Monday, March 26, 2007

Report on March Scanfest

We had a great time yesterday at Scanfest! Seven of us participated in one way or another: Amy of Untangled Family Roots; Apple of Apple's Tree; Denise of Family Matters; Jasia of Creative Gene; Lee of The Amateurologist; Susan of Family Oral History; and myself.

Susan and Denise introduced us to the Gizmo Project, a voice-enabled chat, and Lee tried it out for a bit. We were scanning photos, journals, and written articles. I'm not sure how much we actually accomplished, as we scrambled to try the new technology, and some of us were interrupted by family members; it also took a while to get everyone "hooked up." We learned that chatters using Yahoo! e-mail addresses could not be added to the conversation, but those using Gmail e-mail addresses could. Most of us used our Hotmail accounts.

Denise suggested that we have a gabfest sometime soon to get the introductions out of the way and make the Scanfest more efficient. Susan suggested that we try a weeknight sometime. She and Lee each also mentioned having a chatroom set up, which is more universal for different platforms, rather than the instant messaging. These are great ideas, and I hope we can implement them.

The point of Scanfest isn't so much to accomplish a huge amount of scanning at once; it's simply to give ourselves a much-needed kick start for these projects. Sometimes doing something like this is just what we need! We had a great time, and if you missed it, we hope you'll join us for our next one, scheduled April 29th. I'll host that one again, and Susan has agreed to host the one at the end of May.

2 comments:

Charley "Apple" Grabowski said...

It was fun and I actually got quite a lot done! I enjoyed getting to know everyone a little better.

Lee said...

I was too busy playing with the new toy to accomplish much, but as someone who rarely gets to talk "shop" with like-minds, it was a real pleasure. I am so happy to see it taking off, and I look forward to the next one!