I just watched an interesting TED talk by Pankaj Ghemawat (of which the most important points are summarised in a TED blog post) about the world not being as globalised as people expect [1]. One point is that only 2% of traditional voice phone calling minutes (and ~6% when you include VOIP) are for international calls which is less than most people expect.
After reading that it occurred to me that most of the “included value” in my mobile phone contract goes unused, I pay for extra data transfer and it includes voice calling credit that I don’t use. So out of $450 of included calls I typically use much less than $50. $400 of calls to even the most expensive countries is about 100 minutes of talking. So the logical thing to do is to find people in other countries to call.
If you are involved in the FOSS community and would like to speak to me then send me an email with your phone number, time zone, and a range of times that are convenient. I won’t make any promises about calling you soon (I could use up my monthly credit on a single call), but I will call you eventually.
I will also send email to some people I know by email and suggest a chat. Some years ago I did this with people who were involved in SE Linux development and it seemed to help the development of the SE Linux community.
Also if anyone in Australia wants to speak to me then that’s OK too. While Pankaj’s talk inspired me to call people I’m not dedicated to calling other countries.