Weekly Technical Telecons Current call parameters Scheduling a Conference Call

Weekly Technical Telecons

We generally have a weekly "telecon" for the ELabs developers team every Wednesday at 10:00 CDT (11:00 EST/8:00 PDT). We currently use the free service from http://freeconference.com, which is easy and convenient (and free). We use Joel as the moderator account, and he will send the call parameters (date, time, phone number to call, and the access code) out to the mailing list a day or two before the meeting, along with a solicitation for agenda items. If you are not on the mailing list and would like to be, or if you otherwise have business to discuss with the IT team, you are welcome to join the telecon. Contact Joel.

Current call parameters

We have scheduled the call weekly for the indefinite future, so the call parameters will be the same each week. Unless you hear otherwise, to join the meeing do the following:

1. Call 1-641-715-3580.
2. When prompted for the conference code, enter 952-588# (you must press "pound" after the digits).
3. There will be a chime to announce that someone has entered. Introduce yourself to the conference (there used to be a prompt to record your name, but this didn't work well, so Joel turned it off).

If anybody else schedules the call then the phone number and access code will likely be different. If anybody else schedules a call for a different time (which is easy to do -- see below) then the phone number and access code will likely be different. In that case, please don't forget to distribute that information to the list of participants. In general the dial-in number and access code are the same when the same person schedules the call

Scheduling a Conference Call

Anybody can schedule the call, but to do so you need to set up an account on the service. You only need to do this once. Simply go to http://freeconference.com and follow the dialog to set up your account, and then to set up the call.

The interface is fairly straightforward. You will need to know how many participants are expected.

The length of the call can be 55 minutes or 1:25. If we run over the scheduled time we may get the call extended, or we may be cut off, depending on how busy the service is, especially how many paying customers are using the premium service. So it may be a good idea to select 1:25 even though you know we re going to only use 1 hour.

It seems that if the conference is scheduled by the same person each week then the phone number and access code do not change. But if someone else schedules a conference then both the phone number and the access code may be different. It's possible to change the access code, but I don't know (yet) if you can change the phone number, or in fact use the old phone number. (Maybe we'll try some experiments.)

You can have invitations sent out to the participants automatically, though they are not really well formatted for a text-only e-mail list. So instead, once you have the call scheduled, simply cut-n-past the call parameters and send those to the e-mail list. The parameters we need are:

• Phone number (usually in Kansas or Indiana)
• Access code
• time

That's it. It's very easy