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“Members Helping Members”

May 2020 Volume 38, Issue 02

Author: Dick Maybach, Member, Brookdale Computer User Group, NJ
www.bcug.com
n2nd (at) att.net

Many clubs have periodic general
meetings, often with refreshments,
speakers, and perhaps demonstrations
or hands-on activities. The social inter-
actions here, including the welcoming
of prospective members, are vital for
the organization’s health. Equally im-
portant are the committee meetings
that support the organization. Here,
much smaller groups, whose members
know each other well, plan the club’s
activities, and it may be more efficient
to conduct some of these as video con-
ferences, which would eliminate the
associated travel. There is a major ca-
veat: teleconferencing is ineffective if
there are tensions within the group.
Meet in-person to discuss a controver-
sial issue. paid services, such as EZTalks (http://
www.eztalks.com/video-conference/) and Zoom

(http://zoom.us/). Neither requires that users other
There are two popular free services suitable for than the moderator register for a service, but partici-
meetings of small groups: Facebook Messenger pants need to install the software. Both have trial
(http://www.facebook.com/messenger/) and Skype versions that limit conferences to 40 minutes, which
(http://www.skype.com/en/). Both require that partici- is certainly adequate for testing.
pants register for the respective service, and all can
be accessed from Linux, Windows, and Mac com- I’ll use Skype as an example, only because I already
puters as well as Android and iOS devices. (These use it for one-on-one calls. Microsoft is refreshingly
free services are provided by for-profit companies, open about what it considers fair use (http://
and the usual caveat applies; they can be changed www.skype.com/en/legal/fair-usage/). In particular,
or discontinued any time their owners determine “Group video calls are subject to a fair usage limit of
they aren’t sufficiently contributing to the bottom 100 hours per month with no more than 10 hours per
line.) If your club outgrows the scope of the free ser- day and a limit of 4 hours per individual video call.
vices, most vendors offer for-fee variants with more
capabilities. You might also consider inexpensive (Continued on page 5)

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