The chat in this context is a special web program that a group of people access at the same time, or at some time during an agreed on period of time, so they can exchange brief messages in real time. I would configure it as a new web page on this site. It is so easy to setup that I already have set it up.
Whatever each person types is shown within a few seconds to everyone in the "chat room". Each short message a person types appears with their chat name next to what they have typed, so you can keep track of who said what.
To send a message in a chat room you type what you want to "say" in a field on the chat page, then you click the Send button. Your message appears on the screen of everyone in that chat room. You can join or leave a chat room anytime you like.
The program we are considering adding here would allow a number of different "chat rooms" to be running at the same time, given enough users online to support multiple chat sessions.
The advantage of using a chat system is you can exchange a lot of questions, answers, or ideas in a fairly short time. Because what each person types appears almost instantly, it is like being in a meeting with a group of people, except that the "place" where the meeting is held is online.
So:
1) What if we started with a single scheduled chat once a week, to gauge the interest. Would you be interested?
2) What if it was on Wednesday nights at 6PM Pacific time, 9PM east coast time, would this be an OK time to try it?
We should expect turnout to be small at first. Once people read messages in the forum about what happened, it might begin to grow.
Who likes this idea?
