You’ve spent the last fifty-five minutes of the meeting capturing information on the whiteboard, but you’re about to lose the room. People are already lined up outside the door, and you know the first thing they’ll do is erase the board. Or perhaps you’ve been discussing sensitive issues, and erasing the board is something you need to do before giving up the room. What becomes of the information?
Teams often rely on a designated scribe to take notes and email them out or post them on a Wiki. If that’s as far as you go, you risk information loss or corruption. Scribing is hard, especially when things are moving fast and people are drawing diagrams. A good way to mitigate this risk is to take and post pictures. That means having a camera at hand. A working camera.
I went through a few months of “O.K., who has the team camera?” and “Oh nuts, who has fresh batteries?” before heading off to the local office supply store to buy a 3 megapixel Nikon Coolpix. It’s lived in my pack for two years now, along with a set of spare rechargeable batteries (which get regularly rotated through the “to be charged” pile). 3mp is just at the limit for taking good whiteboard pictures. I’ve tried 2mp, but the results weren’t useable. The one problem is the flash, which tends to white out an area of the whiteboard, requiring either multiple shots or shooting off-center, which leads to odd looking results. If the room is well-lit, I can often get by without flash, but it’s risky.
Digital camera technology has advanced a bit since I bought the Nikon. Image stabilization and higher sensitivity sensors are now readily available for a quite reasonable amount of money. So, for my birthday this year, I arranged (by “honey, I emailed you a URL with an idea for a present, and it’s on Sale!”) to get a 6 megapixel Lumix DMC-LZ5. Image stabilization, plus greater scene control options in software to handle lighting and exposure, means better whiteboard pictures. (And better non-whiteboard pictures, of course.)
My wife got the Nikon, and our daughter got my wife’s old Canon, which is the perfect sturdy camera for a 9 year old.