Brenda Bartholic writes with this interesting news. “We finally executed our round the world joint meeting and I submitted a newsletter article to the District to share with others. It took a lot of collaboration and technical investigations. It was very exciting although we did have some minor quality issues with the video and the room we were in was very small. We also learned about various meeting traditions from another culture. Very stimulating!”
In early December, the ATPCO Avi-Orators Toastmaster club (1157824) took an amazing ‘journey’ to Shanghai, China. We had a splendid joint meeting with the Infosys Shanghai Toastmaster Club (1070469). It took several months of various alternatives to work out the logistics of having 2 clubs almost 7,500 miles apart with a 13 hour time difference get together to advance their communication and leadership goals. After much collaboration, it finally materialized on the icy Washington morning of December 9, 2009. Over 30 Shanghai Toastmasters stayed into the evening after a long day at work to meet from 8:30-10pm. The Washington Toastmasters crowded into the Infosys Reston office starting at 7am for the joint video meeting from 7:30-9am. Each club had a Toastmaster and shared several key roles. They followed the traditional agenda with a speaker from each club and evaluators. In addition, they shared Table Topics, challenging each other across the miles to answer questions related to their relevant theme of Disaster 2012. There were occasional exchanges of friendly humor between the two clubs which made the event even more memorable. Thanks to Infosys for providing the facilities on both ends to make this happen!
ATPCO is currently working with Infosys and through their business collaboration discovered another joint leadership opportunity in the shared Toastmaster experience. With the world getting smaller and smaller these days, opportunities to share between diverse cultures opens us to many possibilities. This was a grand success and one that we hope to repeat.
