Thanks for your ideas. Unfortunately, the roundtables have been on days/times when I am unavailable, including the September 25th one. The roundtable idea is definitely interesting, though!

Part of my thinking for why I’d want these chats to be open and flexible is because I know I don’t have all the answers! I’d love to facilitate and provide information/resources when I can, but also help pull out resources, stories, an insights from others. Much more of a sharing, than a Q/A chat – anything to not call myself an expert!

As far as topics go, as I said above in reply to Nancy, I’m open to a process where people submit ideas or questions and I pull out those that are somewhat related as the focus of the chat. Keeps it responsive to what is more pressing to the community as well as open for very wide-ranging topics month to month.

How have the first three roundtables been? Have they been facilitated like I mentioned above or more just water cooler type conversations? I hadn’t thought of doing phone (mostly because I don’t personally have a conference line; and my experience with Net Tuesday conference calls has been that unless you only want to talk to people in US, Canada, and UK then it’s impossible) but think a phone + online chat could be interesting to test drive!

It sounds like you are going to be reviewing your plans soon and I’d love to be part of that conversation as much as I can. If it turns out that the roundtables weren’t very popular, I’d be open to other options like a chat that you sponsor and I host or anything else.

Thanks again!

So in short – we’re moving away from Office Hours. It was a fun experiment, but not quite right for the long haul. We still want community discussion, so we’re working on monthly chats with particular audiences. Right now, we have monthly roundtables set up for IT Staff and Marketing & Comm folks. See http://nten.org/events/online-chat/2009/09/25/communications-roundtable

Of course,in our first marketing roundtable, it was all about the social media! But we did spend a little time on enewsletters.

We run them the way we do most things, with a phone call + chat. If it makes sense, we would love to work together on those. We can play with time, etc. Did you have a particular topic in mind?

I’ve been tossing around the idea with various people of hosting chats on my blog for some time now, and finally wrote it up on the blog as an opportunity for feedback. I got lots of feedback on twitter (should go back and paste in all the feedback here as comments…)- mostly people saying they would be interested and would participate, etc. but, I’m conflicted because I’m SOOOO against recreating the wheel. The main driving forces behind this development are creating more valuable opportunities for the community here to connect with each other and to have a real-time conversation. As you can see from some of the info in the post above, as a reflection of these chats being for and with the community, I hope to keep them fairly open for any topics or questions that come up or people have that day. So, here’s my question: is there a way to turn these chats into NTEN Office Hours while maintaining the open structure? Also, is there a way to port transcripts of the chats back onto this blog so those who couldn’t participate can still have access to the conversation?

I’m really looking forward to any direction these chats go and to see what kind of value we can create together!

Thanks so much,
Amy

Thanks for your comment and questions (and support!!!). I’m still asking myself the same questions about audience, time, format, etc. I want this to be as open as possible but have lots of experience with discussions/events/anything that tries to appeal simultaneously to beginners, intermediate and advanced users of anything, let alone social media. So, with that in mind, I’m thinking of a process that would let people suggest questions or topics they would like to talk about and then I can let people know inadvance what questions/topics will be discussed and they can join in as they wish (either to hear what others say as they have the same question or to help provide insight). What do you think?

I’m also interested in moving this into NTEN’s “Office Hour” project. The only reasons that I haven’t participated in that yet is because I was worried it would either be too difficult to pick a time 🙂 or that I would not be able to keep as open an approach as I would like. Perhaps I’ll take this opportunity to connect with my NTEN friends and see what they think!

Thanks again, Debra – look forward to having you join the conversation if possible!

How do you intend to setup the conversation?

amyrsward: @jon_bedford i know, right?! maybe if there’s 4 in a month, each can be at diff time: 9 am, 12 pm, 5 pm, 10 pm or something?

jon_bedford: @amyrsward That sounds like a good idea, keep all the nations happy. You’re just like Koffi Annan.