1st Annual Dry Eye Zone Online Conference

[deep_dry_eye]

Hello DEZ everywhere, I am proposing we have our 1st annual DEZ online conference.

Who?

• You!

What (will we discuss)?
I propose each member can volunteer for a formal 10-20 min presentation (w/ slides), with topics such as:

• Diseases (MGD, Sjogren's, etc..)
• Treatments (Topical Azithromycin, Xiidra, Restasis, LipiFlow, IPL, serum, Prokera, etc...)
  • Your experience
  • Research literature
  • Anecdotal evidence
• Management of the Disease (i.e., mental health, family, scelerals, etc...)
• Upcoming and experimental treatment
• Open Panel
  • We can have a moderated Q&A session, maybe we can even invite some experts like Dr Laura Periman to join us online etc...
• You decide!

Where?

• Online! Maybe we can do a Google Hangouts or Skype call, we need an online platform that can support many users.

Why?

• Let us share knowledge and resources
• Let us support each other
• Let us get to know each other

When?

• Let's create an online poll and find a time good for every1, I suggest we target approx 2 months from now.

[Milo007]

Above all we need a real time chat facility to begin with. There's no provision for even a one to one chat and continuing a discussion over private messages or through posts disrupts the tempo of the discussion. It would be great if we have a live chat facility in this forum.

[pharmacy91]

I completely agree. A live chat would be so helpful for a lot of us members, particularly in getting support and advice, as many of us don't know someone else in person, who suffers from this condition.

[deep_dry_eye]

We can setup a discord channel? I believe that's free to setup.

[Milo007]

We can setup a discord channel? I believe that's free to setup.

What's a discord channel?

[Rebecca Petris]

Love all these ideas! Let me know anything I can do.

Re live chat: We used to have this in years past. I had forgotten all about it! TDEZ Admin Can I ask you to look into this, I don't think vBulletin has something native but there's got to be something compatible at least? We had a wonderful chat tool back in the beginning of time from 37Signals that I loved. (Interface was very similar to Basecamp's campfire.)

[Guest]

Love all these ideas! Let me know anything I can do.

Re live chat: We used to have this in years past. I had forgotten all about it! TDEZ Admin Can I ask you to look into this, I don't think vBulletin has something native but there's got to be something compatible at least? We had a wonderful chat tool back in the beginning of time from 37Signals that I loved. (Interface was very similar to Basecamp's campfire.)

I'll make it a project for this week to see what I can come up with.

What's a discord channel?

Discord is a free to use online chat software, though it is aimed at online gaming it's pretty easy to use. You can set up public and private channels, add friends and even do voice chat. It's probably overkill on features for our purposes but it's pretty solid and.. free.

What we're probably looking for though is something we can tie into vBulletin so you can use your forum username to log into.

[Guest]

Love all these ideas! Let me know anything I can do.

Re live chat: We used to have this in years past. I had forgotten all about it! TDEZ Admin Can I ask you to look into this, I don't think vBulletin has something native but there's got to be something compatible at least? We had a wonderful chat tool back in the beginning of time from 37Signals that I loved. (Interface was very similar to Basecamp's campfire.)

Ha! The reason why the chat from 37Signals looks like Basecamp's campfire is because 37Signals is now Basecamp! Who knew?

So it looks like the popular vBulletin chat is CometChat.. we can discuss options when you have time. At first glance it appears slim pickings for vBulletin integration though. Will keep looking.

Just to throw my own two pence in here, I think an online conference is a great idea.

[Rebecca Petris]

Oh wow I almost lost sight of this!

TDEZ Admin If I remember right at some point I think you said the chat for vBulletin was really expensive?

I don't know anything about the other platforms, but just by way of doing something that we could try out, I've made a chatroom on our company's Basecamp. Brent, it's a project titled Dry Eye Zone Chat." Looks like we can invite anyone so long as we have an email address and a first name or handle, so if we just know which members log in, you/I/Chaidie can look up emails and invite them.

If you care to give it a whirl... anyone who wants to participate can just say so in this thread. Then one of us can send you a link that will let you log in. We could schedule a time to chat about the conference idea for example...deep_dry_eye

[Nevil]

Rebecca Petris : I would like to join this conference. Please add me whenever it gets scheduled.