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STRATA and Glassboard

An ongoing feature of the Glassboard blog is to invite our users to share their stories. This post comes courtesy of STRATA. Enjoy!

STRATA is a newly formed photography collective based in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, Ca. The group consists of six like-minded street photographers and photojournalists who want to use their combined strengths to raise public awareness of the craft and generate new business opportunities, whether they come from commissions, assignments or print and book sales.

From day one Steve Goldenberg, STRATA member and CEO and Founder of Interfolio, recommended the group try Glassboard during our first overnight trip to document the boardwalk in Ocean City, MD. What we were initially drawn to was the fact that it is a private messaging service. Unlike Twitter or text messages, there were no distractions and the conversations between members were easily contained and referenced.

We traveled in two cars and could converse back and forth while on the road. Once in Ocean City we split up to photograph the beach. With Glassboard it was easy for us to keep in touch with each other whether it was for meeting up for lunch, heading back to the hotel or letting others know what kind of shooting opportunities we were discovering.

When we returned home, we continued to use Glassboard as the preferred means of communication between members. We use it to communicate about building our website, www.stratacollective.com, setting up meetings, critiquing images and letting others know what kind of events are breaking in DC or the Bay area.

Glassboard has been integral in the set up of STRATA and has been useful in many different scenarios. Since we are a small group we haven’t had any need to create multiple boards, but we would assume this could be very helpful for larger groups who want to categorize their conversations between teams or subject matters.

With that said there are some features we would like to see added to Glassboard. First and foremost is a search capability. Since we literally use this product as our main communication vehicle we have built quite an archive of messages. As of right now there is no quick way to find content that is a week or more old without having to manually scan all of our old messages to find what we are looking for. Equally frustrating is that the App version only stores your last 50 message topics. It would be nice to be able to access the archive on the go.

[Note from Jenny: Both search and archiving are great features we'd also love to see in a future version of the app! We like to hear what people want out of Glassboard so we know what to work towards.]

We will continue to use Glassboard on assignment and for general business matters, and we look forward to the upcoming premium version of Glassboard which promises new features.

Note: This post was vetted by STRATA members using Glassboard. All images in this post were taken in Ocean City, Md., during STRATA’s first experience with Glassboard. If you would like to see more of our work and individual portfolios please visit www.stratacollective.com.

Posted by Jenny Blumberg