Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Amazing Tool for Meeting Effectiveness

After more than 10 years of leading virtual teams, I think I have found the single most useful tool to virtual meetings. www.etherpad.com is a free service that allows you to create a “public pad” with a unique url. Etherpad is a simple, “really” real-time white board that allows everyone to take notes (concurrently), post content, chat, edit, and then export meeting notes. The notes stay active on the public page "forever" so they can be referenced by clicking on the url you get for each “pad.”

2 comments:

Tom Khazoyan said...

Hey Clyde,

I agree that the EtherPad is a big help. It's nice to have our meeting notes all edited and available almost by the time we wrap a meeting.

I also just got on Google Wave. That could be even more useful for this sort of on-going collaboration. Gotta wait until it really launches before we can really use it, but it could be even cooler than EtherPad.

Tom

Unknown said...

I use this free tool a lot. It's especially good because there is no sign up or forcing users to create an account on some sharing platform. It can be created instantly. In fact, I store the links to these etherpads in a folder on my browser labelled "Instants" - renaming each link to remind me what the pad is about. Very useful.