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The West Easton Council Meeting was held last night using the Zoom online conferencing platform, and it served us well.

While I had faith that it could be done, there were those nagging thoughts that something would go wrong.

Since I was promoting its use, and would be hosting the meeting, if it was a **** show, the responsibility would be mine alone, and provide fodder to at least one person who would joyously bray about its failure.

Earlier in the day high winds came through. As I watched electrical lines being rocked back and forth I expected a power outage from a fallen tree somewhere. That would have ended the meeting before it started.

I was thinking the link to the meeting would have a problem. During a previous test of Zoom this actually happened. Nobody, including myself, could get into the scheduled meeting. I had to create a new meeting and send out new invitations on the fly.

Since I would be hosting the meeting, I had to know how to use the “share” feature. That’s a feature where I can display items from my own computer for all attendees to see.

Initially, in the test meeting, I was doing it the hard way. Trying to access each image individually wasn’t working too well. It was cumbersome, time consuming, and leaving me with a dozen open windows on my desktop.

I finally figured out the easiest way was to create a .pdf with everything in it I wanted to display, and having it open on my desktop when the meeting started. As I scrolled through the .pdf at home, attendees could see the page changes, as well.

Would my explanations of how to access the meeting, download the Zoom .exe file, using a password to enter, testing microphones, and other information be enough to ensure everyone who wanted to attend, could? This information I put into the responses to invitation requests, and apparently everyone made it in, including four from the public.

Not that there weren’t any snafus.

While not required, I intended to record the meeting using Zoom. I even advised attendees to keep their webcams off, knowing that when the recording was published and available on the internet, there was a good possibility that some troll would screen capture an image and create a childish meme with it.

However, with all the commotion of admitting people from the waiting room, checking if everyone’s mics were working properly, and calling people on my phone, who hadn’t arrived, I forgot to start the recording until about 20 minutes into the meeting.

Not a big deal. The recording missed the pledge, roll call, and approval of checks.

Then, when Council went into Executive Session, I turned off the recorder. When we exited the session I turned it back on.

That was the big mistake, as I found out later when I contacted Zoom, asking them where the rest of the meeting was. I could only recover the portion where we came out of Executive Session.

Apparently, turning the recorder “off” during the the meeting and then turning it back on wipes everything previously recorded.

Zoom’s Help Desk informed me that I should have “paused” the recording, not stopped it.

While a meeting is in progress Zoom only retains the latest recording of the meeting. If a host ends a recording and restarts a new one in the same meeting, only the newest recording is retained. “One recording per meeting”

It would have been nice if they mentioned that on their training videos. I suggested they add that bit of information to their website, or next training video.

Now I know, if there’s a, “next time.” I hope not.

Thankfully, there were residents in attendance, so any accusations of a “secret” meeting being held can be brushed aside as another, “Conspiracy Theory.” Minutes of the meeting, as required, were taken.