In 2012, the Synod of the Southwest, in Fulfilling Its Mission to Engage One Another In

In 2012, The Synod of the Southwest, in fulfilling its mission to “Engage one another in dialogue about ministry and faith across presbytery lines, and in partnership with the larger church (including, among others, General Assembly, other synods and ecumenical partners”, funded and installed 14 Cybercafés in churches across each of its four Presbyteries and in two Synod Offices. In 2013, the Presbytery of Santa Fe funded and installed an additional system in its Presbytery Office, bringing the total to 15 Cybercafés.

Two purposes informed the decision to install these Cybercafés: 1) reduce travel costs and 2) provide opportunities for additional communications between churches, Synod Presbyteries, and Synod meetings. Cybercafés, help mitigate these barriers by providing virtual meeting spaces for Synod Members to share and conduct meetings while minimizing travel.

Each Cybercafé consists of an Internet connection, computer, web camera, conferencing microphone, speakers, a large screen monitor and a GoToMeeting subscription. The Synod funded purchase, setup and the first year of Citrix subscriptions. Cybercafés were selected (3 per each of the four Presbyteries) based on geographic location and technical characteristics.

Any meeting will include the some or all of the following persons and places:

The Meeting Facilitator is responsible for scheduling the meeting and emailing the link for that meeting to the hosts or participants. Generally this will be a Committee Chair.
The Cybercafé sites are the churches throughout the synod where a cyber cafe has been installed. Technical Liaisons from each site set up the equipment, maintain them, secure the site from theft, and schedule the room for meeting dates.
The Organizer is the person who begins the meeting. Once the meeting has begun, the organizer may hand the organizer role off to the meeting facilitator and leave.
A Participant is a person attending the meeting. They may attend the meeting by going to a Cybercafé or from their own computer (provided that there is sufficient space within GoToMeeting and their system/Internet connection meet the minimum requirements).

As of this writing, the systems have been set up, tested and are starting to be used for meetings. The initial start-up of training, tuning systems, identifying Internet connectivity issues has been augmented by a Series of Shakedown Meetings between Organizers and Technical Liaisons.

Many thanks go to Conrad Rocha for his vision in moving the Synod forward, Robin Thomas for her constant and consistent attention to this new media, David Hicks for purchasing, logistical support in setting up the initial Cybercafés, Dee Ellis for capturing information from our initial meetings, and all the Organizers and Technical Liaisons for your willing and joyful participation.

Steve Ediger

Overview by Role

Organizers

Technical Liaisons

Meeting Facilitators

Meeting Participants

Set up the Cybercafé

Basic System Setup (Technical Liaisons)

Tuning the System Up (Technical Liaisons)

Setting up the Common Calendar and GoToMeeting (Organizers)

Minimum System and Internet Requirements

Schedule a Meeting

Overview

Schedule a Meeting (Organizers)

Schedule a Meeting (Meeting Facilitators)

Start and Leave a Meeting

Start a Meeting (Organizer)

Start a Meeting (Technical Liaisons and Participants with Computers)

Managing Audio

Leave a Meeting

Trouble-Shooting Meetings

General Steps

Poor video/audio

Audio Echo (feedback)

Have a Good Meeting

How to Run a GoToMeeting

Cybercafé Meeting Etiquette

Care and Feeding of the Cybercafé (Technical Liaisons)

Keeping the Hardware and Software Up-to-Date

Hardware Care and Maintenance

Personnel and Sites

Organizers:

Host Sites within the Synod:

Overview by Role

Organizers

One Organizer per Presbytery and Robin Thomas at the Synod Office manage the scheduled virtual meetings for that presbytery and the Synod with a common shared calendar. Steve Ediger provides Technical Support. They

Manage Meeting Requests
Receive meeting requests from facilitators
Communicate with facilitators to decide on a date and time for the meeting.
See “Schedule a Meeting” for further instructions.
Schedule a Meeting
Log onto common calendar
Check to see if any other meetings are going on.
If there are no conflicts, use the common calendar and GoToMeeting tools to schedule the meeting. See “Schedule a Meeting” for further instructions.
Start a Meeting
See Start a Meeting for further instructions
Set up and start the meeting 30 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the meeting.
Make sure that the Meeting Facilitator has your phone number so that s/he can call you if something goes wrong.
When the Meeting Facilitator joins the meeting,
Stay in the meeting long enough to ensure that all participants’ video and/or audio connections work. See “Trouble-Shooting Meetings”.
Make the facilitator both the Presenter and the Organizer.
If you are not attending and/or facilitating the meeting, close your meeting session. If you have transferred both roles, this will allow the meeting to continue after you have left it.
After the meeting, contact the Meeting Facilitator
Ask them how the meeting went
Collect any feedback including
The number of participants that actually met
Detailed descriptions of any problems that they encountered
Report meeting results to Steve Ediger and the other Organizers

Technical Liaisons

At each host church housing a Cybercafé, a Technical Liaison, provides the technical support and manages the Cybercafé. Technical Liaisons

Get notice of meeting from Organizer
Schedule it on the church calendar to book the room.
Plan on being there to start the meeting or arrange for someone else.
Reply to meeting invitation from Organizer
On the day of the meeting.
Arrange the room and set up the equipment. See Set up the Cybercafé.
Ensure that you have the Organizer’s phone number to make quick contact in the event of problems. Also see “Trouble-Shooting Meetings” for further assistance.
Set up and start the meeting 15 to 30 minutes prior to the scheduled start of the meeting, using the invite to join the right meeting.
After the meeting, report any problems to the Organizer.

Meeting Facilitators

Anyone with Synod or Presbytery-related business can facilitate a meeting. Generally Meeting Facilitators will be Moderators, Committee Chairs or Commission Chairs. However, the system is open to anyone within the Synod wanting to connect with other Synod or Presbytery members/ churches about issues important to the church. Meeting Facilitators

Decide to hold a virtual meeting
Collect information about the participants
Ascertain whether they will use a Cybercafé (and which one) or their own computer.
Determine a set of tentative dates. These will not be finalized until you get confirmation from the organizer.
Contact the Organizer with tentative meeting times and dates and a participant list.
Get confirmation from the Organizer about a specific date and time and schedule the meeting with the participants.
Before the meeting, become familiar with the Go To Meeting software and how to run a virtual meeting. See Have a Good Meeting.
On the day of the meeting, get to the CyberCafe or set your system up in plenty of time to accept the roles of Organizer and Presenter and run the meeting.
After the meeting, forward feedback to the organizer about successes/problems with the technology.

Meeting Participants

Anyone interested in or having a reason to participate in a Synod/Presbytery virtual meeting may join as a Meeting Participant. Meeting Participants

Work with your meeting facilitator to schedule tentative meeting dates and times.
If you plan on joining the meeting using your own computer
Please clear this with the meeting facilitator first. There are a limited number of slots and it may not be possible for each participant to log on from their own computer with both audio and video feeds.
Read and ensure that your system and Internet connection meet the minimum requirements in “Minimum System and Internet Requirements”
On the day of the meeting, log in with the meeting invitation (See “Start a Meeting (Technical Liaisons and Participants using their own computer)”) that you received at least 15 minutes before the scheduled start of the meeting to ensure that all of the technology is working.
After the meeting, report back to the facilitator or Organizer (the one that sent you the meeting invitation) on your experience and any technical problems that you encountered during the meeting.

Set up the Cybercafé

Basic System Setup (Technical Liaisons)

Each Cybercafé has been installed in a suitable room with the computer, web camera, and wall monitor positioned so that they provide access to the wired network connection and adequate visibility to all participants. Ideally, this should have been a permanent setup. However, a permanent setup may not have been possible in all cases, because the computer may need to be secured or moved out of the way between meetings.
If necessary, set up the computer.
Check all the cables to ensure everything is plugged in securely.
The wall monitor has an HDMI cable that should be plugged into the computer (on left side of the computer) and the monitor port.
The web camera should be plugged into one of the computer’s three USB.
Plug the network cable into the wall network jack and the computer network port.
Plug the wireless mouse dongle into a USB port and turn on the mouse. BE SURE to turn off the mouse at the end of your meeting when shutting down the system. It also might make sense to keep a spare set of batteries around.
Plug the Polycom Conference microphone into one of the other USB ports on the computer. Plug the speakers into the jack on the Polycom to reduce echo, because it separates incoming sound from outgoing sound to the speakers.

Tuning the System Up (Technical Liaisons)

We have discovered the audio is muddy when you first join a meeting. We were advised by Citrix to run their Connection Wizard. This wizard figures out the best pathway for audio through your system and the internet and sets that permanently in your computer’s registry. You only need to do this one time.
Browse to the Connection Wizard.
Download and run it. You will probably see a message that JEDI ran successfully and that ECRPC failed. This is OK; the ECRPC failure is a problem that Citrix support is aware of and fixing. It does not affect optimization of the path.
Start the process to email the results to a technician. When you do this, it creates an email and inserts the detailed results.
Instead of hitting Send, replace the “To:” line with , so that the results will be sent to Steve Ediger. Steve will review the results to ensure it’s all working properly.

Setting up the Common Calendar and GoToMeeting (Organizers)

Before scheduling meetings, the Organizers should set up the common calendar
Steve Ediger has sent invitations out for this shared calendar. If necessary, contact either him or Robin Thomas to get an invitation.
We are using Google Calendar, so Organizers will need to have a Google account to share in this calendar.
By convention we are using the color purple to designate CyberCafe meetings, but you can use any different color than your other calendars.
Download and install GoToMeeting from
By using the Google Chrome browser, you can avoid extra steps with an extension called Veenome Calendar Integration.
In the Chrome browser, select Settings from the Chrome menu (three horizontal bars appearing toward the upper right-hand corner of Chrome).
Select extensions.
At the bottom of your extensions list, click on “Get more extensions”
When Chrome Store comes up, search on “Veenome Calendar Integration”.
Install it.

Minimum System and Internet Requirements

Please check to see that you meet the minimum system requirements and that you have the equipment you need before downloading the latest version of GoToMeeting.

Windows
Operating system / Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8
Processor / 2.4GHz or more
RAM / 2GB or more
Internet / DSL or better
Bandwidth / 700Kbps or more for simultaneous screen sharing, video and audio conferencing
Browser / Internet Explorer® 7.0 or newer
Mozilla® Firefox® 4.0 or newer
Google Chrome™ 5.0 or newer
Mac
Operating system / Mac OS® X 10.6 (Snow Leopard®), Mac OS® X 10.7 (Lion®),
Mac OS® X 10.8 (Mountain Lion®)
Processor / 2.4GHz Intel processor (Core 2 Duo)
RAM / 1GB
Internet / DSL or better
Bandwidth / 700Kbps or more for simultaneous screen sharing, video and audio conferencing
Browser / Safari™ 3.0 or newer
Mozilla® Firefox® 4.0 or newer
Google Chrome™ 5.0 or newer

Schedule a Meeting

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Overview /

Scheduling a meeting typically involves the a committee chair, but could involve anyone in the Synod that wants to meet with other Synod Members about church-related issues.

Scheduling a meeting is an interactive process involving the meeting facilitator, organizer, technical liaisons and participants.

The facilitator starts the process by calling for a meeting with the potential participants and suggesting a set of meeting dates and times.
After ascertaining dates and times that participants can meet, the facilitator sends information about the meeting to the organizer.
The organizer schedules the meeting at an available time, places it on a calendar common to all organizers and sends invitations out to the facilitator, technical liaisons and anyone that will be connecting with their own system.
The facilitator follows up with a confirmation email to all participants.

Schedule a Meeting (Organizers)

After being informed of potential meeting times by a Meeting Facilitator, check the common calendar to ensure that one of them is clear for all the Cybercafés. Ideally, ensure that there is a clear ½ hour between meetings to allow adequate time for setup.

[NOTE: As I was reviewing this document, I realized that we are missing a step of having the technical liaison check to ensure that the room in the CyberCafe is available at the scheduled date/time. If this becomes a problem, we will need to modify this procedure to add this step.]

If no clear times exist, communicate with the Meeting Facilitator to get other dates/times.
Once a clear date/time has been established, schedule the meeting in the common calendar and the GoToMeeting with one of the two following methods:
Schedule a meeting on the common calendar with the Veenome Calendar Integration extension.
Use Google Chrome Brower with the Veenome Calendar Integration extension installed
Select the date, start and finish times and schedule a meeting.
Edit the meeting
Fill in
Event Title (name of the meeting)
Check the date and times and fill them in, if necessary
Check the time zone to ensure that your calendar is in the proper time zone. During daylight savings time, New Mexico is an hour ahead of Arizona. Make sure that you are setting the time according to wherever the Meeting Facilitator resides.
Type “GoToMeeting” in the Where box
Change the Calendar to SynodSW to share with other Organizers.
Add Guests. This should include the Meeting Facilitator, Technical Liaisons from any Cybercafé being used for the meeting and any participant attending the meeting from their own computer (This information should have been forwarded by the Meeting Faciliator along with their address).
For now, we are a) not allowing invitees to modify the event, b) allowing them to invite others, and c) allowing them to see the guest list.
Set Reminders as you like.
Once this is complete, click on “Add GoToMeeting Invite”.
The Veenome Calendar Integration extension will take over and schedule the event in GoToMeeting. You may be asked to login to GoToMeeting with your Citrix GTM login.
After this completes successfully the extension will populate the Description box with the meeting details and Meeting ID.
Above this information in the Description box, add each Cybercafé that will be participating so other Organizers can see which Cybercafés will be affected at that time. Multiple meetings in non-conflicting Cybercafés may run concurrently.
Click on Save and “yes” to update the participants.
If a meeting gets changed, the Veenome Calendar Integration can handle it. Edit the meeting and change the date/times. Click on “Update GoToMeeting with New Date & Time” and the extension will update the GoToMeeting site and Description. Save it and update the guests.
If the integration extension is not working, you’ll have to set the meeting up in both the common calendar and in GoToMeeting.
Start with the calendar (items iv.1 through iv.8 above).
Log in to GoToMeeting
Click on “Host a Meeting”
A Gray screen will appear: fill in the blanks
Subject
Date
Start and end times
Audio Select the following:
“Use built-in audio conferencing”
Provide both (VoIP & Conference Call number)
In the bottom right corner, click on schedule
Send an invitation for the meeting
You will see an outlook email
Send the email to your email account
Copy and paste the body of the email to the Description and continue with iv.9.c above.
Verify receipt and correctness of the invitation with the Meeting Facilitator and update as necessary.

Schedule a Meeting (Meeting Facilitators)

Decide on a meeting title, for example “Synod Finance Committee”
Contact all participants.
Propose at least 3 dates and times. Doodle provides an easy way to do this if there are more than two people meeting.
Settle on at least 2 dates and times to limit back and forth communications in the event that another meeting is scheduled for the same time.
Determine from where the participants will be attending, which Cybercafé or from their own computer.
Note that there is a hard limit of 6 video feeds and a total of 25 audio feeds for each meeting. If you want to be able to see everyone, schedule a maximum of 6 locations.
Please pass the “Minimum System and Internet Requirements” along to each participant wanting to use their own computer.
For each participant using their own computer, make sure that you have their email address and a phone number at which they can be reached.
After getting an initial set of dates/times, communicate the following information to the Organizer.
Name of the meeting
All dates/starting/ending times
All Cybercafés involved and the names, email addresses and contact phone numbers for participants attending from their own computer.
Get confirmation from the Organizer.
If one of the selected dates/times works, it will be in the form of an invitation to a GoToMeeting.
If not rework the process to find a meeting date/times that work.
After getting a confirmed invitation from the Organizer, please confirm to all of the participants.

Start and Leave a Meeting

Start a Meeting (Organizer)

There are two ways to start a meeting: