Watching Stories Together Miles Apart

Kyle never lets a little thing like distance stop him from meeting with someone, either in a group or one-on-one. Here he is showing someone in Iowa around our office in Madison.


The other day he wanted to debut videos of several stories about serving local farm products in the Chilton, Wisconsin, K-12 school, but one person was in Chilton, others were in Madison, and he was attending a conference in Austin, Texas.

That would pose a big problem for me, but Kyle is kind of a technology geek.

How to Set Up an Online Video Premiere

• First, Kyle set up a conference call, and told everyone to expect an email just before the start.
• He set up a document with questions he wanted everyone to answer in Google Docs and used the sharing menu to generate a link to it.
• Next he drafted emails to each participant containing the Google Docs link plus links to the videos, sending them just before the call.
• When everyone was on the line, Kyle cheerfully cautioned them not to open the video link just yet, and led a phone-muting practice exercise.
• Opening the Google Docs link and document was next on the group agenda--no problem.
• He walked everyone through opening another browser window, then finally gave the okay to open the video links.

Group Reviewing in Real Time
After a few minutes of silence watching the videos, fingers were flying on keyboards describing reactions all at the same time in the Google document. It must have felt like ghosts typing alongside each person at their computer.There was a technology breakdown (weren't you just waiting to hear that?)—one person could not get the videos to play on her computer. Kyle tried troubleshooting with her by refreshing the page, trying another browser, but nothing worked.

She ended up watching the videos on someone else's computer and talking to Kyle later.What caused the video failure on her computer? Don't know...but we're looking into it.

Apart from that, it was a fun experience. I’m starting my own journey of learning about using online common space by experimenting with Google Docs.