In real time your association will be teaching their members about digital workflow, about the power of collaboration and about performance management. They'll be doing it! These weekly, online collaboration events will be scheduled to begin immediately after an episode airs.
The basics of collaboration¹

These events would be opened first to all viewers of that episode of the show, and then to all those visitors to the web who observe that it is a realtime event, happening now! The local viewers will be invited each week to attend by the voice of their PBS-member station and the host of the event would be identified. The subject matter would first be the key ideas presented from that episode and ways such ideas can be implemented locally.

Because the meeting time will be in a consistent time slot each week and be made public on each state's resource page, people could join the event from around the world.

The host has total control of the event, the queue by which people speak, the ability to cut them off and to keep them out of future sessions under that user name and password.

Such events usually cost substantial dollars. The model is now being work so these are free events for everyone involved.

The local chapters can reach out personally to their membership and potential membership. The local chapters would be participating with their Economic Development Commissions, other local national trade association chapters, people of the SBA, SBDC, or SCORE chapter, and even people from the offices of the governor, mayor, the station and the local sponsors! There would only be 52 such events a year and the perceived value of that event will increase as the participation grows.

There have been discussions about collaboration as part of the dialogue within a few of the past episodes² of the show¹ and there is an introduction to a specific type of collaboration offered by Microsoft.²

We always invite our viewers' COMMENTS OR QUESTIONS and we invite the same from you.
Your feedback is very important.

Over the years, the feedback of our viewers has been most encouraging.

¹The basics of collaboration. Here is another one-page overview, Weekly Collaboration Events, to provide a basic introduction to collaboration using Microsoft's LiveMeeting. We are very open to exploring and using other collaboration tools as well.

²Time Technology: We'll continue to get this episode into shape so you can use it as a tool with your members of the local chapters. Collaboration is not instant messaging. It is groupware, but it is also a entirely new order of business. We all are only beginning to grasp its power. Paul Scharfman of Specialty Cheese believes we had better collaborate or we'll die.