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?
Hitesh Sawlani
January 23, 2008I was there on Sunday and it was good.. but to be honest, after 2hours of photolooking and critiquing it can get a bit old.
Also with regards to time, is it sustainable? You are taking 8hours of your week to do this for both sessions!
Brian Auer
January 23, 2008Well, I’d like to keep the sessions under 2-3 hours.
I’m not sure how sustainable this really is — especially as the group grows in size. That’s why I’d like to get the tools in place to have it run a little more autonomously. As it were, I was spending probably 2-4 hours per week going through the photos and selecting images on my own.
For the time being, I can spend the extra time to get things worked out with the photophlow team, but in the long run I’ll have to cut back to keeping it under 4 hours per week.
CyberCarsten
January 27, 2008Although another stil a difficult time – was at work. Hope I will have time to participae in a future sessin 🙂
sskennel
February 3, 2008This was educational and fun, except for the frustrating intermittent Flickr/photophlow glitches. Midnight Wednesday/Thursday EST is right out, but I’ll try to show up occasionally on Sundays.
Brian Auer
February 4, 2008Yeah, the downside to photophlow is that it’s dependent on Flickr being in-tact… which seems to be less and less often lately. Even so, It’d be great to have you join us again next time around!