At Advantage Labs, we host a variety of participatory Drupal learning opportunities. Our weekly Lab Hours sessions have become particularly popular and effective at creating a community skill-sharing environment.

The main Lab Hours concept is to bring together a group of people, developers and online community managers, to work on their Drupal sites in a collaborative support environment. At the outset of the session, each person identifies a topic or question or task they are focusing on. Then Advantage Labs and attendees group up to help everyone accomplish their goals. At the end of each 2-hour session, we go back around the room to summarize what was learned and accomplished.

Until last week we were keeping track of tasks and accomplishments in a particularly non-dynamic fashion -- ye olde dry erase whiteboard.

One of our members suggested we try an online collaborative whiteboard service to enhance session note taking. We tossed caution (and dry erase markers) to the wind and set up an Etherpad whiteboard page for our regular Wednesday Lab session. It was a great success that is still building as we explore the options for using the online whiteboard to extend the value of sessions beyond the in-person experience. This is especially important as our members attend Lab Hours weekly as part of our Catalyst and Alliance support programs.

Here are some the things we're trying:

• setting up a session whiteboard the day before a session to allow attendees to post their goals in advance -- shortens pre-meeting task discussion, allows pre-session interaction (and problem solving), gives potential attendees a taste of what they could be learning if they attend
• posting links to resources and attendees' sites -- a common complaint was that the great work people are doing and the many resources discovered at sessions were not available after the session or at all for people who could not attend
• keeping pages live to allow us to refer to or update a session's notes -- building institutional memory and reducing repetitive research
• using Etherpad's online chat feature to enable remote attendance for both question asking and skill-sharing -- discovered by accident, now a new dimension for our sessions

The list could go on.

It's not a revolutionary concept -- I know online whiteboards are in use fairly widely. In fact, I discovered Etherpad while working with Drupal documentation team members on a collaborative re-write of several d.o handbook pages a while back. But, I have not seen this utilized as a tool for organizing and extending the value of live user group or training sessions.

If you're interested in trying out a service, here's why we chose Etherpad specifically:

• we already had some familiarity with using it making it easy to just start
• the code is now open source -- while etherpad.com is going away as a service (bought by Google), others have taken the code and have set up hosting services (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etherpad for details); we're close to setting up our own hosted instance on our web servers to provide the service to our clients
• simple, easy to use interface, handles enough simultaneous users who don't need to log in or have an account
• features like chat, custom URL creation for pages, and HTML export allow us to use the service beyond just collaborative notetaking

I'd love to hear from other organizers who are utilizing similar tools for their events. In the meantime, feel free to check out our evolving Lab Hours session notes on our site: http://www.advantagelabs.com/. Click on a link in the "from the lab" block or visit our Lab page.