On Fri, 2021-06-25 at 08:51 +1000, Tom Worthington wrote: > Has anyone seen any examples of effective use of electronic fora in > > membership-based organisations? ... > > No.
I have to agree. Wearing various hats I have found Slack, Discord and Mattermost excellent for discussion, but the results have to be extracted by someone and summarised. They do maintain history, but not in a very useful way, and they maintain very little context. Discussion recedes quickly into the past. Zoom and related meeting/webinar tools are also great for "face to face" discussion, but they are real-time. And again, someone has to extract and summarise things like whiteboards, chats and Q&A exchanges, because they otherwise disappear when the meeting closes. You can record meetings and webinars of course, but video is not a useful thing for searching, citing, quoting etc. You need someone to produce what amounts to traditional minutes. The various forum products out there are mostly crap. Discourse is OK as a forum, but has no effective mailing list capability. Most forum products have very poor thread-handling abilities, and very VERY poor search facilities. This means that unless someone is curating them and adding metathreads, or unless participants exercise a lot of discipline, useful discussions are just as quickly lost as in Slack or Discord. One quite effective method I've used in a couple of contexts is Google Docs. A document is created about a topic, then people can add comment threads (or edit the doc directly if they have permission). The document owner incorporates the comments into the doc as discussion continues, rolling up/resolving threads as they go. The end result is a consensus document. Arrange all the different things into different folders and you can have related documents, supporting data etc all in one place around the primary document, and even put references to them into the document. I'm not sure how that would scale to hundreds of commenters, but has certainly worked very well in teams of up to twenty for me. Google's search abilities are of course second to none. For most serious discussion purposes, email is probably still the best way to work. Every participant has their own copy of the "forum" arranged in the way that makes most sense to them, generally with pretty good searchability. It is not a confidential medium though unless everybody uses MIME or GPG, which I have never seen used outside very small groups. Regards, K. -- ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Karl Auer ([email protected]) http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer GPG fingerprint: 2561 E9EC D868 E73C 8AF1 49CF EE50 4B1D CCA1 5170 Old fingerprint: 8D08 9CAA 649A AFEF E862 062A 2E97 42D4 A2A0 616D _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
