mschauber
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Re: the number of attendees by Phone
There are a few different ways it could be handled. To answer your 2nd question first, the best case scenario is what Zoom has done... they have their hand raise function and for callers, there's a star key sequence for them to press. Without the hand raise function, the way we will have to do it, is at the end of an agenda item, we'll open it up for public comment/questions. If the user is on a computer, they will have put a '?' in the chat box. For callers, we'll have to unmute them and ask people to say their first name if they want to speak. That leads me to your first question... gotomeeting just lists caller 1, caller 2, etc. When a member of the public first speaks, they have to give their full name... we will also be asking for spelling and will then manually change the name from Caller x to the person's name. This, for us, is important for multiple reasons. Our meetings are recorded, a permanent legal record. Some are also broadcasted on local community tv and even if not live, they are recorded and broadcasted at different times during the week and are made available on their website for watching. So we need to have an accurate recording of everyone who speaks. Actually, now that I think about it, we need a listing of all members of the public in attendance for our minutes. The 2nd item on our agenda is alway 'members of the public.' So at that time we will ask for all callers names and update it in the list of attendees/participants. If people call in after the meeting is called to order, we will have to pause at some point to get their name. Since these meetings are public, I wouldn't want phone numbers to be displayed... although the last 4 digits of their number would be helpful in identifying which caller we'd like to speak. What it comes down to is that there is more of a cross section for these products than GoTo currently provides for. I'd much rather see the hand raise functionality added to gotomeeting. We can live without the file sharing that is in webinar. When you're running a meeting with 10 to 30 or more people, being able to know who wants to speak and queuing them, preferably in order, seems like it should be a standard feature. Clearly zoom felt it should be. Jitsi has it. I'm sure others do as well. Thanks, Marc3KViews1like2CommentsRe: the number of attendees by Phone
And that's the rub. The moderator/organizer needs to be able to control all mics. I know gotomeeting is more of a 'meeting' application, but it's missing some functions.. primarily the hand raise, but also the ability to include documents for people to download. These are municiple and school board meetings, which have to be open to the public. I'm doing everything I can to keep people from using Zoom, but zoom has the handraise function where gotomeeting does not. And if gotowebinar can't accomodate call-ins whose mics can be controlled, then we're looking at a mess of noise, interuptions, etc.3KViews1like5Comments