Schedule for Photophlow Gatherings

We've had a couple of photophlow get-togethers centered around selecting photos in our Flickr pool for the weekly PhotoDumps. I think we're getting better at this, but the number of images submitted to the pool increases each week too. This last meeting on Sunday lasted four hours and we didn't even get through all the images! The guys at photophlow are working hard to get us some new features to make this easier, but regardless of the tools we have I think we'll have to split up the session to twice per week.

This will allow us to get through the photos a little easier, plus we can stagger the times so that everybody around the globe can join in on at least one session. Here's what I'm proposing as standard weekly meeting times:

9PM PST (GMT-8), EVERY WEDNESDAY

You can check this time conversion to see what time it will be in your timezone.

9AM PST (GMT-8), EVERY SUNDAY

You can check this time conversion to see what time it will be in your timezone.

We'll run things the same as the last session, with the voting and such. I think that worked out well, and it puts the photo selection in the hands of the community rather than just mine. Basically, I run the slideshow, we talk about the photo, I give a signal, and everybody votes. Anything that gets at least a 50% vote will be featured on the PhotoDump blog post. On average we had 5-7 active people in the room during the last session, so it only took 3 or 4 votes to get the photo accepted. The more people we have involved, the more interesting it gets

At some point (if we continue to do this) we'll have to split up the meeting time into more sessions, so my hope is that the wonderful team at photophlow can develop some nifty tools for us to run this thing on a more semi-automated basis. My ideal situation would involve a voting system that would enable you guys to run this thing yourselves in the event that I can't make it to the session. So we'll see what comes down the pipe, but for now we'll continue on as we have.

I'd also like to hear some thoughts from people who have participated in these things. Is it worth the time and effort? Are you gaining anything from it? What can we do better?