[Coworking] Official News! Updated "Google Group" (now at forum.coworking.org) is open for registration.  Plus details about what comes next.

[Alex Hillman]

Hey coworking friends!

Earlier this month I announced that the Coworking Google Group is being 
migrated to a new platform 
 to help us 
make the archives more accessible, improve discussion quality, and ensure 
this community and resource can continue growing for many years to come.

Today, I'm writing to tell you that things are well underway (more than 25% 
of the historical archive has been categorized thanks to a team of 
volunteers) and as of today, our *new platform is OPEN for registration!*

*You can check it out here and get signed up:* https://forum.coworking.org




The rest of this email includes some useful details about the most 
important things for you to know right now, and what's coming next:



*1 - you can now go to https://forum.coworking.org and sign up. No invite 
required!*




Registration is open, just like the current google group. Anyone can browse 
and search the site without a login, but to post/comment/other interactive 
features, an account *is* required. 

You can sign up with an email address and password, but you can also sign 
up in just a couple of clicks using a valid Google account or Twitter 
account. 

And just like Google Groups, once you have an account, you'll be able to 
get email notifications about new topics, (much friendlier) digests if you 
don't want emails about every single thread, and even the ability to reply 
from your inbox. Basically, everything Google Groups lets you do, we can do 
better!

UNLIKE Google Groups, you'll gain the ability to tweak your notification 
settings for specific categories & subcategories (aka just get emails about 
the topics you care about) and even mute categories you don't care about as 
much. I'll share much more about the more "advanced features soon, but 
these ones are BIG benefits to the switch so I wanted to mention them here!

*Coming soon: merge your account history into your new account. *

Any posts you make with your new account will obviously be associated with 
your account, and in the near future, we'll have an easy way for you to 
request merging your post history into the new account as well. It'll even 
show your "join date" on the new forum as the original join date on the 
google group. Cool way to preserve history!

I've already done this for our early contributors, but it's a fairly manual 
process so for everyone else it will be done by-request. Stay tuned for 
more on that. 

If you do NOT sign up for an account on the new platform during the next 
few weeks, you'll be part of an automatic migration in the future (which 
will respect your existing notification settings on the google group).

*2 - In the very near future, the plan is to "freeze" this google group to 
new posts and replies and direct everyone to the new forum as we complete 
the content and member migration. *

*To be clear, the reason for this decision is technical!* The importer 
scripts that allow me to migrate discussions from Google Groups to the new 
forum are powerful, but have a few limitations that I've learned along the 
way, and it's increasingly difficult to be sure that I'll be able to move 
new posts made to the Google Group seamlessly. For now, I'm doing this 
"sync" roughly once a week, and capturing as many new posts as possible, 
but want to avoid accumulating many more valuable posts on the Google Group 
that I can't easily move to the new platform.

*I'm still working on the exact process/procedure/communication for the 
last stages of the migration, and promise to do my best to do this with 
clear communication and as much advance notice as I reasonably can. *My 
goal is for the migration to be relatively seamless for most people, and 
create more improvements than drawbacks. 

*Questions? Comments? Concerns?*

So far, all of the feedback I've gotten from the folks who joined the site 
early have been positive and enthusiastic. Most of the ideas people have 
for making this discussion platform better are possible, and in many cases, 
either easy or already built in!

*My biggest priority is making sure that folks know what to expect and how 
to get set up on the new platform, and get the most out of this new and 
much-improved experience. *

I'm here to bring as much clarity to this shift as possible, and avoid 
unnecessary surprises. I WILL be following this post up with more details 
about things like categories & a more robust, transparent moderation 
process going forward! 

In the mean time - get yourself signed up , 
browse around, and start getting familiar! If you get stuck on anything or 
have questions, drop me an email directly (a...@indyhall.org) and we'll get 
you going again. :)

-Alex


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Re: [Coworking] Re: building the community

[Eric Haas]

Thanks so much for sharing this alejandro! reminds and helps me to set up 
those basic house rules as well!
Muchas gracias!
Eric

Op dinsdag 26 maart 2019 16:05:21 UTC+1 schreef Alejandro Moreno:
>
> Since we hardly did any community-building before we opened our space, if 
> I could do it over again, I would address certain topics like kitchen 
> use/rules, some basic bathroom usage/rules/etiquette, ideas for improving 
> recycling/sustainability, member guest policy, open space noise policy 
> (like whether phone calls will be allowed in the main space or whether 
> people should use phone booths and meeting rooms for calls, as people talk 
> very loudly on cell phones and video chat calls), getting the members to 
> help you keep the bills down (turn off lights in rooms when not in use, 
> etc), and how many of your members would potentially want private offices 
> (build as many as you can). 
>
> As far as specific recommendations I would make for some of the 
> aforementioned topics (some might be relevant to you, some might not be):
> — NO seafood in the microwave, EVER
> — Any food left in the fridge at 6pm each Friday is up for grabs for 
> anyone because it will get tossed that night.
> — Rinse the sink after you've emptied food, coffee grounds etc into the 
> sink / disposal (basic common sense stuff that people are too unconscious 
> to think about sometimes)
> — Have a sign you can hang on the dishwasher telling people that it's 
> running so DO NOT OPEN while running
> — Tell members to go ahead and load toilet paper if it runs out and not 
> have to wait and go tell you that TP is out
> — Ask them, if they'd be open to pitch in and clean a toilet once in a 
> while if it needs cleaning (cuz you're going to end up cleaning them daily 
> unless you hire a service)
> — We set up 3 separate recycling stations in our space but we need to do a 
> better job about telling people to do small things like remove the plastic 
> lid and paper sleeve from their coffee cups and recycle those (better yet, 
> I think we're going to establish a new rule for our regular members – no 
> more plastic/paper cups from the local cafe, use your own washable coffee 
> mug instead)
> — We set a 2 hour member guest policy, after that they need to buy a day 
> pass
> — We have a ''quiet culture'' in the open space, we built 3 phone booths 
> and we let our members use the meeting rooms too for short calls if the 
> phone booths are full.
> — We give each of our members 20 free hours of meeting room use per month, 
> so they can book meeting rooms either for a long phone call that they have 
> in their schedules or for meetings or whatever they need. You may or may 
> not be able to afford this so, do what works best for you.
> — I'm constantly turning the lights off in the phone booths, meeting rooms 
> etc, we need to put signs up telling people to turn them off (even though 
> the rooms have automatic sensors, the lights stay on for a while after the 
> room or phone booth is vacated) so you might want to consider the same 
> thing. Some people when entering the office in the morning turn on the 
> entire panel of lights automatically without thinking whether that is 
> really necessary. It never is, so several times a week I'm turning off 
> about 50% of the lights someone mindlessly turned on when they let 
> themselves in early in the morning. 
> — We built 2 private offices originally, we're looking at converting our 
> largest (and most underutilized) meeting room into 5 small private offices 
> and another nook we have into 2 more meeting rooms, plus converting one 
> meeting room we have now over to a private office, giving us 8 private 
> offices and 4 meeting rooms total
>
> That's all I have off the top of my head.
>
> Alejandro Moreno S. 
> Cofounder/VP VenturePad 
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 21, 2019 at 8:11 AM > wrote:
>
>> In addition to what the other experts here suggest, research what Mark 
>> Eaton of the Cochrane Corner did. I believe it was based on Angel's advice 
>> and it was clearly successful. I recently spoke with Mark and he is looking 
>> for a second location. Not bad for a semi-rural operator. 
>>
>>
>> On Sunday, February 24, 2019 at 2:46:33 AM UTC-7, superio...@gmail.com 
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hey Guys!
>>>
>>> Tomorrow is my first meet and greets for my coworking community.  I am 
>>> building the community before acquiring the actual space.  What are some 
>>> topics or processes I should cover tomorrow during the meet and greet?  Any 
>>> advice for topics to be discussed? Ice breaker techniques? 
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Trey 
>>>
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>

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