We are a club that, due to geographical reasons, cannot meet
as much as possible. We would like to explore the
possibility of conducting meetings online, in a private chat
room. However, we do not know where to begin in regards to
this. Are there any websites that we can set up a private
chat room in order to conduct our meetings, with only those
invited allowed to enter? Thanks for the help.

Stewart Custis writes:
> We are a club that, due to geographical reasons, cannot meet
> as much as possible. We would like to explore the
> possibility of conducting meetings online, in a private chat
> room. However, we do not know where to begin in regards to
> this. Are there any websites that we can set up a private
> chat room in order to conduct our meetings, with only those
> invited allowed to enter? Thanks for the help.

http://groups.yahoo.com is a reasonable choice, but I'm sure others
will pipe up about IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and AIM (AOL Instant
Messenger).

My personal recommendation is setting up conference calls and using
e-mail for more deliberative stuff, e.g. research reports. Chat rooms
are not ideal communication media, because they require people to type
quickly. We at bivio use a combination of e-mail and phone
conferences. We use our own "club" communication area on bivio.com
for message lists and file sharing.

Cheers,
Rob

Hi Stewart,

We have a chat room on our homepage here at Bivio. It's just a link to
www.network54.com. Network54 provides free chat rooms and polling booths.
Pretty nice addition to our tools.

Lynn Ostrem, Minneapolis
Crow River Investment Club
www.bivio.com/crowriver

I think using a chat room as a forum would be
less-than-ideal. For instance, there are several members of
our club that just wouldn't participate - they don't use
computers as part of their day-to-day lives, they don't type
well, and they find the whole idea of chat rooms kind of
scary.

I think you would have to have an extremely computer
literate group for a successful chat-room meeting. And, if
all members are comfortable in the milieu, you *might* (just
might, not necessarily do) have a too hemogenous group. One
of the benefits of an investment club is diversity of
opinion, which results from diversity of background,
ethnicity, and life-style.

I think using a chat room as a forum would be
less-than-ideal. For instance, there are several members of
our club that just wouldn't participate - they don't use
computers as part of their day-to-day lives, they don't type
well, and they find the whole idea of chat rooms kind of
scary.

I think you would have to have an extremely computer
literate group for a successful chat-room meeting. And, if
all members are comfortable in the milieu, you *might* (just
might, not necessarily do) have a too hemogenous group. One
of the benefits of an investment club is diversity of
opinion, which results from diversity of background,
ethnicity, and life-style.