** ANNOUNCEMENT ** : the NAS helpline is closing from 19th may

How about we whomp up our own zoom based helpline?

I'm a member of an inventor's group and we are currently collaborating online using zoom.to build a novel tabletop nuclear fusion device. We've found that we can maintain a 24/7 connection between two people (or one monitoring the apparatus from a safe distance! (only joking..) and we can extend multi people meetings indefinteley by means of rotating between identities. 

I'd envision maybe a panel of those of us who think we may have tools to share with others working several zoom identities between us?  On the aspergers "meetup" group they are going through organisers pretty fast, because (of course) we all have much more problems hitting a deadline like a pre-arranged zoom meeting, than we do reaching out when it suits US.

A zoom helpline run by volunteers, (who can allocate a computer to the zoom helpline, so as it can be kept monitored during your "shift" even if you need to have a zoom convo with someone else, like I certainly will as soon as me or one of the other guys produces neutron flux this week).could possibly work...

We'd need a list of "spergs with specialities", to form the panel, so if you find yourself out of your depth, you don't have to fob 'em off, or wing it. I would bet my *** that the majority of us turned out to be really helpful and good at the job, to be honest.

Any takers? (Please no, :c) I love having ideas, not so keen on having to follow though with the work when I have a good one!)_  

Doesn't zoom forcibly terminate the meeting after its been running a good while longer than it was scheduled?

After several days, yes!

The loophole seems to be, one host, one extra participant = endless meeting, ended only when zoom detects a serious level of inaction. Observing a workbench on which a spectrum analyser is displaying a constantly changing picture seems to be enough... As soon as you add an extra person the 40 minutes comes into play. Even if that extra person is your second laptop running on your local network. We were hoping to use one laptop to stream the readout from the analyser on one screen and view the apparatus on another using two zoom identities & two machines but then the endless meeting feature disappeared, and we have really been enjoying that.

Psychologically speaking, it's been a weird experience, it's like my friend is lodging in my workshop, and appearing form time to time, where in actual fact he is in another country! He seemed to be going pretty stir crazy as well being in lockdown without a life partner or cat, so it gets him out of his isolation and into my workshop/smoking area.

It's all been totally free of cost or anything but the minimum registration. I also use it occasionally to make recordings for other purposes simply by launching my own "chat", hitting record, then ending teh session when I've finished. Zoom then neatly compiles and spits out an MP4 after you close the session... 

By using a cheap usb video in device, and a cheap 8 channel security DVR which has a video output compatible with the usb device, you can then have multiple selectable camera angles, videostreams etc, which make collaboration even more flexible,although the zoom image is quite low res, so you can't go mad with the picture inpicture feature.  

I think you'd need to pay to schedule a 24 hour meeting anyway. (roughly 120£/y which works out at about 33p/day) And if you are paying for it I don't see the issue with getting the most of the service.

The real issue is staffing anything 24/7 is hugely expensive. And the autism helpline gets so many calls it needs a queueing system at peek times. Something text based and non live would be far better. You can arrange a team to respond outside of peek times, assign responding to difrent enquiaryes to multiple team members based on background knowledge. Where appropriate you can have template responses for common enquiries with an invitation to write back if there isn't enough detail in the template.

I think you'd need to pay to schedule a 24 hour meeting anyway. (roughly 120£/y which works out at about 33p/day) And if you are paying for it I don't see the issue with getting the most of the service.

The real issue is staffing anything 24/7 is hugely expensive. And the autism helpline gets so many calls it needs a queueing system at peek times. Something text based and non live would be far better. You can arrange a team to respond outside of peek times, assign responding to difrent enquiaryes to multiple team members based on background knowledge. Where appropriate you can have template responses for common enquiries with an invitation to write back if there isn't enough detail in the template.