1. Regional Focus Group of the Americas and the Caribbean Bernie Connell CSU/CIRA

2. Brief History Organizers: CIRA, US NWS Training Branch, CIMSS, the International Desk at NCEP, COE in Costa Rica and Barbados First sessions: March 2004 Participation has varied from a few to over 40 for an individual session. Participants: Antigua, Argentina, Barbados, Bahamas, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Cayman, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Netherland Antilles, Nicaragua, Panamá, Peru, Paraguay, Republica Dominicana, Trinidad, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

3. Brief History Larger participation occurs with “events”: Face to Face training Significant weather event. Persistent participation enthusiasts students intern forecasters Recurring intermittent participants seasoned/experts

4. VISITview browser mode Teletraining and real-time collaboration tool Connects instructor(s) to many participants via Internet Voice over Internet - Yahoo Bi-lingual: English and Spanish http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/visitview/ Tom Whittaker

5. largest session: 40 users logged into VISITview, 30 users logged into Yahoo Messenger http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/training/rmtc/focusgroup.asp

6. KEYS TO SUCCESS  Motivation  Distribute the workload  Cooperation and Collaboration  Input – experts and users  Native Language  Build capacity International Activities

7. Motivation Organizers It’s a good thing to do. Learn weather outside “my” region Participants Participatory learning An easy way to communicate across boundaries –Physical, institutional, social

8. Distribution of workload Lead scheduler and information distributor Discussion leader Images and session material – real time available all the time. Session monitor Session transcriber

9. Results of Capacity Building Costa Rica put forth a proposal at UCR to replace aging RAMSDIS system Barbados has a focus group session and a Vlab co-chair

10. Side effects Public utilizes the online satellite imagery - RAMSDIS.

11. Recruiting/Revitalizing/ Restructuring People move on Technology evolves How do we engage the “experts” that are now out in the various countries ?

12. Links WMO Focus Group of the Americas and Caribbean http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/training/rmtc/focusgroup.asp VISIT http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/visit/

13. Thank You!