Hi everyone!

I've done a lot lately to reach out to people to encourage folks to sign
up for our mailing lists (sent many hundreds of emails, although
hundreds more to do). I don't want to delay much longer actually
engaging with the new email lists.

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INTRODUCTIONS: Everyone can read about me on my user profile on the
site: https://snowdrift.coop/u/3

I'd love if others would post here with some brief introductions,
thoughts, questions…

Let's get engaged and build this community and encourage each other to
figure out how we can all work together to achieve this ambitious but
important mission that Snowdrift.coop stands for!

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SUMMARY OF STUFF BELOW: I'm trying to figure out best tools and
approaches to engage with folks, maximize the amount the people stay
engaged and motivated to help us succeed. I'm going to go through
referencing all sorts of issues about mailing lists, forums, our tools, etc.

**If long detailed stuff will be overwhelming right now, please feel
free to skip this.** I'd love everyone to read and reply if you have
helpful ideas to share, but I don't want anyone to feel pushed away by
my crazy long email.

Right now, this email list is just getting started. If it gets overly
busy, you can always switch to the digest version… I hope everyone will
care enough to stay involved to the extent manageable. Thanks for
understanding and for your support and interest.

==========================================

MAILING LISTS, FORUMS, ETC. (as its on my mind right now)

I don't want these new Snowdrift.coop email lists to be so active that
people push away from them, and there's lots of concerns about the
nature of mailing lists. Such lists don't have good ways to handle
conflict or tangents… there's lots of tools with better and worse
features. The issues involve balancing the amount of mail, the fact that
people today often do terribly with managing email, people moving to
other systems, wanting to keep things on topic…

I saw a proprietary tool that has some great features I wish we had:
getting emails only for *new topics* but opting-IN to getting replies
once you decide you like a topic… I want to see us add that to our
built-in website discussion boards… shouldn't be too hard, but it's one
of tons of lists of things we'd like…

Mailman 3 has a lot of improvements. I haven't tried it lately, and we
could update to that sometime soon, it might have value.

Alternatively, I was just reading the updates for Discourse 1.3 — see
http://blog.discourse.org/2015/06/discourse-1-3-released/
and I'm really impressed.

Discourse initially had several design issues I didn't like, but today
it's really powerful. The new better controls for various
notifications, moderation, and more all seem excellent. I'm even up for
consider deprecating these new email lists and just moving to Discourse
maybe!

Using Discourse would certainly let people better manage and review
things in a nice web format (although Mailman 3 does some of that). On
the other hand, our built-in discussion boards are already more like
what Discourse offers (but are beta state, not as polished, and I have
mixed feelings about reimplementing all the good, select elements from
Discourse, certainly it's distraction from core mission, although we'd
build them specific to fit our needs).

I do *not* want to have too many separate systems. My *ideal* dream is
in fact to have most of the appropriate aspects of Discourse built into
our integrated discussion system. And that's why it seems moving to
Discourse makes sense. But in practice *today*, I find most Discourse
instances (on other projects' sites) to be somewhat overwhelming and
hard to manage.

I see our built-in system as being designed around a different use case
versus email lists and forums: we're discussing very specific questions
/ tickets / concerns about pages… in other words, it's project
management stuff. We're not building around general community chat. Each
topic on our discussion boards, gets dealt with, closed, wikis updated
etc. But we need better organizing and searching tools to use it more
effectively…

My feeling is that email lists and forums often have really valuable
community discussions that then just get lost in the bulk. That's why I
like our system's ability to move (i.e. rethread) comments, close
comments, and *tag* individual comments. We're really about *managing*
the comments to serve the needs of the project, which is different than
the social feel we get more at IRC in live chat.

Of course, there's stack-exchange style QA formats too… sheesh.

At any rate, our discussion system wiki page
https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/discussion-system and its
connected discussion board itself have lots more details about related
issues. The whole topic is overwhelming, and I apologize for
overwhelming YOU if you're reading this. That's partly the fault of
email as a format maybe…

In *principle*, posting pointed, threaded comments on the site allows us
to tease apart each issue and break things into manageable bits. So,
*ideally* we would adjust things so that comments can be *split* as in
my recent comment:
https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/discussion-system/c/3305

Imagine replying in-line to this long email but each in-line reply gets
its own thread so that things don't get longer and longer, and we don't
need to see quotes, we just see the comments in context. That would be
like the in-line comments on Medium.com, which a Yesod-based FLO system
like https://github.com/thoughtbot/carnival supports… except *threaded*
so that instead of just blog posts have in-line comments, each comment
itself can have similar in-line replies… I think that's probably the
best design. I *honestly* believe that such a tool would *greatly*
improve my own ability to manage this project. Our discussion board
could have that, and having that in FLO software would be superbly valuable.

This very email is excessively long, and yet if I sent two dozen emails,
that wouldn't go well. But we're working to address FUNDING. We can't be
solving every last problem…! except we need this solved for our *own* use…

At any rate, there certainly are some advantages to mailing lists, that
no web forum can match. Here's something super-meta (HAHA): a link on
this mailing list to a post on our discussion board linking to an
insightful comment in a comment system on a web forum about mailing
lists versus forums:
https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/discussion-system/c/3010

I've also started exploring some mainly unidirectional mailing list
tools, namely https://phplist.com/ https://www.mautic.org/ and
http://www.freelists.org/ — all of which are entirely FLO and offer
no-charge service to FLO projects… In some sense, what we need is to
send updates to specific people separately from having back-and-forth
discussions.

And this doesn't even get into real-time meeting technologies (IRC,
WebRTC)… This is the nature of a 21st century online project.

## Proprietary communication tools threat ##

All this confusion is related to how proprietary silos are coming in and
seeing a need and working to capture the market.

The more general people communicate only in proprietary walled gardens,
the more those entities will influence the discussion. The more the
hard-core folks who refuse to use those systems will have their views
unrepresented in the community discourse.

Of course, we need to focus on our own immediate tools for how to reach
everyone NOW and get enough people involved to finish the minimum work
to launch Snowdrift.coop. But I think this is a good case study for the
status quo of the FLO and proprietary tech world today. Everything is
still in flux, but the *need* is there, the demand is there, and we
need, both for ourselves and in general, to figure out how to solve
these things and in ways that lead to FLO success long-term…

Okay, all that wasn't carefully edited. Apologies for sending something
of a brain dump. I'm making a decision to avoid perfection and try to
engage with people more. We will make these things happen if we all work
together.

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## Volunteering, teams, and roles

On that note, I started https://snowdrift.coop/p/snowdrift/w/en/teams to
get into figuring out all the roles and responsibilities we need people
to cover. There are places for everyone in smaller and larger roles! You
CAN participate and make a difference. If THIS VERY EMAIL isn't the most
inspiring, readable, etc. — i.e. if it could do better at motivating YOU
to come help or to know how to get started helping, then the complex
situation that led to this email has room for improvement, obviously.
I'd love help. None of this will be easy, but you've made the first
step: you're on the email list (unless you're a lurker reviewing the
archive).

I *promise* not to send tons more long brain-dump emails (although I
have about 180 more big topics I *want* to hash out besides this one).
I'm taking this risk as part of the learning process. I'm not sure what
to expect (maybe it'll get marked as spam for most people, oh no! maybe
not…)

Anyway, we're going to solve these things. It will get better from here,
although getting there won't be easy. Please know that even brief
"thanks, keep it up" messages are meaningful contributions… i.e. we
appreciate all levels of engagement, though obviously the more everyone
puts in, the greater and sooner our success…

I suppose I should adapt this email into a more manageable thing that
could be a blog post…

Overall, this email reflects the fact that we have imperfect tools and
we need to just figure out how to use them as best we can and improve
our tools as feasible. I'm probably overly worried in some ways. Perhaps
many people will respond to this with wonderful, supportive, productive,
constructive, critical feedback… and then I'll accept that this mailing
list option may work out well enough, at least for now. I'm going to hit
send, and we'll see.

All the best,
Aaron

-- 
Aaron Wolf Snowdrift.coop <https://snowdrift.coop>
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