I think it’s a non-issue.
I think that we would have the, as we did in the At-Large summit days, some sort of standard meeting performers and people will make the best use of what is on offer as collaboration tools.
So I think the last scenario is exactly what we’d be wanting – a fixed link to the room would be connected to what we’re also desirous of and that is for every At-Large structure to have its own dedicated Confluence Wiki page.
So there would be a centralized controllability, for the want of a better word, and at 1:00 a.m. or whatever time it is for me in the morning, you’ll have to forgive me for my words. I think it’s not a complex thing, it’s a simple and productive thing and one well and truly to make the aims of this Work Team within the current setup of the accounts that we have for the Adobe Connect. I guess our other questions are blending at cost to the issues we want to raise with Confluence.
One of the reasons we were delighted with Confluence of course, is with its plug and play ability for modules. Other more general cost platform tools, the RSS tools and using things like Posterous would appear, at least to those people with more technical bits then mine, to be a none too difficult thing either.
But if we think of this as provision one – every ALS has a Confluence Wiki page to call its own from whence it links into ALAC regional and sub-regional activities and other pages, but it would be from that base point page that link out to an Adobe Connect room and any other collaboration and communication tools would be, I guess (inaudible) centralized.
Thanks Annalisa, I just thought it was important that we got where we were coming from clear to begin with.
Annalisa Roger: Thank you, Cheryl. So Roman, Cheryl is right. There’s two access points that we would like to work together – the Confluence page for every ALS as well as access to an Adobe room; that’s what Cheryl was bringing up. So Roman, I guess my question to you is as far as the host, would that sort of, responding to what Cheryl was saying, would the host be able to be our regional ALAC support staff?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Annalisa, we wouldn’t do a host. We’d have a join and you’d be a presenter. So it would be a fixed template and I would suggest the template that we’ve got right here right now – top section for agenda, space for chat, discussion notes to the side – everyone who joined the room would have presenter status, which means they could share and other things and I would think at the collaboration level that we’re trying to encourage out at the edges, that would be a perfect setting.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. So Roman, does that alleviate some of the questions if not challenge to setting up a room for each ALS?
Roman Pelikh: Right so, agreeing on the particular layout, and that’s what I think Cheryl was referring to, we are using that particular one right now which has agenda and discussion notes but doesn’t have as an example, ability to share a screen or Power Point documents. So we could come up with a particular layout that as an admin we can set up ahead of time and ensure that the meeting rooms are set up to auto promote participants into the presenter mode at which point there is no host to be required therefore there is no need for anybody to really have an account. I would actually recommend setting up one or two rooms in that fashion and have you guys try it out and see how that works and socialize that with the one or two ALSes that you already know are looking for this and get their feedback how that would work.
Yaovi Atohoun: Thank you, Roman, for the presentation. What I want to say from my point, like number one ALS will be very useful for us and everybody, because some of us, sometimes were are travelling and from the (inaudible) we have when you’re using Adobe, this is something that is very help the ALSes.
And then my question is related to the other option we can have like if we are connected can we also use the voice, like if you took one ALS there’s no need of translation. I’m sure that there is no need to have the support of the staff at that time because it can be a lot of work for them.
So the main comment for me is it possible, another tool to have a voice? I think it’s good that we have this question, and this is a question I want to know about Adobe. So it can be an option of voice to the current option we are using?
Annalisa Roger: Yeah, that’s a great question.
Roman Pelikh: There is a built in functionality on the voice over IP in the Adobe. Once everybody is promoted to presenter they will actually have control of the voice over IP and functionality. And you are able to host the conferences as well. the challenge becomes, with the voice over IP us the quality of the connection. So if the quality of the connection is reliable you can easily have a well-organized conference.
Now, if you have a number of people that are participating from the same room, as we’ve seen in some of the ICANN meetings, it’s very easy to get the feedback, the audio feedback and audio loop. Although the functionality is available there are some guidelines that would be beneficial to follow when utilizing it in order to have an effective meeting.
Yaovi Atohoun: I want to (inaudible) my question is that do we have an option where we don’t need to have ICANN call people? So my point is that once we are in the room I want us to be able to use the voice capability just to talk like just one member of the ALS. If he comes in he can just use his good internet connection in that case.
So my question if it is possible to do it sometimes without having ICANN staff call you or especially for Africa, in my case, anytime I’m participating in meetings they have to call me. So in my case it is something that I want us to consider so if it could be done without having the operator sometimes to call the regular participant. So that’s my question. Can we just use the voice from the Adobe?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yaovi, Roman indicated that particularly with the system where everyone who joins the room would be automatically promoted to what is called a presenter; the answer is yes, you would have the audio the voice over IP facilities. And with the use of some simple guidelines, such as turn off your speakers so you don’t get echoes and feedback, it should be a very useful tool particularly for as you say your region where you’ve often got single line which you’re trying to use for the internet.
Annalisa Roger: I have a question. Oh, I have a question. And I think Yaovi was touching on this, when we use these Adobe Connect rooms for our meetings we have ICANN staff involved and they’re often helping with some technical issues along the way, is there an operator provided by Adobe Connect that would be available to the ALSes if they were using the room, Roman?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah, so that’s one of the challenges that the Adobe does not provide support to the community; we actually have a very limited number, even in the IT staff, who can open the specific cases. So if there is a specific case in something specifically doesn’t work we will set up an email where people can send their issues that we can address with Adobe.
From the training perspective I think what we’re looking for is when we’re setting it up to provide some basic training for using the Adobe and running the meeting in the Adobe, but it’s fairly user friendly and intuitive so we would be relying on the ALSes to be a little bit more self-sufficient and us just providing the tool as a way for people to work and collaborate.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, thank you Roman. So what I’m hearing from you is that perhaps the ALS would have a contact person, maybe some initial minimal training afforded to them by ICANN and other than that it’s a tool that would be afforded to them, but not really followed up on in terms of tech support. Is that correct?
Roman Pelikh: That’s based on our availability and resources. I just don’t see the feasibility of us supporting every single meeting and every single potential issue that could come up; especially with a number of people using different systems and potentially hitting different issues.
As an example, even within the organization we do have internal training for all the staff and staff primarily that operates and runs the meeting is responsible and when they have issues or challenges they submit the request to the IT and then we look at it. So a lot of stuff is simplified through the training because the actual new redesign of Adobe Connect Aid has simplified a lot of things, made some of the things more stable than they used to be and increased the compatibility with other systems.
So from the support perspective we would not be looking to provide a detailed support for every potential need, but if there is a common issue or something specifically that doesn’t work or, I don’t know, the room got hanged up or something like that or some functionality that doesn’t work, that’s to the degree where we do have the control, we’re able to make the changes. So as an example, if there is a layout change that needs to be done on a permanent basis we could potentially make the adjustments.
And those adjustments actually could be made through the At-Large support staff because they will be assigned as a host to their rooms so they will be able to go into the room and make changes as well. So it’s not going to be just the IT group that will have access to the rooms.
Annalisa Roger: Well thank you, Roman. So you’re recommending that maybe we set up one or two rooms to test and if the rooms are lasting for perpetuity does that, what exactly does that mean in terms of if we were to assign the one or two rooms to some ALSes for this testing period how, what happens to the content? Is that staying in there?
Roman Pelikh: Right. So, the content will be, when you set up a room you get the permanent URL that you could reuse and that’s the URL you would use to rejoin. After having a meeting if you have any content left it will remain in the room.
So, as an example, in the meeting room that we are right now, if we were to close the room and leave and come back tomorrow into the same room and if nobody cleared out the agenda and discussion notes and the cat, all of that information will be available.
The challenge is that since the rooms are going to be open to public essentially the content that is going to be in there could potentially be removed by somebody else because those rooms will be publicly available.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. So perhaps somebody, a group using the room may want to delete everything before they leave and that’s a capability that is fairly simple for them?
Roman Pelikh: Oh, correct.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: …just says you cut and paste your chat into the same space as your archived agenda is held and that’s also where you’d cut and paste your discussion notes goes, that sort of thing.
Annalisa Roger: And that would be on the Confluence Wiki page right Cheryl, is that what you’re suggesting?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Which is good practice anyway because these rooms as we’ve found out can get pretty unstable when they get really full as well.
Annalisa Roger: Right okay. Okay, does anybody else on the call have questions for Roman about the use of Adobe Connect room as a tool for an ALS? Go ahead Seth.
Darlene Thompson: If you just need someone to try it out I sure wouldn’t mind.
Annalisa Roger: Hi Darlene. Okay great. So Darlene’s willing to try that out with her group. Seth, you had a comment?
Seth Greene: I just wanted to ask Roman is there any way of limiting who can actually log into the Adobe Connect room to a certain group of people – for example, the members of the ALS so that it’s not actually open to virtually everyone in the public?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah, unless people have accounts, which is where the challenges start coming in, there is no way to restrict who can join the room. So the assumption would be that the rooms would be made public.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. So once the URL is put out there people could, members of the public could be coming into the room even if they were not a part of that meeting that was going on at that time?
Roman Pelikh: Correct. Especially if you’re posting the URLs on the public Wiki so there is always that risk. As I said, the only way to control the entry is to actually have an account created for the user and assign the roles of the host or the presenter or the participants and lock down the room at which point the entry to the room is controlled.
But for that functionality you need to have an account on Adobe Connect at which point we won’t be able to provide that with our existing account and we would have to look at potentially provisioning another account or one thing I have outstanding with Adobe is if there was a way to segregate or create a sub account at this point we could assign some of the access to the public without giving access to the rest of the ICANN meeting rooms.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Does that sound helpful Roman? And it sounds like those steps could be taken at some point during or after the testing phase of trying this out?
Roman Pelikh: Correct.
Annalisa Roger: Okay.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Or if we actually ever get the problem.
Annalisa Roger: Right, if the problems actually do occur. Thank you Cheryl. One more question from me is I expect that we would set up a calendar or some way of being able to schedule so that people would know when the time is available if there’s only two rooms, you know just to avoid overlap?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah I made the suggestion if you guys need five rooms to try all this I think we could make arrangements for that too.
Annalisa Roger: Oh, that would be wonderful because that would cover all the regions right Cheryl?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: That would start as regional rooms and the regional rooms could be something that would be valuable in the long term regardless. So yeah, the five rooms running as regional rooms opened up for ALSes to start using. And I would suggest that in fairly short order after that, as soon as we actually have the Confluence pages set up for each of the ALSes, then as we do that set up of each page a URL is dedicated for an AC room for each of them.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. We could run a calendar then within the region then certainly I’m sure.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yeah. And the advantages of the shared calendar would be that if I am then getting my calendar updates from the At-Large calendar, which already exists, and the Moldavian ALS is doing something that I’m really excited and passionate about, I can just log in and join into that discussion.
Annalisa Roger: Right, okay. Thank you, Roman. Is there anything you wanted to add at this point Roman? Maybe when these rooms may be available and how we would start?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah. So, let me work with Seth on getting them set up. When do you guys foresee you need to start utilizing them so I can kind of get an idea of how much time we have? As I said, it doesn’t take that much time we just want to make sure we set them up correctly.
Annalisa Roger: Darlene, did you have a specific time in mind?
Darlene Thompson: No. Our next conference call is next – oh no it’s tomorrow. So it’s probably a month from now.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: If it could be available to the regions to introduce the concept to the ALSes in their March meeting; in other words you’d have to have…
Roman Pelikh: Yeah we can definitely do an introduction of this during the ICANN meeting in San Francisco.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: And that way they’re coming back from SFO, going to their regions and saying look at what we’ve done aren’t we great? And now you can start using it but at the moment you’ll have to work in the regional room and between now and June you’ll all be getting your own Wiki page and you’ll have your own rooms linked onto that.
Roman Pelikh: So we could potentially also do the training for some of the regional people on the Adobe Connect room and how that would work.
Annalisa Roger: I was just thinking that Roman, since this region is in North America there may be, we’re having a NARALO showcase, there may actually be people physically present that would be interested. And if there was a way to get a specific time of your introduction and training narrowed down and on the calendar then that might be helpful. We might be able to direct people…
Roman Pelikh: I don’t think we have a particular session scheduled for the training; we weren’t necessarily planning to do Adobe Connect training this time. We do have a Confluence Wiki session set up I believe and Heidi invited us to do the Confluence Wiki status update on Thursday, I believe. So I think…
Annalisa Roger: Okay, could we integrate it into that?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah, I don’t know if the training could be integrated into that, but I’ll work with Heidi and Seth to see if there’s a time available where we could potentially do a quick 15-20 minute overview of Adobe Connect and the regional meeting and how its set up. Before we set up the rooms we would like to get the idea of how you want the layout to look.
And it could be just a wire frame or… Seth if you could organize a meeting with a smaller group so we’re not taking too much time on this call, kind of as a pilot to work in one of the rooms and set up what the layout would be for the rest of the five meeting rooms that would be great as well.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yeah, I don’t think that will be a problem because you’ve got regional reps from all five regions in that.
Annalisa Roger: So are you suggesting, Roman, that we set up a smaller sort of subgroup to talk about the setup of the room?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah. So Seth, one room as a kind of a template before we roll out what you guys would like to see, so we’re not just using the default template in the room and we actually would set up what would be useful for people.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Yaovi has a comment.
Yaovi Atohoun: I think we just have something basically like what we have now to avoid delay because I think if that happens it will take time and maybe people will add more work. So if you have something basic like what we have now I think it would be good for a beginning.
Annalisa Roger: Thank you, Yaovi. Yaovi is concerned about a potential delay by putting one more step in between you and setting up the room.
Roman Pelikh: As I said I’m open I just want to minimize the potential changes.
Annalisa Roger: I understand. Go ahead, Cheryl.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I’m being my usual democratic self. It’s the ALAC’s job to facilitate ALS direction, the aggregation, the collection of all other things to do with the regions as well so I will suggest that Olivier and Seth simply ask online over the next few days what specific things, and I think most of us could probably run them off the top of our heads now but we shouldn’t because of the time it would take in this meeting for the design of the test rooms for each of the regions.
Meaning that the ExCom, the five regions represented, that means all the regional rooms will have a standard format to begin with and any additions they can suggest after they’ve done the testing. And you should be able to have that in a matter of days.
Annalisa Roger: Yeah. Roman, I think Cheryl has a point. Sometimes it’s hard to get suggestions before actually seeing the room. Some of these ALSes’ members who would be using it are not actually using them right now.
Roman Pelikh: Right. So let me do a stab at what I think will be useful and then we can, as a part of the rollout in San Francisco we could potentially get some feedback and make adjustments and changes after that.
Annalisa Roger: That sounds like a good plan.
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: Yeah especially if I may elude to what Darlene suggested, a training session in the secretariats meeting would be a useful thing. That would be a perfect time for them to also give you any “hey what about’s” and “could we have’s” as well as the training opportunity.
Annalisa Roger: Darlene, you have a comment?
Darlene Thompson: Yeah, just a quick comment. I like the idea of each region having their own room, however if that’s going to be a problem, I don’t know if that’s going to be problematic for ICANN or not, but the thing is when North America is having meetings likely Latin America or not Latin America but Asia-Pacific will be asleep. So I think would easily share less rooms if that was necessary.
Annalisa Roger: That’s a good point – the time zone factor. Thank you, Darlene.
Roman Pelikh: Yes, there is no concern of creating as I said two rooms versus five rooms. That’s not an issue. Our licensing is not locking us into how many rooms we have or how many, it’s limitations on how many participants could be in each room and the limitations are in the meeting; who can actually set up the rooms, not how many rooms we have so.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, thank you Roman. I know we’ve spent quite a bit of time on this but I wanted to take full advantage of Roman’s time since he was with us on this call. Thank you so much. Does anybody have a last question or thought for Roman before we move on in the agenda? Okay Roman, thank you so much and we look forward then to seeing our first test rooms at the March meeting.
Roman Pelikh: Sounds good.
Annalisa Roger: Alrighty. So the next one’s Confluence Wiki pages which we did actually touch on thanks to Cheryl, and actually Roman, you’re involved in this too. Roman, do you have any questions about the idea that we want to have a page for every ALS and we would actually be using the Confluence pages to communicate about the rooms – the URLs would be on there; the calendar would be on there and other technical tools would also be available on the ALS pages. Do you, Roman, have questions for us about what it is that we’re hoping to do with the Confluence pages?
Roman Pelikh: Yeah. From what I remember I think the concept got introduced over in the Cartagena meeting and still a couple of questions kind of exist. What type of permission and editing rights are we going to have for the public or are we going to have a designated At-Large staff or At-Large members editing and supporting those ALSes versus just giving blanket access to the pages to the public? So that a concern I have. The other question that needs to be answered – do they really need the full space or do they just need the page for the ALS where they would have that information?
Annalisa Roger: Okay, my understanding is each ALS would have their own page and so they would have access to their own page but would not need blanket access to everything. Is that possible? Access to view but not to change. They would be editing only their own page.
Roman Pelikh: Right, so here is where potential issues could come in. if we set it up as a page in the larger space, we would have to give access to the space and then do restrictions which is a very, if we’re going to have really 120 or 37 however many ALSes there are, it could be a very mundane task to maintain and to change the permissions and add permission on that.
Also, are there going to be any designated people in each ALS who will have that ability and not the entire group? So the entire group will obviously have the read access but we’re probably looking for one or two people to be designated editors of that ALS. Or if there was three to five people that should be fine, too, we just don’t want to get into the position where we are overburdened and managing access all the time as you guys have seen through the At-Large Wiki.
If the permissions are not set up you will not be able to search for the content, some of the links could appear as broken links because somebody may not have access to the right page or right workspace.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Let’s see, do we have any comments from people on the call for Roman about what they would like for the ALS page?
Gordon Chillcott: Annalisa, this is Gordon. An access problem is something that we dealt with in our ALS on and off for quite a little while. I like the idea of designated persons or a group of people managing any edits to the Wiki page for each ALS. And in fact on the case of our ALS, it’s the two ALS contacts.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, that makes sense to me. Does it make sense to have regional persons maybe as a contact for the ALSes about their pages and maybe the regional person would have some knowledge about setting up or removing restrictions?
Cheryl Langdon-Orr: I think that’s an extremely useful way forward because what we’re trying to do is better integrate and build interaction at the regional level between ALSes in any given region as well as more globally, as well as in the regions or sub regions. So having a system where we’ve got the designated contact, which in most cases would be somewhere between three and five for each ALS who have the permissions and then an overwriting editorial permission given to a couple of people in each region seeing as these pages would probably be clustered under the regional sub sections. It seems like a very natural fit to me.
Annalisa Roger: Yeah, I agree with Cheryl. I also think it gives an overall structure of the regions and the ALSes. And the ALSes would get to know who their regional representatives are as well as other ALSes and it would be clear for them to see which other pages are within their region and that type of thing that clustering would afford. Anyone else have comments on that?
Roman Pelikh: Well, from what I hear there’s a couple of potential avenues we could take. We could set up a regional workspace at which point all designated people will have the editing rights to the entire regional workspace, but just through the agreement they will be only editing the pages for the ALS that they’re designated to.
The other option would be to create a workspace for every ALS which the challenges could be the sprawling of the workspaces and you’d still have a (inaudible) over to the wherever the regional designees are. So those are two options that I see of how this could be implemented on the Wiki.
Annalisa Roger: Does anybody on the call have a preference they would like to tell Roman about those options? Okay, let’s see Roman, how would you like to move forward on that?
Roman Pelikh: Do we know the number of ALSes that we potentially need to set up?
Annalisa Roger: I think we would start, similar to the Adobe room, it makes sense to me we would start with a few and see how that was going and meanwhile continue with the outreach to let others know that it’s available for them also. I’m having some difficulty understanding – do we (interference)
Okay, is the line working now? Somebody’s line has some static on it.
Roman Pelikh: My line is fine it’s somebody else.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Roman, at this point we don’t know how many ALS pages are ready to start so it seems to me if you started just a few of them and then had them available to show us in March that would probably be a good way to start.
Roman Pelikh: We can take the same approach and then we’ll actually match with the regional Adobe rooms. We can create the workspaces for each region and within the region have designated people and create the pages for each ALS in each of those regions. So the workflow would be that all the designated people in those regions will have the edit rights but it will be verbal agreement that people will not edit the content of a different ALS for example.
So if you have ALS 1 and ALS 2 and you have two people designated to each, there will be four people that have editing rights to the entire workspace but two people will be just editing their pages and two other people will be editing their ALS 2 pages. So that could be just a verbal agreement and I think that should be a good starting point for us and we can definitely set something like that up by the San Francisco meeting.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, thank you so much Roman. Okay, so we are almost out of time here. Let’s see we are going to talk about item number five on the agenda which is rolling out other technologies to ALSes such as Posterous, iEtherPad, Twitter Twibes, etc. Do you have something specific to tell us about Roman, on those issues?
Roman Pelikh: Actually no because I wasn’t actually planning to look at, I haven’t been prepared to talk about that.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, well thank you. We can maybe move that to another – are you going to be with us Roman, at the next meeting in March?
Roman Pelikh: Yes I am.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Maybe we should move that to there.
Roman Pelikh: Sure. Let me ask a little bit more specific what are you guys looking for? Any other technologies that we are looking to roll out or you guys are looking for us to look into these types of technologies to see what we could potentially provide you guys?
Annalisa Roger: So were you aware that we had other outreach tools that we wanted to use such as Posterous and Twitter Twibes? And had those I guess connecting with the ALS pages?
Roman Pelikh: No, but I’m pretty sure that if it’s a URL or reference that could be integrated into that.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. Does anybody on the call have comments about the general issues or questions about other technologies for the ALSes for Roman? Maybe questions that are not related to Confluence pages but just using these other tools for the ALSes; does anyone have any questions about that? Okay, well Roman, why don’t we move that to the next meeting and if you could maybe look into some of the logistics on how it would be done?
Roman Pelikh: Yes, let me look at some of the tools that you guys have listed; if there is any other ones you like to look at we can definitely take a look at it and see how that could be integrated. I‘m assuming we only will be looking how to centralize the access to those tools, but not necessarily support those tools as we’re not using them within the organization.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, thank you. Is Cheryl still on the line with us? Okay, I think Cheryl may have dropped the call because the connection was bad and our time is actually up; we started 10 minutes late but at that point we would still only have two minutes. So Seth, can I ask you to move number six to the next meeting, where Cheryl was going to speak.
Seth Greene: Absolutely. Thank you, Annalisa.
Annalisa Roger: Okay. For number seven is there any other business that somebody wants to bring up or maybe put on for the next meeting agenda?
Seth Greene: Annalisa, just very briefly if I may. Roman, would it be possible for you to join us briefly in the next call rather than waiting until San Francisco?
Roman Pelikh: When is the next call scheduled?
Seth Greene: On March 9th.
Roman Pelikh: Let me check my calendar real quick.
Seth Greene: Okay, sorry for putting you on the spot actually.
Roman Pelikh: No worries.
Seth Greene: You know, you and I can chat between the meetings and if you actually have anything you’d like to tell the group about rolling out these other technologies. And if you do then certainly you’d be more than welcome to join us, but no obligation obviously if you…
Roman Pelikh: Yeah, this is the week of when we are actually in San Francisco setting up so I won’t be able to join on the 9th, but Seth, we can definitely talk offline at least we can get a game plan together what we could potentially present at the San Francisco meeting.
Annalisa Roger: Thank you, Roman. And if anybody on the call has a specific question or idea or concern about other technologies, maybe let Seth know since he will be talking to Roman offline, but we will look forward to hearing about that in San Francisco Roman, thank you.
Roman Pelikh: Sounds good.
Annalisa Roger: Okay, so our next meeting as Seth mentioned is Wednesday March 9th at 13:00 UTC. And if there’s no more comments from anyone; is there any comments before I adjourn the meeting? Okay, well thank you everybody for attending and I look forward to seeing you back here on March 9th. Thank you, Seth. Thank you, Roman. Thank you everyone for attending.
[End of Transcript]
