hi this is Keef Swinson from Weaver again and today I'd like to make a short presentation on how you can use Weaver instead of using an email discussion list in order for accomplishing asynchronous decision-making now if you've ever tried to carry on a conversation through email you know it can be quite a challenge you send a message to a bunch of people and you're hoping that everybody doesn't reply also that everybody gets the response if people join the discussion later sometimes there's multiple copies of emails going around they get added to one of the lists but they don't get added to all of them it's very hard to add people if people don't want to be part of it they have to send a message to everybody saying leave me off and the summary of all of the email is kept in these email messages that are being passed back and forth and there's many many copies of each message very hard to find the particular message you're looking at so we looked at this and we decided there's got to be a better way let's show you how you would achieve the same thing and hold a discussion online through email and unweave err in order to accomplish decision-making asynchronously so I'm assuming you're familiar enough to know that in Weaver you've got a workspace and when you want to have an online discussion with a bunch of people you use the topics capability so topics allows you to address a particular Kopp topic put it out there for discussion so let's say for example we need to decide how to repair the garden in our community I want to get people together I want to discuss it and get some ideas going and hopefully to come to some decisions on what needs to be done so it's very easy to create a topic just type so there are introduced the topic with a little bit of description here and I can create a draft of that very simply while it's in draft mode I can go back and edit it a few times but the most important thing is the post option here by clicking post I'm making this topic available for people to have a discussion about and when I do that I specify who I want to be part of the analysts now it's pre filled this in with all of the normal members of this workspace but you can then change that you can actually remove people and you can you can add someone and you can get the right group of people here that you want to have the discussion with when that's all set hit post and send email and this will send an email to all of those people so each person that you put on the subscription list whilst receive an email message that looks like that it introduces the topic it gives you the subject here but there's an important thing about this they're invited to make a comment and by clicking make a comment they're presented with this forum and the important thing about this is they don't have to be logged in to do this they don't need to even be a member of the workspace if you've invited them as part of the discussion that's all they need and they can make a simple response here so they enter their comment like anybody normally would fill it all in and when they've got what they want to say they click send that comment is then emailed around to everybody that's on the subscriber list as well then people can read that and and then again reply directly using a button here so I put a reply in there like normal and I and I click send and all of these will be collected together this can be most easily seen if we say go to the full discussion so this brings us to the title page I'm not logged in currently so let me login and here we're gonna see the topic and we're gonna see all of the comments that were made as we went along so it's very easy to have a free-form discussion there's another thing and that is when it comes to making decisions you want to have a little bit of structure on it you want to be able to ask somebody something and get their input we do that with a proposal or with a round around is just for collecting input and then a proposal is is a specific thing so let me go ahead and do that I can make a proposal at any time so there's my proposal we should install a new garden shed and if I click post with email that will now get sent to everybody as a proposal they can respond to and there's these spaces here where everybody can respond again click 'save here my response is saved associated with me George Washington here might come along and give his opinion and these will all be collected here now you can go back and change your position if over time you see everybody else's you want to go change it you can then edit it everybody's allowed to change their position at any point in time but the point is that this represents their best position now you're looking at everybody you can look across everybody and see what you feel like the person that called the discussion or just call the proposal can then close it up and summarize everything when you choose close you have a place here to put in the summary and so that becomes part of the conversation you see what was originally prompted you see what everybody's position was on it and then you see what the final conclusion was and if this is a decision that's important for the group you can actually create a decision in the decision list very easily it's copied the text in here yes we should install a new garden shed click Save and this becomes now one of your decisions that are recorded in the decision area of the workspace so I hope that gives you a quick idea about how instead of using an email list you can actually discuss things and come to decisions with a group of people using email and using online at the same time and that you can use the round in the proposal feature to help collect people's opinions see where they stand help maybe persuade people to come to conclusion and basically to make asynchronous decisions
