Day One - Whew!

OK, so the Adobe Connect webcam thing at the RoundTable didn't work, but at least not because we weren't prepared. In this case, the cause was something we couldn't have known in advance. Turns out that 60 users simultaneously in Adobe Connect sessions by themselves chew approx. 1.5 Mb/s. When you try to add 4 webcams to that over a pair of T1s, it's all over, baby. (See Justin Moore's good-natured ribbing about our bandwidth quality!) So now we know. By the way, it totally slammed Internet access for our staff as well, and they were a bit cranky about it. ;-)

Second issue, even if the technology had worked, my "touch point" idea might very well not have worked anyway. Turns out getting everyone to stop at the same time and interact with the other rooms is a cat-herding exercise.

On the plus-side, the rooms are small enough to have really great conversation. My group in Room A has been outstanding. I'm thinking this breaking-up-into-groups idea is generally on the right track. Also, I think it was good to collect topics in advance and have all rooms generally discussing the same themes and topics at the same time. Even though we can't see/hear the specifics in the other room, there is something cool about knowing they're all having similar discussions. That simple fact has created a shared experience in an unexpected way.

Tomorrow we're going to try to get everyone in one big Connect meeting, spanning across all the rooms. Not sure if UMCOM has a room big enough to hold all of us simultaneously, but we'll see. Thanks for your flexibility.

The banquet and worship tonight were, for me, exactly what I needed at that moment. I hope most of the attendees had the same reaction.

Our own Matt Bradshaw built a cool web application that generates a web page from a list of feeds and auto-refreshes. We have dropped in feeds from people at the conference we know are blogging. Check it out at http://bitshepherd.com/planet/citrt/.

Overall, I've had a great day and I'm thankful to all of you who have come to be a part of it. Day 2 is tomorrow. Geeks for Jesus!