That was fun - although unfortunately some people were having connection problems. This is a drawback of this kind of seminar, I'm not sure how it can be resolved.

Dear Sowmya,

Thank you for your post. I'm glad that you went to the mosque with your friend and, I trust you had a great experience!

You have given very nice proposals and suggestions. I'm sure, Elisabeth will take a note of it.
Your suggestion of "SuSanA courses on Coursera," is very interesting. Sanitation in schools is a important topic. Here, the toilets of schools are most pathetic.

Thanks again for your excellent post!

Regards,

F H Mughal

Thank you all for attending the open mic webinar. As Joe said a few folks had audio problems, but I think perhaps the old saying here rings true "practice makes perfect". In other words we should probably have more frequent open mic session for the SuSanA community.

During my train ride home today I was thinking about how to achieve having more frequent open mic sessions without increasing anyone's work load excessively. The effort that goes into organising such sessions behind the scenes is a few skype calls, number of emails, writing of promotion / advertising text and then circulating that all through various media channels. What if one could cut all that effort out?

My idea / proposal would be the following:

Timing:
Choose a weekday, lets say Thursday, and then one of the four weeks in a month, lets say the first week of each month, and then simply schedule an open mic session for the SuSanA community every first Thursday of the month.

Topic:
We have a monthly digest that lists the top 20 discussed topics of the month, it comes out on the 1st of every month for the previous month, so we could base our open mic session on this monthly digest to get the discussion going.

If we took up an idea in this direction, it would simply become a regular event in all of our diaries and we would all attend as often as we could. Not sure if anyone would manage to attend all 12 sessions in a year.

Anyhow, just wanted to float this idea with you all and happy for you to add to it and refine it further.

All the best
Trevor

I was thinking we should do some more research about available meeting services to test to see which are best to use for those with limited bandwidth. One thing is that this system maybe causes problems as it tries to load video and images even for those who (maybe) can't use it. I wonder if there is something which could be used which has two options (ie one which loads all the videos and one which doesn't). It is nice to see each other's faces, but maybe this is causing a problem for some. I don't know if, for example, skype or google chat systems might be better for some.

Another thing maybe we could think about is to not try to have slides on the same service as the conference - if they are available on the forum to download, maybe participants can download them beforehand and we can have an audio-only conference with each of us looking at our own copy of the pdf.

I think most people had a better experience than when we were talking about the SDGs with the JMP the other week. So that's good

I liked it. Kind of new experince for me. First had to get used to it. Of course face to face is better but this still a possibility to get the feeling of community. I am sure if we do it on regular basis we find the format it will work as close to live conference as possible and also solve the technical problems. I actually do not tink that presentations are useful in that kind of meeting. They can be downloaded separetely and we'd better stick to words and discussions . Maybe some occasional pictures to support what we say but very limeted.

I am mysef would be very interesred to talk on technical issues of sanitation systems.
Like say the subject "Public Compost Toilet problems" or "Competition aspects of CW and compact SBR" or even "Toilet ventilators".

Thank you very much everyone! Was very nice to hear you and I hope to do it again.

Dear SuSanA secretariat
Thank you for organizing the revitalizing chat yesterday. I have not been that active on the forum lately but this was a nice comeback, hopefully there will be more opportunities.
Yesterdays open mic session indicates the strength of SuSanA. The convening power of SuSanA mission and vision bring together people with a lot of experience within the sector people who want to connect share experiences and learn together.

It is also timely to reflect on the ICT development that has taken place with the development of SuSanA. The possibility of global connection is truly amazing and SuSanA has also been able to make a very good and timely use of the technology. WE could probably use the technology out there much more. Based on yesterday´s conversation I think we actually more than ever need a communication and capacity development strategy in place. Already from the start we worked to develop a capacity development strategy and the initial drafts have ended up in a file somewhere in a members hard desk. It would be a good investment to develop a strategy that would enable us tailor and organize our resources making them accessible by using different communication tools for our different target groups referring to practitioners , researchers, students etc

As an example I think SuSanA could use Twitter much more efficiently to lead people into interesting resources, articles on the website etc. WIKI is powerful and so is indeed Twitter and requires less work . Twitter can be programed long time a head and it is an easy channel to present our interesting resources on a regular bases.

Furthermore my recommendation is not see other sanitation online communities as competitors on the a contrary they are complementary and attracts other very important user groups. More than ever before we are working towards the same goal sanitation for all and Susana take the additional step to make this goal sustainable.

To blame limitation in growth of SuSanA on a ecosan stigma is contraproductive in a time where we are heading toward integration of the development goals and in time where the agriculture sector is proactively posing a demand on the nutrients and want reuse to become part of national and global food security strategies www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe/en/ . In Sweden the agriculture sector has pushed forward certification standards for Urine and Blackwater to make the agriculture products acceptable for the Swedish market see the resume from the Emilie Jung and Ola Palm attached.The long term connection with the productive sectors is rather a merit than a liability for future growth of the network.

This and much more will be discussed in Stockholm please share the invitation for our SuSanA meeting in Stockholm on August 22 and we will really try to prepare the meeting so that it can be a productive online meeting as well.

Greeeting from a Sweden in midsummer time : Madeleine

joeturner wrote: I was thinking we should do some more research about available meeting services to test to see which are best to use for those with limited bandwidth. One thing is that this system maybe causes problems as it tries to load video and images even for those who (maybe) can't use it. I wonder if there is something which could be used which has two options (ie one which loads all the videos and one which doesn't). It is nice to see each other's faces, but maybe this is causing a problem for some.

There is the open-source option called Big Blue Button bigbluebutton.org/ that could be directly integrated into the SuSanA website and which uses modern WebRTC audio that might solve some of the issues.

Ah-ha, that looks like a useful thing, Krischan. It looks like phoning in is also an option for those low bandwidth. Happy to give it a try with anyone else who wants to experiment.

I was just experimenting with Dorothee in the Big Blue Button demo, it seems to work quite well - although there are some technical issues - it seems to use a server, so we'd have to set that up. Also I have not yet worked out how to phone in to it. But as an idea it seems to be a good one.

Dear all,

Thanks for your valuable feedback and all the great suggestions that have come in so far! Very interesting.

I have to apologise to Dorothee and Sowmya, who made great suggestions on what we should discuss in the webinar (scrol up to access their posts), but we were only able to scratch the surface on some of them. One hour is very short, although on the other hand it's amazing how much came up in just this one hour of focused time in an energetic group. (I reckon we might need to move their suggestions into dedicated threads in order to not lose them)

Some people had problems with the sound or even getting into the virtual room (which was a real pity but had to do with non-updated flash players apparently) but also very many didn't have technical problems. It seems that the video quality from our participants in Mexico was even so good that they could read the name on the shirt of my son who was far behind me at the end of the webinar when he was getting bored with waiting....
They wrote in the chat:
Team WTR: (17:18) Elisabeth we can see Lionel Messi jumping on a bed behind you


I have attached the log from the chat field which gives a good overview of topics that came up (note that the webinar officially ended at 17:00 but some people continued chatting for a while longer - like in real life):



And here is also a screenshot to give you a visual impression (I took it at the beginning of the webinar when only few people had entered the room so far). In the end we had about 35 participants.



I think we succeeded in providing an open space for active participation from the floor - something which I have missed in many other webinars which consist of 90% presentations and 10% discussions. Ours was more like 20% presentation and 80% discussion (maybe the inputs by Trevor and myself should have been even shorter, in fact).

I really like Trevor's suggestion of coming up with a format for an open SuSanA webinar that can become a regular feature in our diaries and does not take up much time for setting up and advertising (for this particular webinar, I did a lot of advertising upfront via twitter, Sanitation Updates and e-mails; which took up quite a bit of my time in the days leading up to the webinar).

Personally, I really like the user experience that Adobe Connect gives. However, perhaps indeed something simpler which works with slower internet connections is needed. Mind you, I do find having webcams or at least sound quite important for the experience. If it was all just typing in the chat field it wouldn't be the same...
What do people think about Google Hangout? I have never used that but perhaps others have made good experiences with it? Let's keep on exploring and testing until we find the tool that suits us best.

Greetings,
Elisabeth

P.S. I like Madeleine's idea to make the next SuSanA meeting in Stockholm into a parallel e-meeting as much as possible. That would really be good and should be planned and advertised well in advance. One needs to block out one's Saturday if one wants to attend though (21-22 Aug.).

Good news: We now have some selected pieces from the open webinar available for a general audience.

I am posting here the links to videos on Youtube, but for people without Youtube access we will also make them available as sound files (mp3 files) later today or tomorrow.

This video here shows Trevor's presentation about SuSanA (which he also gave at the 19th SuSanA meeting in Dakar, Senegal in May), followed by some words from Madeleine Fogde providing her views of the 19th SuSanA meeting:



Madeleine's input starts here:


The slides that Trevor used are available here:
www.susana.org/images/documents/04-meeti...tions/1-Overview.pdf


And this video shows the part in the webinar where I spoke about the forum statistics report, just highlighting some important trends (which I had also mentioned here on the forum ):



Another video clip about the 5000th member announcement, I will post in another thread here .

We have selected these three segments of the webinar for "general consumption". If you have a particular interest in the entire open webinar - and this applies particularly to those people who had registered but couldn't attend due to sound problems; but also to others with a special interest in SuSanA - we can make the sound file of the entire hour available to you on request.

Please send such a request for the mp3 file link to the SuSanA secretariat at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

(we decided not to post the entire sound file here, as it was an open, free discussion and as such probably not so relevant for non-SuSanA members)

Regards,
Elisabeth

Dear members,

Trevor Surridge's presentation about SuSanA and Elisabeth von Muench's presentation of the statistics report, both given during the webinar, are now also available as mp3-audio files. This might be of help especially for those members without access to YouTube, and also for those who like to listen to podcasts on their mobile phones.

• For Trevor's presentation about SuSanA, and Madeleine's words about the 19th SuSanA meeting in Dakar last month click here (presentation starts after 20 seconds of silence)
• for Elisabeth's input about the forum statistics report click here (the sound starts after 8 seconds of silence)

Best regards,
Lasse, on behalf of the SuSanA secretariat