Monday, I sent out 49 emails asking potential mentors, mostly
executives, to consider taking a SEED Engineering mentoring program
participant for their mentee for the six month 15 January-15 June 2007 term.
So far, 9 have accepted that invitation. Our newest SEED mentors (some
of whom have served as mentors in prior SEED terms) include a Vice
President, 2 Distinguished Engineers, and 2 Directors. They are based
in Beijing China, California, Colorado, Hamburg Germany, and New Mexico.
I hope to get at least half of this term’s participants matched before
Sun’s winter break week starts.
SEED just had its regular monthly phone in meeting. Today’s speakers were
a panel from Sales speaking on “The View from the Field”. Tim Van Loan, a
2003-2004 SEED participant and Sun Sales executive based in San Francisco
put together the panel.
The topic was popular, with 52 people calling in from all over the USA plus
Canada, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Texas,
and elsewhere.
Phone in meetings work best when people who are not speaking
put their phones on mute. Today, everyone was good and the sound quality
was excellent. It is worst when someone puts the phone in call on hold and
everyone has to listen to their bad “hold music” until we give up and restart
the call. Second worst phone in behavior is when a caller is not on mute and
has a noisy background. Listening to someone wash dishes or shout at their
dog while trying to hold a business call is miserable.
KatysBlog 
Funny how you single out Texas in the second paragraph. Despite what some folks might wish, Texas is a part of the USA. 🙂
Hey Katy – thanks, really enjoyed the call – much appreciated!
Never having participated in many lots-of-people conference calls (despite having working with sites all across the world, I’ve never really had more than 5 lines in different timezones call in at once) Something I found on calls like this one, is that it’s hard to answer a question like “Who else is on the call?” without worrying about speaking at the same time as someone else, and cutting them off.
Is there any way to give each different line “the floor” in a round-robin fashion when doing introductions ? (perhaps Meeting Central has some way around that particular problem ?) That’d be a nice touch when dealing with many folks across different locations. Shared VNC, with a single icon representing “the floor” comes to mind, but I’m not sure VNC is sophisticated enough to give different cursors individual identities…
Anyway, look forward to next month’s call – thanks again!