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.
------- 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! -------- 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. ----------- ## 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> _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.snowdrift.coop https://lists.snowdrift.coop/mailman/listinfo/discuss