Whiteboard replacement for remote meeting participants?

[George Paci]

All,

My current On-Site Customer is 300 miles away, so we have a lot of meetings
with remote participants.

For Standups, this isn't much of a problem: we just go around the room, and
take turns talking.

Even for Demos, this isn't bad: everyone's looking at one screen anyway, so
some people are just looking at one that's smaller and a little blocky for
half a second when it changes.

But Planning meetings and Retrospectives present a larger challenge: what
can we use to replace the whiteboards we use so freely? Our conference
room, like our team rooms, has full-wall whiteboards on three of the walls.
We have a rainbow's worth of dry-erase markers, even if you only count the
ones that work. And it's not unusual to have two of us writing or drawing
on the whiteboards at once.

At first, I thought we could just make sure to write big and legibly, but
I didn't grasp the fisheye optics of our webcam; it's essentially impossible
to write on the wall in a way the remote participants can see.

The last couple of meetings, we've had one person edit either a text file or
a Google Drive spreadsheet. That's suboptimal for a few reasons:
* Only one person can drive at a time
* While the text is nicely legible, a very limited amount can appear
at once; columns are also hard to do
* No freehand sketching is possible
* We can't all point at things, so we have to number them to communicate
* "Cards" in a GUI (Trello, in our case) just aren't the same

Does anybody have any ideas what to use in place of our whiteboards? A free
tool or approach would be nifty, but I'm also open to commercial products.

--George


PS: Some of you will be tempted to respond to this by saying, "Well,
your REAL
problem isn't whiteboards, it's...." Do *not* resist the temptation.

[Tim Ottinger]

It's good that you don't want me to resist. I can resist anything but temptation. Your real problem is hard to tell from this distance. Probably with having assets shared across longitudes or something. That's my problem often enough. ;-)

Have you done any google drawing pages? It's better than a stick in the eye. Or else try join.me or webex or whatever and your favorite drawing app. I've never been entirely happy with anything I've tried, so just make yourself comfy.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Agile Coaching Support" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to agile-coaching-support+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

--
Tim Ottinger, Sr. Consultant, Industrial Logic
-------------------------------------
http://www.industriallogic.com/
http://agileinaflash.com/
http://agileotter.blogspot.com/

[Lisa Crispin]

I was going to suggest google drawing also, tho I haven't tried it myself, I've heard other ppl say it was ok.

We just use our tracking tool and Google docs / spreadsheets for our planning meetings, but, we get the whole team or most of it together in one place every 6 or 8 weeks and do lots of whiteboard drawing then.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to agile-coaching-su...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
 
 

--
Lisa Crispin
Co-author with Janet Gregory, _Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams_ (Addison-Wesley 2009)
Contributor to _Beautiful Testing_ (O'Reilly 2009)
http://lisacrispin.com
@lisacrispin on Twitter

[David Koontz]

I'm constantly looking for the perfect whiteboard remote collaboration tool...  so far no one has properly digitized the affordances (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance)  that pen & paper, post-its and a whiteboard give us.

But here's my ongoing list of collaboration tools:  http://agilecomplexificationinverter.blogspot.com/2013/02/collaboration-tools-list.html

Feel free to add a comment with your tool of choice.