Community Resources

[indicoyote]

This is somewhat of an interim document. One of the things we still need to do is have an easy and obvious place to put up important info like that, but that also turns out to be one of the more complex things to set up. In the meantime, I think we really need a place we can go to fora good list of what we've done so far. If you know of something else that should be added here, PLEASE put it in a comment, or something else; I don't want this to be a one-toy show.

Organization is a bit of a new thing for us. We're a close community, and in the past we've done pretty well with word-of-mouth, but that's not always enough. One of the big risks of everything being ad-hoc is that informal power structures can arise that leave some people feeling overwhelmed and others feeling left out. xurnami pointed me to an essay recently called "The Tyrrany of Structurelessness", which really got me thinking about how we could do better in a way that lets everyone feel like they have more involvement.

To be specific about our group, I've heard a lot of worry about being left out from a number of folks, and I worry a lot about the overwhelmedness myself. I'm not good at being a leader, but being an easily-overwhelmed person has taught me a lot about organization, so I have plenty of ideas about that. elanna has been interested in getting more into the project management of all this, so she and I and a number of others have been putting together a bunch of stuff to try to help. The goal of this doc and all the stuff below isn't to say 'this is how things should be' but 'here are some things that might be helpful'. I don't think any of us want our structure to be hierarchical, but I'd like it to be at least visible. Hopefully open planning can help us a lot with that.

So here's what we've set up so far:

Dreamwidth

That's where you are right now. We have a community set up, which is where this post is. If you're not a member yet, and you think you should be, please request membership! This is currently mainly being used as a place to put up docs like this one, but I'm hoping it gets more use in the future for long-form presentation and discussion.

Trello

This has a few parts. The above link is to the general Trello page for the community. You'll need to set up a Trello account before you can do much other than view stuff, but it's a nice quick minimal signup.

The most important thing there currently is the General Planning board, which you should be able to see on that page. The idea behind this is to have a place to write down what we're doing and what we want to do. We say "We should really..." a lot, and often everyone just nods and it gets lost. I think it'd be really cool to try to make a habit to put every single one of those things on this board. Even if they never get past 'To Do', it's better to have them there and visible then to have them dissapear into conversation.

The nice thing about having this in a Trello group is that we can create more group boards, too. Some of the projects there are probably too big for that board, so expect to see other ones popping up, or feel free to creat your own.

GroupMe

If you're not familiar with GroupMe, it's a group chat system that has both mobile and web clients. The really cool thing about it is it stores the entire history of a chat and makes it visible to anyone who joins at any point, so it's easy to catch up. You can also have it send updates directly to mobile, so you can use it like chat, or mute those entirely and just check in every once in a while. We used GroupMe really effectively at RF this year, and hopefully it'll remain a good way to stay in touch.

text.postfurry.net

There's no signup here, by design; this is just a place we've been using a lot to dump longer-form thoughts, especially for posting to Twitter. It's quick and anonymous and tuned for our own sort of text-sharing, rather than for code like most things of this sort.


Those are the main things we have so far. More stuff is coming soon, but if you sign up to at least some of the above, you'll definitely be up-to-date with everything going on.

I personally would also really like to hear anyone's thoughts, as far as how we can do better with inclusion, organization, or anything else. Leave a comment below, talk to me elsewhere, whatever. :) Just think of me as a cuddly glowy suggestion box, collecting up all these ideas and bringing them to folks who can get them done.

Comments

requesting membership yes

[drakelyn]

is me. new DW account just for these things. DM on Twitter if you want to confirm who "me" is. ;)

[soreth]

I have been feeling a lot more connected thanks to this burst of activity and generation of easier ways to communicate and share. :)