Virtual Meetings & Competitions
With the Corona virus pandemic, we will not be able to use the Cokesbury Village facility, nor meet as a club anywhere else. Therefore, instead of meeting in person, we will be holding all of our club meetings and competitions virtually, via web Zoom meetings. The competitions will follow a slightly different format: they will be judged online (but not live) by the panel of judges before the Monday night meeting. At the meeting, we will only announce the scores and show the images, so we don’t have to wait for judges to make up their minds. On the second competition night of the month, we will have our Critique Only section where judges will provide critique and feedback to submitted images. This should work well with our online meetings, as everyone will be able to see the images clearly on their own computer or tablet, and we should have enough time for thorough critiques.
We have already started with offering a few high-quality webinars over the summer and have more lined up for the 2020/21 DPS season. And we will have other meetings online as well. While it is disappointing not to be able to meet in person, the Zoom meetings at least allow us to connect, see each other and communicate. And there is one benefit: some members are located too far away to make the in-person meetings, but they can finally join our meetings online!
About using Zoom: Early on, when Zoom suddenly became a household name, there were some security concerns reported in the news and on social media. These concerns primarily relate to default settings for Zoom meetings that allow anyone to join meetings and to share their screen. Zoom has addressed these settings and will continue to improve their security and privacy settings. The meetings for DPS all have passwords enabled (encoded in the link) and do not allow participants to share their screen unless given permission by the host.
If you do not already have the Zoom client, you will be prompted to download and install it when you try to connect the first time. As that may take a bit of time and may require a reboot, you are strongly encouraged to install it before the virtual competition. You can install Zoom from https://zoom.us/download . Please note: it is best if your computer or tablet has a web camera and microphone/speaker, as that will allow you to fully participate in the meetings. However, they are not strictly necessary (and you can always turn your camera off and mute your microphone).
You can find the link to join a DPS meeting in the Event Calendar on the web site. Feel free to invite me (peter@forster.us) or Gary Altoonian (garyaltoonian@gmail.com) for a quick test meeting or send me a note to invite you. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!
Peter Forster
DPS IT Director