The Low Carbon Conference Meeting

Organising the conference has meant a fair bit of travel, not good for my family life or the environment (not to mention my bank balance), so when one of our group came up with the idea to meet by telephone conference  using mindmapping software I was keen to try it (and how obvious – wish I’d thought of it!). Now, anyone who knows me will tell you I’m a complete technophobic. Like the car, so long as everything works I’m happy to leave the technical side to someone else and throw a complete wobbler when all goes wrong – so I was happy to hand over the facilitation to someone who knew what they were doing.

The result was that many people who haven’t been able to participate in the meetings so far were able to join in and I feel the experiment was a success. There were some minor hitches, the software doesn’t like linux, it’s too big to download on a dial up and it’s inconvenient if your phone runs out of credit half way through (mentioning no names

However, we had a constructive meeting, agreed to do it again and the feedback by email has been very positive. So, although it won’t replace face to face meetings entirely it served a useful purpose and we’ve agreed to meet up again in 2 weeks. Next time I’ll be at home so I’ll make sure I’ve got a cup of tea and a piece of cake to hand! All we need to do now is find out if there is a web based tool we can use which performs  the same function as the mindmap software, top up our phone credit and we’re sorted!

Just please don’t suggest video conferencing or everyone will see me sitting in the garden in my scruffy shorts  taking advantage of the sunshine and the wifi…