Monday 03/21/2022
Started with a standard walk. Back in good time for the 10:30am meeting of the event managers committee. Before that I called Stanford Tickets and ordered my all-session seat for the Spokane regional. It sounds as if they will be able to give me a good seat. We’ll see.
Yesterday, and I can’t believe I didn’t write about it, came an email from administrator Yadira, to me as AV committee and to Pam as Events committee head, saying that staff would like to get rid of the responsibility for the CH Zoom account.
They created a professional level zoom account back at the start of the pandemic. They have closely guarded the password to that account since. When an event manager wants to do a big meeting — say, David G wants to start the Resident Association meeting, 2nd Monday of every month — they have to call a staff member, who logs in to Zoom with the secret email and password, creates the meeting, and then makes the event manager the host. The staff member can then go on their merry way, while the event manager conducts the meeting as host.
Now they want to be rid of this responsibility, and apparently also rid of the $800 a year that it costs, for a pro account plus the right to have more than 100 attendees. So today we discussed this at the event managers meeting. It was settled that Events could in future pay for the annual cost of a zoom account, although finding $800 for the first year, now when some of their budget has already been spent, might be a problem.
Again, this is all due to how Channing House events are all resident-driven, not staff controlled. Including the costs. Each year the Events committee asks the Heritage Fund for what they estimate to spend for the year on museums, speakers, etc.
What wasn’t settled was who, or how, the new account will be managed, that is, who will be responsible for starting meetings when needed while keeping the account credentials secure? I am carefully not volunteering myself for this.
Meeting over, I headed down to FOPAL and spent 3 hours processing books.
After supper, it was soon time for the talk by Judge Cordell. John did a great job of running the zoom, which was available to a long list of other senior residences, although in the end only about 60 people joined the meeting, and some of those were from Channing House.
An innovation here was, for the first time, John allowed Zoom remote attendees to unmute and ask questions vocally, rather than restricting questions to the chat window. I had feared doing this would start a horrible feedback loop. It did not, and I’m not sure why. The remote person’s voice came out of our auditorium speakers, and it should have been picked up by the lapel mike Judge Cordell was wearing and sent around again. But it wasn’t.
Codgerville 