Okay, grumble… yet another app or platform to learn and monitor. Grumble. Okay, experience in other platforms and todays social environs, slack may well be a darn good resource… given the ubiquity of cell phones. I still think the forum and google group have many uses, and urge they not be dropped. For me, the “mailing list” is 95% of my hive activity. Yeah, I live far out. It seems more forum than mailing list, I’m old school… mail is more a physical flyer, or an inbox email. Perhaps the term is misleading.
But… if this is a large part of the public face, the Hive looks far far more active than other groups in the area. It looks alive. I’ve the last post on another group, and that post is three years old… at least that’s what my memory says last time I looked. The other thing is I believe it is web searchable… and if a detailed project were up and going, it might get hits. Anyway, sorry to ramble… just wanted to put out there that even if other platforms are emphasized, don’t underestimate the footprint and value of this one to distant outliers and lurkers.
Mailing list (or forum) is absolutely still necessary.
Likewise, so is the Wiki, and I appreciate that Brad was pushing for more use of the Wiki… even though I do an absolutely horrible job putting things there, perhaps because I rarely organize my projects well enough for this.
Slack is definitely convenient and I love how much use it has seen lately - but I’m wary of having anything important be on it. At the same time, Hive13 has had some kind of real-time communications since its start, and this is important to have because neither the mailing list nor the Wiki are good places for general “this matters now, but won’t matter much later” messages to everyone, nor for general free-flowing discussion and socialization. Initially, it was the IRC channel on Freenode, but the IRC channel has seen hardly any activity in ages.
However, I’d like to look a bit into ways of bridging the Slack with other things. I was looking at Matterbridge which Slack can talk to. Perhaps if I made some automation to help migrate longer/slower Slack discussions effortlessly into a mailing list thread, or Wiki page, and encouraged people to do so… who knows.
Yes, I was thinking the same kind of thing. Something that could push some longer term stuff that may desire archiving into the group (or whatever is right).
At my work they are jumping on the O365 bandwagon. They are pushing in order of group size and outreach:
Outlook groups
Teams
Yammer
Sharepoint
I’m not suggesting we do this, but maybe some kind of structure to guide people to the different tools/platforms would be helpful.
Sharepoint is really good. With the requirement that once you finalize the design and how any workflows will work before you even setup the server.
Most sites are half designed and 3/4 implemented before it is decided how they are going to be used. Then everything gets shoe horned into what is there.
I have managed several sharepoint instances. And the ONE that was done propperly was amazing, stable, and incredibly useful. The others.... they were ... not, not, and not.
I try to push for technologies that give Hive13 the option of hosting themselves or at least of being able to keep copies of data locally and in an openly available format - which is the case for the Wiki, mailing list, git, and for the basically-defunct IRC channel. In general though, I’m okay with how most things are now.
I’ll try to come up with some ideas on some kind of minimally-annoying way - perhaps with the help of a bot - to let a person take a Slack discussion and turn it directly to the mailing list or to a Wiki page, even if it’s something that requires a bit of editing or explanation. It’s a bit tricky to merge the differing mindsets - talking on Slack is more conversational and sequential, while Wikis are much more about editing and curation.
Sure. I didn’t mean for you to create something.
More like a guide to say:
Slack for day-day general discussion (making fun of stuff and broken things)
Mailing list for deeper discussion that should be archived (vote discussion, activities, money)
Wiki for project documenting and Hive capabilities.
If there is come cool thing that could grab a slack discussion and start a mailing list topics, that would be great. But don’t think you have to make it.
It’s sort of what I meant. MediaWiki has an API we can leverage and so does Slack, so there might be some possibilities here. Having a guide to point newcomers to is still a good idea in addition.
Perhaps a sticky post on this Google Group could point the way to all of the other ways in which Hive13 communicates. The same type of message could also be posted on the dreaded FB, meetups web pages and other social media.