Group Leadership Project: PART A

Our group decided to use Google+ Hangouts in order to facilitate synchronous group meetings.  G+ Hangouts is simple to setup and use, given everyone involved already had a Gmail account.  G+ Hangouts allowed us to record our session and auto-magically placed it in my YouTube account for everyone to view and embed (called Hangouts On-Air).  The audio and video quality was good throughout both sessions.  One of the most interesting features is a snap-in that allows everyone in the session (up to 10 people) see and edit one or more Google Docs files simultaneously in the same window.  It also had a screen sharing feature that allows anyone to share their screen (or window).  This feature isn't limited to one person, each person can share, and their screen replaces the image of their camera, and every participant can choose which screen (or camera image) they are viewing.

There were only a few minor drawbacks or annoyances with G+ Hangouts.  The screen sharing does not stream out to the On-Air recording.  This seems to be a glaring omission in the On-Air feature that could be resolved easily. Some of our group members had occasional connection problems, but reloading their browsers typically fixed them.  Lastly, I attended one session on a wifi connection, and my video and audio were noticeably degraded compared to the other people in the session.  

Overall, G+ Hangouts is a free and easy tool to use to facilitate synchronous meetings with a lot of features that benefit working groups (rather than merely chat groups).  Our recordings are below:

Our Brainstorm session came directly on the heels of the "Dry Run" testing of Google+ Hangouts for the Web-Video Conferencing Lab, and therefore the first video is over an hour long.  Brainstorming begins ~29:00 in.

We decided to hold weekly meetups through G+, and our second meeting is here:

UPDATE:  Full group meeting: 

(why do i look like I'm complaining in the still?)