Last week: people came and went during eight hours of VoIP Users Conference

This week: we had the largest simultaneous turnout on ZipDX.com wideband bridge, htting the limit of 50 participants. I've been on several Talkshoe conferences that had one hundred or more simultaneous conferences, but our average of the two bridges combined, Talkshoe and ZipDX is about 35-50. There were about 55 simultaneous callers on the two bridges last night.

Why this matters

We used to do this kind of thing in the 70's in Los Angeles on ham radio repeaters. We also used to get together for drinks and even parties and picnics, but that was easy since we were all in the same area. The gathering of people for the VUC is made of of callers from several continents: Countries include most of Eastern and Western Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, China, the Carribean...

I'm impressed that people take the time, their time, to come share ideas, knowledge, rumors and facts live each week. Subjects range from uber-geeky to why everyone picks on AT&T or a comparison of mobile handsets by those who own them. Authors, project leaders, programmers and hobbyists come together for the event and we look forward to occasions where we can meet in person. One of those was Astricon, last October. There's one coming up in Europe (AstriEurope, Paris in April) that I look forward to attending.

Community is everything

I've tried to make this kind of event happen in the world of wine, but I haven't been able to get the critical mass needed to keep it going. The VUC community is definitely sustainable and still growing. If you have any interest at all in telephony and other internet technologies, join us some time. Visit http://vuc.me/next for the next session, shown in your own time zone, or go to http://vuc.me for all the info on how to call in using VoIP, regular phone or Skype.