We had a great conference call early this morning. For the OSUG leaders unaware of these calls, here's how it works: We set a date and have 2 calls at different times. We've been rotating these through various times of the day to give leaders in different timezones a chance to chime in. For example, we had today @ at 12am Friday, 2009-09-25 UTC and another at 7am UTC. The call-in numbers (toll-free) are provided by Sun via Teresa Giacomini. We had leaders from Australia, Japan, US, Germany and Canada present. We hold the calls simultaneously with our IRC channel irc://irc.freenode.net/#opensolaris-ugs (which translates to: #opensolaris-ugs on irc.freenode.net).
Discussions have included: topics for group meetings, live video linking between Adelaide and Japan group meetings, ways to promote & build groups, special events and more. Contact me for more info: Steven Acres, [email protected]. Join in!

Together with Sun's Teresa Giacomini, a number of Global OpenSolaris User Group Leaders and myself we had our first simultaneous IRC/conference calls this last week. Really very rewarding, to see something we've been going back and forth on the OpenSolaris mail-lists come to fruition in a relatively short time.

So what, you may be thinking, it's a conference call .. big deal. Ah, if you notice above I said "Global". When I'm up others are asleep and so on. Yet after a number of back and forth and forth and back emails regarding the time of the call(s) we finalized the dates. Co-operation and community, can you dig it open sourcers! 

Talking live to each other was great. We 'scribed from the call to those on IRC unable to call in (there's that co-operation again), vocalizing their written questions & comments back. Good ideas regarding our groups and the framework for our future calls .. even a few jokes. It flowed easily .. other than a recurring question, "Who's first?"