As the poll (http://www.anthroaquatic.com/forum/index.php?topic=476.0) has declared, we will start having a set topic in one of our Coffeehouse Chats. The question is, which one will have that topic?
Vote now! Voting will end next Wednesday, 12/10/14
I vote on Thursday’s having the set topic.
We already do a lot of casual chatting during the day, and besides that, it’s the only one I can attend >.>
I didn’t vote on whether we should have topics in the first place, because I wasn’t sure yet how I felt about it. But I’m starting to think that they would be a good idea. As such, I voted for Tuesday, because that’s the day that I’m most often able to attend. However, what I’m really voting for is topics in general – I’m just doing it too late.
X3 Yay topics! Better late than never! And maybe we can have a revote on how many days to include them once we get a feel of how well it runs for the one chat 
I’d kind of like to see how the discussion works with a topic before choosing a date. Some days may be better for discussions and the Thursday chats haven’t even happened yet.
That’s a really good point. We could try a rotation thing, where one week the chosen topic is for Thurs chat, the next week it’s for Sat chat, and the last week it’s for Tues chat, or something of the sort. That should give us a good control and comparison for which chat it works best on, and if they would want it on more than one or none of the chats.
I think rotation is going to be a little too much to keep up with. It’s already kind of a strain, logistics-wise, having 3 chats a week, so I don’t want to have the added hassle of switching the formats around from one week to the next.
Voting for this ends in a couple of hours. However, looking at the past three chats, things have gone quite well in each with intoducing a topic for discussion after the check-ins are done. Maybe we could go in that direction for a little while and see how things go?
Well, the poll showed a pretty clear preference for still having some kind of open chat. I don’t see the point of doing a poll if we’re then going to completely ignore the results and have topics with all 3.
We also hadn’t tested the topic idea out before we started polling. They still were less, “we are going to discuss this topic today,” and more, “this subject seems interesting, any thoughts?”. It’s something to keep in mind. I’ll start working on having set topics in the Thursday chat, and it’s up to you and Dwale if you want to introduce an idea in your chats for discussion (again, rather than have a strict topic). I personally quite like how the last Thursday chat flowed, and will keep utilizing the topic idea in that way.