Image by kjarrett via Flickr
I have been doing a lot of conference calls lately. Both large (15-20 people) and small (2-4 people). I have been pretty disappointed in the web technology to support such calls. We've tried a couple of different webinar types of tools for the larger calls and they all seem to have one glitchy problem or another. We're not even trying to do video much - just voice and a shared viewing space. For the smaller calls, though, what we usually need to do is to capture notes, ideas, and action items as they emerge during the conversation. For that, a shared space to look at and edit would work really well. So I started poking around.
I decided what I was looking for was a real-time collaborative online editing environment. In other words, I needed something accessible through the web, so that the only thing call participants need is a browser, and that could support multiple people making changes to a document at once and show those changes as they happened. Handily, Wikipedia actually has a page devoted to collaborative real-time editors.
The page includes a long list of such editors, including a bunch that are browser-based. After further investigation, I decided to try Zoho Writer. It was ok, but one of my collaborators found it too slow and clumsy, and it felt buggy in that text would show up twice or not show up at all sometimes. So that was a bit of a fail. Then I started looking at EtherPad.
EtherPad is a technology, it turns out, that was bought by Google and incorporated into Google Wave. Once upon a time I was enthusiastically looking forward to Google Wave. But it has turned into a complete dud for me. And one of my regular collaborators on these calls is not a fan of Google and prefers to avoid using their stuff. (I also work with people who refuse to use Microsoft products - such platform preferences make for some interesting collaborative challenges, for sure.) Anyway, so I'm reading about EtherPad and, while Google acquired it, apparently people were such fans of it that there was an uproar and it was released in open source as well. So my little Spidey-sense got to tingling and I kept reading. Anything that people are such fans of that they object loudly to its incorporation into the Google-maw is probably worth a peek. Wikipedia says:
EtherPad is a technology, it turns out, that was bought by Google and incorporated into Google Wave. Once upon a time I was enthusiastically looking forward to Google Wave. But it has turned into a complete dud for me. And one of my regular collaborators on these calls is not a fan of Google and prefers to avoid using their stuff. (I also work with people who refuse to use Microsoft products - such platform preferences make for some interesting collaborative challenges, for sure.) Anyway, so I'm reading about EtherPad and, while Google acquired it, apparently people were such fans of it that there was an uproar and it was released in open source as well. So my little Spidey-sense got to tingling and I kept reading. Anything that people are such fans of that they object loudly to its incorporation into the Google-maw is probably worth a peek. Wikipedia says:
After the release of the software as open source, a number of people have set up EtherPad servers, as clones of the original website. Soon after, users and programmers of Etherpad, gathering in the newsgroup etherpad-open-source-discuss, founded EtherPad Foundation to coordinate further development. The website keeps a list of sites that run the EtherPad software.I went to the EtherPad Foundation for suggestions and tried out a site called Meeting Words and was really pleased with how the tool worked. I was able to have a small number of people on a phone call where we were all looking at the same shared screen for outlining/note-taking and jotting down action items. Everyone on the call was able to edit in close to real-time and the only coordination required was to send around a link to the 'pad.' One caveat is that these joint note-taking spaces are not private and may not be retained for long, so be sure to save anything you want to keep. And, of course, don't use it for truly sensitive information. Still, I'm pretty happy with it as a good scratchpad/work-space for some kinds of teleconferences. Recommended.
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