Yes. Okay. Do you want us to all have our video off? So welcome everyone. Yes, please have your video off and please mute yourself or we can also mute you. Unfortunately, we are having some technical difficulties. So the host of this event, Terin, is having a little bit of problem connecting. So I'm her backup and I'm very much looking forward and honored to introduce you to Karla King, who will be our speaker today. And Karla, if you would like to take it from here and introduce the event, that would be wonderful. Sure, thank you to everybody for having me. Love at the Mechanics Institute. It's such a San Francisco institution. I recently took a position in business development at the San Francisco Writers Conference, but I've been a member of so many different writing groups over the years. And in 2001, in fact, my writer's group, it was very genre specific. We had so many great stories that we're getting published that we published our own anthology. This was way back in 2001 and this is so easy to do today. And I'm just showing you this to inspire you because this is what connection really gets you. We self-published it in 2001 and then sold it to New York Publishing House the next year. And I've had other small writing groups. I'm a member of, I started a virtual travel writing group just a few weeks ago when all this COVID-19 chaos came about because I felt like all of the travel writers, of which I'm one, as well as a how-to book author, are stuck now. So we have to write those books and articles that we promise ourselves that we would do. So I've also written memoirs on my travels and I have the self-publishing boot camp guides for authors, which is in its fifth edition coming out next week, if you can believe it. I can't believe, and I already see a sixth edition coming out in a year and a half. I'm sure it'll go forever. It's my project. So today, you can find me at KarlaKing.com and at selfpubbootcamp.com. And I just wanna talk about writing groups and creating virtual writing groups because it really is so easy. I love the way technology has kept us together during this time. I've always loved it because I am a traveler and I've had met so many people all over the world via tools like Facebook and Meetup and LinkedIn and even Twitter. So what I'd like to do is take you through the story of how I created this virtual travel writing group because I think you could be inspired to create your own in this way.  So I'm gonna show you how I do it and I'm gonna show you how simple it is just to do it more casually just with email and Zoom, for instance, okay? So I'm gonna share this screen. So when I decided to create a virtual writing group for travel writers, I created this homepage. Now I use a mailing list manager called ConvertKit so you can easily use MailChimp or Constant Contact or whatever and I just created this form to get people signed up so that I didn't have to maintain my own email list. Now you can also just maintain your own email list which is fine depending but I put the word out and I have a large network of travel writing friends and I have over a hundred people in this travel writers group right now. Now that doesn't mean that all hundred participate. The biggest number of people that we've had so far is 19. That said, we created, we had a discussion. First, I created a Facebook page for the group. So I created a group in Facebook and this may be a really easy way for you to manage your whole group, right? So it's very easy to create a group.  All right, and so I created the event in the events panel over here and put all the information for the Zoom meeting every Friday at 10 o'clock until December 18th of this year, right? And so people RSVP, right? Not everybody who signed up to be in the virtual travel writers group have joined the Facebook group, but that's okay. Not everybody uses Facebook. So I also created a questionnaire because I did want to get to know people. Now you may already have a writers group that you wanna offline, you know, offline online because we can't meet in person right now but you may want to recruit people as well. Maybe in your genre, whether it's mystery or memoir or sci-fi or magical realism or whatever it's nice to cast the web widely. So I created in forms. All you have to do is go to forms.google.com. They make it very easy for you to create a questionnaire that collects email addresses and you can ask all kinds of questions. You can make them required. There's a little button here that makes it required or not each question so that people who don't get through all of the questions are automatically filtered out, right? If they're not, you know, really in it enough they don't really want to enough they might just drop out during the questionnaire process which is good because you only want people who are committed, correct? And then in Google Docs, I created an FAQ and that's frequently asked questions. After we had that first meeting, the initial meeting with about, oh, I think 15 writers showed up and we talked about how we would run the group, you know, what was best for everybody. They kind of led the group and took the temperature on what kind of tools people were comfortable with and we set up, I had suggested Dropbox at first to document share and a lot of people were not comfortable with Dropbox because Dropbox is, can be, I think it's easy but a lot of people think it's complicated. So we upload our documents to a Google Doc, a folder and I can show you that. How to submit a document. So we have a folder that we, sorry, this just goes. Anyway, we have a folder and you can just drag your story into that folder online or you can paste in your story there. We've limited it to 1500 words. The group runs for two hours, 15 minutes each submission. We get through about six submissions each week. Some of us are pitching ideas which may take even just five or 10 minutes. Some of us are looking for help with query letters and this can be for books as well as for articles and newspapers, right? So really everything, we didn't wanna limit it to anything but we're all working on travel, whether it's travel articles, travel blog, travel memoir, right, I hope that makes sense. We also talked about feedback. Now, this group has turned out to be so wonderful and so kind and really respectful in their comments and their help. I found this writer's loft and I'll give you the URL to this, tips for giving and receiving criticism in the group and how to respectfully help people and how to respectfully receive criticism. This is very important, right? Because in writing, you're sharing your soul, right?  So oftentimes in writer's groups that aren't that great, you feel like the criticism is directed toward you and if that is happening, that is not your fault. It's the person who's critiquing and it's the leader's fault. So having somebody who knows how to run a writing group and who enforces respectful feedback is super, super important, okay? Now, I have another writing group here in California and we meet at the library every Monday but we can't do that anymore. So the leaders went to email and OneDrive. OneDrive is Microsoft's answer to Google Drive, right?  So that happens every Monday, also for two hours and the rules are about the same, 15 minutes each, six or so. Six or so pieces to critique. My Monday group has a half an hour free writing exercise with prompts every week as well and I don't have that with the virtual travel writing group. And there are a couple of tools, geeky tools that I wanna show you. One is beta books and this is, if you're writing books instead of stories, I know many of you are, beta books is a paid platform that allows you to upload your chapters and get feedback all in one place. And so you can invite your early readers and if everybody in your writers group joins this, you can all work on your book together. There's also another site called Scribophile which does somewhat the same thing. It's more targeted toward writing groups and for getting like creating a writing group. I would say that beta books is for peer if you're writing nonfiction. So for my self publishing bootcamp guide for independent authors, I used beta books and I invited people to critique inside beta books my guide. It doesn't cost them anything, right? It just costs me, I'm paying, I think $100 a year for this platform. And so this one is more for people who don't have writing groups and everybody who's on this platform pays. Okay, so that's pretty much the, I'll stop sharing now. That's pretty much the thumbnail sketch of how to create mechanically a virtual writing group. And I think that's enough for me to talk and start a discussion now if anybody wants to jump in with questions. Is that right? Oh my gosh, I hope I've actually been broadcasting all this time. Yes, you have been, it was wonderful. Anyone has any question? We have one question from RC. Could you elaborate on the differences between beta books and script for file a little bit? Sure, beta books is a platform where you would upload your book and it's in chapter format. So if you had 20 chapters, you'd upload those one by one to your book area. And so it works like this. Your book is here and the comments area is here. And it's super nice because in the case of my self publishing guide, I had Robin Cutler of Ingram Spark and Mark Cocher of Smashwords and all these professionals with all these different companies reviewing my book, but I did not want them to see each other's comments. I mean, I wanted them to feel free to say, oh, you got that part wrong all about this company and I didn't want them to have any consequences or competition inside of my book.  So there was no discussion. Yeah, there was no discussion, but I could turn it on so that with my other book with China Road Motorcycle Diaries, I've got the discussion area turned on. So basically kind of feed off of each other's comments and say, oh, yeah, I agree with that. I agree with what she said and yeah, here's maybe a solution. And so there are different ways that you can use it. So when I invite people to critique my book or my story inside beta books, it's free for them to do that. I pay for this platform, right? So I get to invite them in. But with the other platform, which I am not a member of, so I've just looked at it from the outside. From what I understand, people like it because you get, people who are in this site, they're looking for other writers and they're looking for feedback from other writers in different genres. So everybody in this platform, so your ecosystem is limited to who's in this platform. The platform is very large, right? So what I do with beta books and Google Docs is I bring my people to my book or my stories and inside the scribbophile platform, pretty sure that's just for people who pay for this service, okay? So maybe if you don't have a big platform yet, like you don't have early readers and I think it's really important to have early readers. I have a blog post on selfpubbootcamp.com on how to guarantee five star reviews on launch day and early readers, beta readers, critiques are the key to getting five star reviews because when you have people helping you with your story and improving your story and you're interacting with them in this fun way, this is actually called book marketing. But you're having fun doing it and you're doing it ahead of time, not after your book is published, walking in the room saying, hey, hey, here's my book, hey, here's my book and it's the first anybody's heard of it, right? So you're not gonna get any reviews on your Amazon page when you do that, but if you've built a team, I mean, this is like building a team of fans or what you call a street team and creating community and participating community and everybody's helping each other and it's just so rewarding and just so much more fun than after the fact marketing, isn't it? Creating and maintaining the group. Are you the only admin? I am not the only admin. What I did is in my questionnaire, and you could do this in email as well, is you could, you can ask people who's familiar with Facebook groups, will you help? Will you be an admin on Zoom? Like if I can't make it one day, can I add you? Can I add you to be an admin on Facebook? Will you help me? And so I have five or six people who said yes, I can help. And so we email back and forth. And so if I don't show up for some reason, like my power went out or, you know, whatever, somebody can take over the running of the meeting and everybody's not just flailing about and everybody's got, I think people would anyway, because with Zoom you can set your Zoom meeting up so that the meeting can start without you, right? So you can set it up to automatically record. Yes. And yeah, so it's kind of, it's like, I set it up that way because I thought, well, if I can't show up, what'll happen? And these are proactive people. Some of them are very accomplished journalists and people who've written books and some of them aren't. Some of them are total ranked beginners. But I know somebody would take over and figure it out. It's always great to have a kind of a group of people who you trust to take over. Thank you. Next question is from Rick Homan. Facebook groups allow questionnaires for screening new members. Are there any other ways of screening? Can you be sure everyone is there in good faith? Yeah, great question, Rick. Yes. That's why I designed the questionnaire, right? To let them in. I designed the, if you go to forms.google.com and you make all of the questions required, the people who are fakers are gonna, they're gonna drop out naturally, correct? In Facebook groups, I didn't know that there was a questionnaire. Oh yes, I do. Thanks for reminding me, Rick. I didn't remember that there was a questionnaire for screening new members. And I've done that before in groups where it says, why do you wanna be in the group, right? And that's cool. I'm gonna thank you for reminding me of that. So my first level is them getting through the 20 questions. And what's nice too, is I give everybody in the group access to the answers for those questions. And I say that right up front. So anybody can go to the spreadsheet that Google just creates a spreadsheet and it's got your name and it's got every question and how you answered it. Because my goal for this larger virtual travel writing group wasn't to just have me have a travel writing group. It was also in knowing that some people are very advanced, they're journalists, they're publishing a National Geographic in a far and you know, Vogue even and places like that.  And so I figured that sometime that would, people would connect individually or we could break them out into different genres within travel writing and different purposes in travel writing in different levels of travel writing. Very interesting, thank you. Then we have, I'm sorry, just give me one second. We have Lizette Wanzer, if I pronounce her name right. She's asking, how do you do breakout rooms in Zoom and what's the best way to handle turning in assignments and manuscripts, exchanges among group members? Thanks, Lizette. Yeah, I looked at breakout rooms with that in mind. Breakout rooms cost $50 a month. Otherwise I would have gone, yeah, boy, that would have been awesome. The memoirs go here, the professional journalists go here and the newbies go here and then we could meet amongst ourselves but that's expensive. So unless this group grows and helps fund that, that's not gonna happen. But I think it's a wonderful idea. And I'm thinking about kind of a business model for the future of that. I also think whenever we had Zoom breakout rooms, they are on their own. So you don't really have a lot of oversight and input. Oh, I didn't know, you use them, really, okay. Well, I don't use them for that reason because I don't have oversight what's going on in the breakout room, right? Got it, so if you had, maybe if you had co-admins, you could have somebody leading each group, yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that, Judith. And then for the second question, what's the best way to handle turning in assignments? Well, I use Google Docs and so you can create a folder in Google Docs for your writing group for each week. So I have a folder called VTWG virtual travel writing group and then I have a folder for every Friday forever. And so people just simply drag their story into the folder. Now, like I said, if there's six stories in the folder, then unless somebody's just got a short pitch or a question or an idea, they'll put their story in the next folder. I actually wanna encourage them to put it in the folder because you can tell what time they put it in the folder. So whoever put it in the folder, theirs in the last would go to the next week because there has been one time when somebody put their story in the folder and then they didn't show up because they had a power outage. So we would have had time for that extra story. So did I answer the question? Yeah, I think so. I also think that the breakout room seems to be free if you have a pro subscription. So that might be the $50 might be just for the basic account and an add-on. We have a question from Barbara. Let me try to find it. I think it's her. Have you, yeah, Barbara Santos, have you experienced the interaction is better the same or just different in live versus online meetings? Oh, thanks, Barbara, for that. Well, nothing beats sitting around a table and my wild writing women group, we would make dinner and drink wine and often sleep on each other's couches. And so that was awesome. But we were besties, we were best friends. So that's different from the library group.  So I have a friend who is stuck in Uganda, they're from Canada, she's from Canada and she's stuck in Uganda right now because of the virus and she's in the writing group, right? We have somebody in Casablanca, we have two people in Johannesburg. They're all one in Bavaria, West Coast of California, there's a bunch of us and all through the US. So what you give up in personal interaction you gain in geographic diversity? Yep. I don't have any of those. Let me go a little bit further on that. Okay, so I think the real question was like, how do you interact? So imagine that there are 12 of us in this meeting and all your faces are showing, right? You can only, because there are so many people in this meeting, the video is turned off. So that's the nice thing about Zoom is because you can get visual cues from somebody. They wanna like, oh, they're actually raising their hand and there is, you know, just like in a group group there's a little bit of interrupting and like, oh yeah, I felt the same way, that kind of thing. So I'm finding it's pretty similar if you can see the person, you can look at the body language, right? I thought that answers your question. Yes, any other questions from the audience? Please type in the chat box. You can find the chat box under the camera, a little chat box function and you can just type in your question. So we're waiting for, what, do you wanna ask a question, Taryn? Hi, Karla, thanks so much for a fantastic conversation. You did wonderfully and so did you, Judith. Thank you so much for hosting the meeting since I got logged out. It happened. Looks like there is another question from Judy. Are all of these groups free to participants? Is there a way you could monetize them? Hi, Judy. Yeah, they're free. I created it as a group effort. I didn't really create it as a business model, although I think I might actually, I did used to teach travel writing and I may do that again with a virtual class or something, it's just giving me an idea, right? But yeah, we're doing it for free. I'm using my Dropbox and I'm using my Zoom account. Now, because I pay for Zoom, because I do webinars and I have clients who I talk with about self-publishing or editing their travel book or whatever. So I already have paid for it and I already pay for the premium Dropbox because I share a lot of files and I like to back up my files there. And Google Docs is free up to a certain number of megabytes. So I am paying, funding it in a way. If nobody in your group has those tools, you would probably, I think Zoom is free up to a certain number of people. Google Docs is free to a certain number of people. Dropbox is, does Dropbox even have a free plan? There are free tools out there for you to use, for sure. And then Sally Singing Tree has a question about optimal group size. I know at Mechanics Institute, the groups tend to be six to 10 with the sweet spot being six or seven or eight. What do you think for an online virtual group? Yeah, it's interesting because this is the thing with this group is, I think it's gonna be different for everybody. My Wild Writing Women group were 12 women travel writers. None of us were in town at the same time. And so I think that six or seven, eight of us were there at any one time. In this group, there are a lot of people who wanna break into travel writing and they don't know really how travel writing works or they're beginners or they just wanna do some writing for themselves and their family. And I think some of those people are sharing, but many of them are watching how the group runs. They're participating in the critiques, but they're not submitting yet. So there were 19 people in the room last week, but only I would say eight or nine participated in the discussion. Now that said, when I looked at the chat, there was a lot of participation happening in the chat as well. And also in the Google Doc, you can comment directly in the Google Doc. And so some people who don't come to the group meeting or who can't or have a conflict will comment on the document itself. And that way those comments are public to others who are reading the doc and they play off each other. So it's almost this ideal little multimedia whirlwind that's going on that I'm finding very, very interesting and very respectful. Great, the next question is from Jackie Davis-Martin. And I'm gonna ask her to ask her question herself. Jackie, can you hear us? I can hear you, can you hear me? Yeah. Yes. Okay, the question is you started out, I actually have two questions there. The first thing you started out, I was trying to take notes. You mentioned something about convert or some kind of form. Oh, convert kit. I didn't catch those. The next one goes along with that. And that is, is Facebook the only way to organize a group? No, no, okay. So yeah, I, instead of collecting emails by asking, typing in their emails every time, I use my email marketing manager. And mine is convert kit and yours might be constant contact or MailChimp or something like that. I recommend if you don't have an email newsletter, get one right now. It's free up to 2,000 subscribers and you don't even have to have a website to get one. So if you go to MailChimp for instance, you can get a landing page and start collecting email addresses. And so I have, everybody who signs up for my travel writing group gets tagged as travel writing group, right? And so I just go into MailChimp or convert kit or whatever mailing list manager that you choose and send an email to all of those people. And they can unsubscribe. You know, they can change their email address. They can change their name. They can change any data about themselves. So it's a hands-off way for me to collect and communicate with these people. May I chime in just for one note? So when you use these email addresses, California law or emails providing services, one of the great things that you use constant contact or MailChimp or things, they take care of the legal background because California has a very strict or the whole US has a strict unsubscribe ability. So every customer needs to have the ability to unsubscribe from any email blast. So when you use these platforms, they take care of that. And with every email, they include an unsubscribe link which per law is required. So it's very useful. Great. Absolutely. All right. Then we have another question from Judy, or sorry, from Lizette Wanzer. Asking if you have any opinion on open board versus blackboard. You know, I just saw that question and I don't know anything about them. These look like interactive whiteboards for, or blackboards for schools and university. Teaching software. I think that would be interesting for teaching. But if you, yeah, it might be interesting to be able to comment for a writing group to be able to comment on a document. I'll have to look at those. So thank you for pointing those out to me. I don't know anything about them. Okay. And then she also had a question about WebEx versus Skype versus GoToMeeting. Can you comment on this? Well, I'm using Zoom. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. You know, I know that people have a terrible time with GoToMeeting and WebEx. Skype, can you do big groups in Skype? You probably can, multi-person groups. There's also one I was on a webinar, Kevin Tumlinson's webinar the other day and it was called streamyard.com. And all of these, like Zoom will actually stream to your Facebook group. So I think you can use Zoom or Streamyard to run your meeting inside Facebook. And then people can go to the Facebook Live even later, which is kind of cool.  So you can contact people about events. So, you know, it's super interesting how, I mean, everybody's gonna use these tools in the way that they're most comfortable with. So I just think it's nice to be able to pick and choose and experiment. Great, well, you're doing great on the hot seat here. We have one more question that we sort of, you sort of touched on just now about whether Facebook is the ideal sort of group management social media platform that is that the one that you like best or can you think of something else? I mean, there used to be Yahoo groups, which of course doesn't have the same functionality as Facebook now does. But can you think of another platform for writing group management that might be comparable? You know, I can't. I have long used Facebook as somebody who travels and who likes to keep in contact with people all around the world and visit them when I can and vice versa. Facebook has become the go-to place for us to create groups.  And those little niche groups, and it's just, they make it so easy. It's, I know people love to hate Facebook, but then, so they jumped to Instagram. So that's owned by Facebook, by the way. All of these, like WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. Whatever it's false, it is a great organizing platform. I don't use it for super personal stuff, like I don't put super personal stuff in the chats or I just assume that everything I do on Facebook or any other social media platform, because of one of their mistakes or an attack or something, could be laid out for the public to see, right? So I don't use it for ultra personal communications. And I think it's a great marketing platform and a great organizational platform. That's my answer and I'm sticking to it. That's great. Well, I think a lot of your commentaries are really going to be useful, I think, to our crowd here. We, I think have covered all of the questions. Any last questions before we relieve Karla? Because I can tell she is, we're really tapping her knowledge here. That's all right. Any other questions? I got more where that came from. And in fact, let me tell you that I have a free consumers guide that you can get from myselfpubbootcamp.com website and it's called the Consumers Guide for Self-Publishers, but it's for writers, just as well, even if you're not self-publishing, I should be titled that. And it's got a review of all these tools and thank you for the heads up about Blackboard and Openboard and all that, because I'll go take a look and add those as well. It's got like beta books and scribbly of file in it. So if you want my, I don't know, I took it upon myself in 2008 when the whole self-publishing technology and the writing tools came on the scene and the internet to keep track of them all. They would just snowball over the years, I know. So a few years ago I was like, oh, it's so hard to keep up. But it's nice because the owners, the founders of these companies know me and they tell me things. So like, hey, will you include our tool in your booklet? And so it's a way for me to keep up with it. I'm not all alone in doing that. So I do know an awful lot about technology that helps writers from tools like ProWritingAid and Grammarly and MasterWriter and Autocrit, you know, all those editing, oh, and Fictionary, which is amazing and all of these amazing tools for editing your book and creating your book and polishing your book. So I love it if you pinged me like about any of the ones I don't have in the book like this open board. Lizette, thank you, or a blackboard and the way it can be useful for writers because I do like to keep track of it and it helps me a lot to learn from you guys too. Great, well, one other question popped in and this is more on the sensitive side. How do you handle members of groups who feel they need to leave because their interests aren't being served or somehow there's a personality clash? Do you have any words of wisdom for me on that topic? Resigned from the group. You know, I did have somebody the other day who resigned from the group. I knew him and he was just feeling overwhelmed because he wasn't published and he wasn't really ready. And so he just gets sent because we're both travelers and we've known each other for a long time. He just said, oh, I'm diving out of the group, nothing personal, I'm just kind of overwhelmed right now. But I think if you set it up correctly, like for example, you use MailChimp or Constant Contact or ConvertKit and people can unsubscribe. And so what I've seen is I had about 10 people drop off three weeks in, which was good because 10 more people came on and 10 people just simply hit that unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email and that didn't hurt my feelings. In the group, I have to say, in writing groups, I don't know, how many of you have cried in a writing group?  You're really revealing yourself and you're touching other people. And I've had people who started crying because they were critiquing something and they're like, I still connect with that. And all of a sudden everybody's crying. And you have to create as a writing group leader or a workshop leader a safe place, which is why at the beginning of each story I've asked or query letter or whatever, I've asked people to ask the group what they want from this piece. And so I'm like, here's my piece, here's what it is, rip it apart. I have a completely hard shell, right? I just want to get it published. And there are many writers in that group who are like that. Like just don't sugarcoat it.  I just would like some gentle, I'm doing this as a personal project. I would just like some gentle direction. And I think that in itself, that requirement to say what you want, what it's for, what you want from it and kind of like the level of critique that you want sets the scene for that respect and that helping mode for the critiques. And so far, I have never had any kind of abuse happen in any of my writing groups. It's kind of phenomenal, but I think it's because there's always been a strong leadership who knows how to shut that down if it could even start to occur. But I think the setup is more important. I might have gone above and beyond answering that question, but I hope that helps. No, that was incredible advice for I think an in-person and a virtual writers group. So yeah, providing the people, the writers with the tool to kind of guide the feedback and the experience. I think that that's really helpful. All right, now Barbara Santos has a question. She wants to know if you and your group plan to turn your submissions into a book.  It's come up because there are so many stuck travel writers and travelers in this time. Like I said, my friends in Uganda and people who just aren't at home and we're like, maybe we should just quick create an anthology about travelers in the time of COVID. Where are you? What the heck? You must be in an interesting situation. So it could happen, it might, but it has to be a group effort. This is a thing when you start a project like that, there has to be a leader and it's a time suck to create an anthology. It really is. So if there's a great group who's willing to co-edit and put in the work, it's completely doable. And if it's not on a timely topic, like if you're writing mystery stories or romance stories, it's just start and have a Google doc for the best of your, a Google folder for the best of your stories, just to start workshopping them with an eye toward publishing and promoting your work and all of your compadres work as well. It's a great goal. Well, that sounds like a wonderful way to end this session. Seems like you have had a phenomenal number of kudos here in the chat section. And I personally have to thank you for your wonderful, you know, saving the day, saving this event, since I got logged out. That's all right, Judith took up the slack too. I says this like, the stress, the stress is not, it's the health of us and the health of the internet as well. It's stressing all of our infrastructure. So it's great to be able to have groups like this when we can't meet in person and got people who know how to use the tech. I love it. Right, yes. Thank you, Judith, you did fantastic. And I want to thank all of the people that joined us today. Let's see what the final count is. We've got 30 people. Thank you all. And if you have any questions, you can email me tedwards at milibrary.org and Karla's URL is selfpubbootcamp.com and I'm sure you can find her all over the web if you want to. I will include her URL in the event listing when we post this video on YouTube and of course we'll spread it all over Facebook as well. All right, thank you all and thank you Karla and I look forward to seeing you virtually. Thank you, thank you all. I look forward to seeing you at the Mechanics Institute Library hopefully soon too. Hopefully soon. All right, bye. Bye.


Welcome to the Project Extreme Training Program. My name is Dr. Michael Hanley of the Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine Division at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center and Denver Health Medical Center. Project Extreme was created by a team of respiratory care specialists at Denver Health Medical Center to provide training in basic respiratory care and ventilator management in the event of a disaster resulting in a surge of patients who require mechanical ventilation. Our goal is not to train you to become a respiratory therapist, but rather to teach you the most basic skills that are necessary to meet the respiratory needs of patients requiring ventilation. Through a combination of video, still photography and text, six areas of basic respiratory care will be covered. Upon completion of the video and module competency tests, you will be prepared to demonstrate proficiency in the following areas, terms and definitions, infection control, manual ventilation, airway suctioning, airway maintenance, and mechanical ventilation including monitoring and troubleshooting. The ventilators reviewed in this video include the Puritan Bennett LP-10 and the Impact Univent Eagle. These are the two ventilators that are currently stored in the Strategic National Stockpile. In a mass casualty event, however, it is possible that your institution may be provided with ventilators that are different than these. We strongly feel that even in this scenario, the basic principles of respiratory care and mechanical ventilation that are reviewed in the video will be critical in helping to prepare you to meet the needs of your patients. Good luck. We hope you find this program useful.