Our fall meeting will take place at the Durham Friends Meeting House, located at 532 Quaker Meeting House Road in Durham on Saturday, September 30. Registration will begin at 9:30 a.m. Our hospitality chair, Diane Hunt, will be preparing brunch and needs a feel for how many to expect. Please email any member of the board to let us know if you plan to attend in person. (Those email addresses are available on the about and email pages of this website.) We will send a reminder a few days before the meeting. We suggest that those attending bring a bag lunch. Please also bring paper and pen or pencil for the afternoon workshop.

There will be Zoom access available for members not able to attend in person or preferring to join us on line. The link will be sent to all current members on September 28 or 29.

Many of our newer members may not know that MPS has charged a registration fee for members and guests at in-person meetings to help with the costs of renting a facility and for the refreshments provided (most recently $12 per person). The board has voted to forgo that for the foreseeable future as we work out the details of hybrid meetings. There will, however, be a donation jar on the refreshment table for those wishing to help offset the cost of this meeting.

Here on the website we indicated that we would include a report of our first hybrid meeting in the July issue of the Stanza. Although that did not happen, we do want to share a report of that event. 

Twelve of us met in person at the Durham Meeting House and 8 others joined us on Zoom. All in all, it went well; however, there were several who experienced audio issues significant enough to make it a less than enjoyable experience for them. We truly regret that.

Because the OWL equipment was set up in the worship space, we were limited as to how things within the room could be arranged or rearranged. We’ll be meeting at the same place for our September meeting. Gus will check to see if we are at liberty to move the equipment to a smaller room. If not, please bear with us.

The plan is to purchase our own OWL equipment before our meeting in May 2024 and ensure that meetings are more user-friendly for Zoom participants by purchasing a large TV screen to use as a monitor for Zoom that can be put next to the space where physical attendees are sitting. This should help both visibility and audibility for everybody.

We sent a request for feedback to all who attended the meeting either in person or on Zoom. We were delighted that nearly everyone responded. Some good suggestions were offered.

• When people speak, it would be helpful if they’d say their name before doing so.
• We should provide a chance for all attendees to identify themselves.
• If people on Zoom would mute when not speaking, “speaker view” would work for those who prefer to use that. If you do not mute, any sound in the room where you are may cause your picture to appear on screen instead of the speaker.
• The host could mute everyone during extended times when the meeting is not actually in session.
• Someone really should be looking for and responding to the “hand up” signal on Zoom that indicates someone online wants to speak.
• The question was asked as to whether we could show the poems being read on screen.