Thanks a lot for these constructive contributions! That’s exactly the kind of discussion I want to have in/with this thread 
And splitting/branching/forking off new project invitations and activities is a good vehicle to get some progress started into this general direction, much apprechiated.
I’m very much for checkins and don’t mind them, even as I myself usually don’t update others that much about my personal current affairs that much, and tend to report more on project progress, but I clearly see the purpose and benefit for each of these habits, and indeed sometimes the personal/social work is the main work, or for all of the philosophical explorations, a checkin can as well be the opportunity to notify about a new discovery or change of view.
I only get annoyed if the personal checkins get mixed into a meeting that’s also supposed to report on project progress or coordinate practical activities, because lots of shared time gets wasted on talk that’s in no way productive for the tasks at hand. And the talk about the many boring details of “doing” must seem wasted for those who attend for growing personal connections.
In my opinion, there’s no point at all in trying to somehow merge the two and reach some common denominator, which is then sub-ideal for everybody. Also, no need to separate the two, as we gain of course a lot from listening in and gaining general awareness about what’s going on, who the others are, what they do, how they feel, how they think, their character/values/concerns, etc.
Therefore, I would favor to remain agnostic in regard of the question how much airtime the different topics for their different purposes should get, especially as I have the easy way out of not attending these group calls in the first place and prefer project coordination in asynchronous ways on the Kanban board or issue/task tracker, avoiding many of the common problems that can easily become huge sinks for productivity.
For the OGM calls, OK, I can imagine that the extend of checkins vs. other discussion might be an important question, and the after-the-fact curation of the recording offers no way out nor improvement for those who attend in the moment. At the same time, with a little bit of tooling, clips could easily be extracted which are just the checkin part, or just the open discussion (or themed topic of the week). Each of these might be splittable into checkin per person, so you could get your update feeds for individuals you’re subscribing to (aggregated into a weekly digest), almost like them sending you their weekly podcast entry, which could develop into a conscious instrument/medium more deliberately used for exactly such purpose. For the other part of the call as well, I would assume that with some tagging, the portions/sections/clips could be grouped by topic, to basically figuratively “go under the corresponding node in the brain”, and potentially even branching out to other groups and communities, to sprinkle some similar/aligned clips in. I mean, who knows if that would turn out to be entirely awesome or rather somewhat boring and flawed, but I can’t really imagine why it would be the latter, and then give it a try, and be it for the learning and understanding how such a practice could work out, also for greater questions about curation and facilitation.
Technically, I would consider this entirely feasible, super-easy, quick and cheap. I just hesitate a little to go into the actual content work (I’m more or less already are somewhat used to anyway), for reasons of vague/questionable licensing (not bad, not ideal), that I don’t want to keep only myself occupied with it instead of also doing more software development, and specifically want to test how serious those are who constantly bring up this topic as being super-valuable and urgently needed, but just some other person is supposed to do it for them, not doing any kind of even minor, occasional work themselves. This explicitly excludes people like Jerry or Pete, who have their hands full with all sorts of other important content/tech/people work, and have a understanding how technical tooling can help with the recorded artifacts, and already took/take steps towards curation independently themselves, and also aren’t those who endlessly only talk about it without investing into such practices. In essence, this is a call for the librarians, curators, knowledge workers, which we are as well ourselves, but also by necessity currently have to fill a bunch of other roles as well, which unfortunately doesn’t leave much capacity for content/curation work despite it or the results could turn out to be somewhat enjoyable, by comparison or in general.
