Looking for Ideas to facilitate group communication on the road

[Mark Phillips]

Some feedback on the google voice idea....

A. I set up a new phone number and tried to add other phone numbers for
forwarded texting. The only hitch is that the new phone number requires a
verification code be sent from an sms on that phone. It makes sense, or
someone would use google voice to spam everyone. It looks like I get a
different verification code every time I add a new phone number.

It does not seem practical to have all the club members get a verification
code and respond to a text message from google voice.

B. I don't see a way for someone to send a text to a smaller group than
everyone on the list. I have two teams, so the 12U folks don't want to see
the 14U texts, and vice versa.

But the google voice number is a great idea. I can give out that number and
say - "use this to send sms to everyone".

I was thinking of google voice forwarding the sms to an email account, and
then have a script of some kind parse the email and send the message back to
everyone's cell phone using the email to sms gateways that the carriers
provide. I could then have a tag in the sms "to:xxxxx" where xxxx could be
one person, and the email parser could find it and send the messages
appropriately. Adds a delay, but I don't see another solution.

To restate the problem: How do I provide a group of people a way to
send/reply to sms messages to anyone in the group, or a subset of the group,
or one person without relying on any special cell phone capability (such as
group sms or email)?

Thanks for any other suggestions you may have!

Mark

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:48 AM, Mark Phillips <mark at phillipsmarketing.biz>wrote:

> Bob,
>
> Interesting idea....I will give it a try. Thanks!
>
> Mark
>
> On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Bob Elzer <bob.elzer at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>  Have you thought of getting a google voice number, and adding everyone's
>> cell phone number to it, but just use the number for texting
>>
>> that way one text would go to all phones.
>>
>> There may be some issues to work out, but it might work
>>
>>
>>
>>  ------------------------------
>> *From:* plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us [mailto:
>> plug-discuss-bounces at lists.plug.phoenix.az.us] *On Behalf Of *Mark
>> Phillips
>> *Sent:* Sunday, June 05, 2011 12:32 PM
>> *To:* Phoenix Linux Users
>> *Subject:* Looking for Ideas to facilitate group communication on the
>> road
>>
>> This group always has great suggestions for my odd requirements, so here I
>> go again....;-)
>>
>> My two club softball teams are going to out of town for nationals at the
>> end of June (~26 families). (We might even make ESPN...) We need a way to
>> send messages to each other, and as a group. Up to this point, I have been
>> running a private group email list that everyone can use to send and receive
>> emails for the group. But not everyone has Internet or email on their phone,
>> so the group email list is not the best option for everyone. My android
>> phone can send a text message to a group, so I can handle the issue of
>> schedule changes. But, not everyone's phone on the two teams can send a
>> group text, which makes those impromptu 'team lunch' difficult for someone
>> in the group to schedule, unless I become the group sms operator, which is
>> **not** something I want to do! I am wondering if there is some open source
>> technology that can help us....
>>
>> My requirements
>> 1. Send sms to a whole group, part of a group, or individually
>> 2. Work on low end cell phones - ie no Internet plan or email
>> 3. Does not require a lot of setup, either for me or for each person
>> going. The people on the trip are not techies, but parents of 11-15 year old
>> softball players (and the players as well).
>> 4. Free, or really low cost as I only need it for ~10 days.
>>
>> I have a Debian server on Linode for our web site, so I could add some
>> more software....
>>
>> I thought of these ideas:
>> 1. pass out a cell phone list to everyone. That solves individual sms
>> messages, but not group/sub group messaging for those who don't have that on
>> their phone
>> 2. twitter - maybe a private group? I have not used twitter before, but I
>> will have challenges getting everyone to sign up for an account.
>> 3. some other sms micro-blog app on my own server?
>> 4. Face to face communication.....how old fashion!
>> 5. Phone trees......from my experience, only works in an emergency.
>>
>> I am focused on sms only because it seems to be available to every player
>> and parent on the trip. I am open to any other suggestions y'all may have!
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Mark
>>
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>
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