There should be a BA Skype group.

Is there one already I do not know of?
If not, we should have one, a Skype groups is great for casual friendly interactions and quickly assisting with questions.

Have you heard of IRC?

It might be a good idea to create a contact list with other Blender users, you can meet them online in Google hangouts or Skype etc. But generally IRC or Forums are better because IRC or Forums where the information is much more widespread and accessible.

I think right now my list of blender users I don’t want to interact with, Far exceeds my list of ones that I would.

Not ideal, group would get to large.
There a few channels on freenode.net, for Blender, to be used with a chat client such as Mirc.
To give you some indication of the group size, every suynday there is developer meeting which has around 170 developers/watchers online.
There are also channels dedicated for Blender Python and general support.

I’ve been in skype chat with 100 plus members, And the ability to take it to voice seems to make those groups somewhat more civil. I’m not saying I am opposed to trying out a skychat such as that. Just as a whole the only reason I visit this forum is to supplement learning. I’ve moved past the points of having expectations from this community.

I’ve been interested in the parallel of this on Google+ Hangouts, but I’m not sure what the activity level is. The interest in that is because of the ability to live stream a desktop and have it not just at the hangout session but publicly broadcast live on YouTube. I’ve had one or two sessions where I seem to get at most two people (while it’s live), so I’m not sure if the interest is there. The other downside is that I didn’t get much participation or feedback during the session. I’m guessing people would rather just watch in the background instead of participating in the actual voice chat. (I’d like to know if there are things I could do better, or just get inputs on the design of whatever it is I’m modeling.)

Then again, it could just be my timing of when I want to do stuff. I’m in U.S. Central, majority of people I catch into this stuff on the net are across the Atlantic somewhere in Europe. What seems convenient for me is pushing it pretty late for them.

IRC is great when that is the focus of your attention, as with most text mediums. I find I am often doing multiple things at once in the evenings when I’m likely to talk to others online and voice &/or video is often the best medium in that regard. Talking at someone whilst typing out code, sculpting, painting, etc with one’s hands is a snap compared to having to stop all that to reply to a comment. There is also the established “politeness” factor that comes with voice/video. People are culturally more likely to remain polite and not flame in person.

I work in a “distributed office” for my day job and we use Skype all the time for that (voice calls on & off all day with screen-sharing as needed… we tend to avoid the webcam as unnecessary). When it comes to watching some of the artists I support via Patreon, it’s generally screen-sharing and voice on their end (for the reasons above) though the input is text from the “crowd” of spectators. Voice/video chat seems to be most beneficial when the number of participants is lower than (around) five. Too many participants and people start talking over one another all the time.

Summary: I think video/voice potential in linking up with other Blenderheads is a good thing. I think it serves a different role than IRC as IRC is better at allowing all people to “get a turn” talking, but is less useful for discussing subjects whilst working.

+1 Btolputt.

Hell lets just get this show started https://join.skype.com/DQoQAdQl7cKN

you should try twitch instead of youtube for live. if its game related use a channel in game development section, if just general art the creative section. i’ve seen a streamer modeling a jet with over 50 viewers, it turned into a “how do i get blender and why is autodesk so much” stream but the streamer was polite about it. dont know if he got to finish his jet but he got over 20 new blender users. i have seen about 100 viewers in a game development stream before who used blender for the modeling then moved the models into his own game engine. seemed to be a smiple exploration platformer but he was getting people wanting to buy it before it was even finished and did get donations. not to the 100k kick starter level, but for a simple game by a single person he gat a few hundreed in donations as well as people wanting to buy the game. it was pirate cove themed if i remember right.

Was never a fan of skype.

I’m sure others here feel the same way because in a forum, you create a thread and you can come back to it at anytime
but in skype… there is this constant stream of messages(which is fine but skype notifies me after any message is posted so… yeah it’s kind of annoying )

Same problem exists with IRC and any other form of immediate communication medium on the Internet. Most people visit the forums sporadically and pressing refresh over & over on a thread waiting on a reply is frustrating. Forums have their place as do more immediate mediums. It’s not a matter of replacing forums or IRC (at least to me), it’s about expanding the means by which we communicate with one another. :slight_smile:

For example, I don’t use Skype for threaded conversations with clients (that’s what emails are for) but for a meeting, for immediate debugging of an issue, and/or for a quick video demonstration of a feature - it beats other mediums hands down. :slight_smile:

Say what you will about skype. But it makes file sharing not quite unpleasant, and it does let you adjust your notification settings.