L to R: Levi, webchickbot, and hijoy1987.

Today at #rdcHQ the SVG Track had their first meetup, and it was a Rural Design Collective reunion with second-year mentee Christopher Garcia joining us virtually from Modesto, CA. Our first order of business was to do a little technology research for the rest of the crew by troubleshooting the state-of-the-art with Skype Group Video Chat. Essentially, we wanted to set up an environment where we could use screen sharing with an open video or audio feed simultaneously. This appears to not be possible in the latest versions of Skype for Mac and Windows even with a group subscription, and the video is quite choppy on a Mac when in Group mode. It is unclear if this is a platform-specific problem as Skype support for the Mac appears to be a bit behind what it is for Windows. We will be researching this in more detail; however, we may need an alternative app for our remote sessions until this feature is less buggy.

Hello, World!

Without further ado, we discussed the Title 24 project and how to best approach the material from a learning and productivity standpoint. We’ll be using an open source tool to organize the project (more information on that as the program progresses), and our goal is to update in real-time and share our knowledge and resources as we go to benefit ourselves as well as others. We are also determining the best tool(s) for the project. We believe Inkscape is at a point in development now that it can be used on a project of this nature – so we know that will be in our toolkit. It is highly likely that we will use a combination of tools as we begin working on some of the more complicated illustrations in the advanced levels.

For now, we are getting our feet wet with Worksheet 1 – Hello, World!