Talk:Wikimania-ting

From Wikimania

MattisManzel 20:39, 28 July 2006 (UTC): The possibilities of tinging are vast, not only in company with conferences - like wikimania is - but generally and they haven't really been explored up to now. There could actually be tings for every wikipedia-article - appointments to meet online in real time to discuss and improve it. It would improve working speed a lot.[reply]

When I made the ting-wiki shortly after discovering MoonEdit in January 2004 I've immediately thought about using it along with VoIP. It took a long time before this actually happpened. Speech is very dominant compared to writing. Having a conference VoIP-connection using common programs like Skype along with writing in a collab-editor is disturbing as you hear every sound in any of the participants surroundings, every caugh, every postman ringing twice, every ... Voice is simply too dominant. A friend finally pointed me to (the unfortuneately hopelessly proprietary) teamspeak, a grandma' among VoIP applications used by gamers for a long time already. The situation is similar: not the VoIP-conversation is primary but the game is. Not the VoiP-conversation is primary but the text is. Teamspeak has therefore has a socalled push-to-talk function - that is, similar to good old seventies citizen band, the others do not hear you unless you push a key on your keyboard. If nobody pushes his/her key there is silence. Silence is good for text work. Having a real question you concider important enough to disturb to group with you push your key and you get an answer. In conversation this function has a disciplining effect. You see a little lamp turn green as long as somebody pushes his/her key and you rather wait til the person finished talking before you answer. Apart from that advantage teamspeak has the possibility to create an elaborated substructure of subrooms meaning if some folks in a session want to talk about something without disturbing the others they can easily move to a subroom for that purpose. I'd recommend to test it for the online part of wikimania and wonder if someone could set up a teamspeak sever. Teamspeak is hopelessly proprietary, yes, but presently the best available to my knowledge.