Sept. 1, 2024
The Forum’s e-blasts have been suspended until further notice while Facilitator Steve Johnston focuses on 12 hours of rest daily and riding the unpredictable seas of chemotherapy.
The e-blast containing names of speakers for Tuesday, usually sent Sundays, will be suspended. Find that information on the Forum’s website here.
The e-blast sent after Tuesday’s meeting has, since January 2022, summarized the meeting, included a link to a video of the proceedings, and included updates to the Forum’s annoucements file, and it too will be suspended. Meeting summaries will be found in this list as they become available. The most recent lists of announcements will always be found here. Regular consumers of this material will immediately notice the big change: The publication of both meeting info and announcements has regularly occurred on Tuesday night. It will be nice when the Forum can return to that schedule.
Johnston will continue to cut back on nonessentials that have gone into Forum meetings. If over the next weeks you miss something and would like to bring it back, please volunteer with Jackie Edwards Walton, Laura McClettie, or Ché Abdullah, who has already begun doing camera work for Forum livestreams.
And speaking of livestreams: Sometimes they work, sometimes not. Frequent outages in August across city office sites were blamed on an ATT work stoppage throughout the Southeast. But further investigation apparently has identified the primary problem: The capacity of City of Charlotte digital infrastructure linked to ATT has not kept pace with increased use of the Internet by just about every city employee. Increasing such capacity is essentially a budgetary issue so it may be far harder to fix than to understand.
Since the Forum moved its meetings to the Belmont Center in 2016, Forum livestreams have been dependent on the city’s internet capacity. When the livestream quit Aug. 27, backup camcorders not connected to the Internet were already running and, while it took days, the Forum could piece together a video of the event despite the outage, and at least post the video on the Forum’s website.
The Sept. 3 livestream did not fail, as it frequently had throughout August. How long will it be before people interested in Forum meetings can once again depend on being able to listen in to the livestream? The Sept. 10 livestream collapsed three times. Thank you, dear users, for your patience.