Cohousing-L Mailing List: shared email accounts for Coho business

[Barbara Scott (bls2753]

Hi.  I am the team lead of eComITy (e-community IT team) at Washington
Commons (WC).  The community uses g-mail and Zoom.  Our community has
several Google groups - one for the entire community, and one for each
team.  People can use non-Google e-mails for the Google Groups, but such
members cannot edit any shared (via the Google group) Google document.
Such members can complete a Google form, which we use for community
surveys.  We do not share gmail accounts.

Recently the team reached out to several cohousing communities to get their
advice in implementing a community-paid for Zoom account.  The following is
what we decided to do:


   - use the Personal Meeting Room of the community-paid PRO Individual
   account ($149/1 yr), for General Meetings and team meetings.
   - use a feature called ‘Claim Host
   <https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/205172555-Using-your-host-key>’
   that allows team leads and General Meeting facilitators to be hosts of
   meetings without the account holder being present.  NOTE: if/when account
   holder joins the meeting, she/he can choose whether to 'Claim Host' or not.
   - share the Permanent Zoom Meeting Link and Host Key with team leads and
   facilitators, who will schedule their meetings on the WC Member calendar.
   - use the calendar consistently to alert teams of possible scheduling
   conflicts, and to provide opportunities for ‘ad-hoc meetings’ when no other
   meeting is on the calendar for that time.
   - pass along the Zoom link and Host Key to the new team leads when they
   change.
   - use the Social Team’s paid Zoom account for when two concurrent
   Washington Commons meetings are being held, if the Social team has not
   scheduled a meeting at the same time as the ‘concurrent meeting’.
   - Actions that the team leads and General Meeting facilitators who
   ‘Claim Host’ can take are: sharing the screen, starting/ending a recording,
   polling (only able to use polls that have been saved prior to the meeting),
   creating breakout rooms, ending the meeting, and muting users.

The only negative we have about the setup is that there is no way to
'share' the ownership of the account to prevent 'a single point of failure'
(hardware term applied to account owner). We've had the account up and
running now for over a month. About half of our teams and today's General
Meeting (11/13) facilitators (will) have used the new community-paid Zoom
account.  It seems to be going well.  After 3 months, we will survey the
community to see how it's going.

Please feel free to reach out with questions/comments.

Barbara Scott
Washington Commons, W. Sacramento, CA