I'm a big fan of the way Thumbtack and other platforms award point values to discussions. Even if it doesn't give you anything in the way of prize returns, it could still make you drift to the top of the activity list and perhaps give you a "gold' profile. I know i fall for that sort of motivation :)
Since most of my email traffic is external to the team, communities will never replace email for me. To prevent confusion of what to post where and why, some well-defined guidelines would be helpful. Obviously sensitive information or internal discussions should never be posted here, but a quick and simple list or even super-basic decision tree might help people determine which means of communication to use.
What would I want? Ease of use, pretty format, for the community to feel "alive". One of Jamey's old requirements, which I think is important, is an email connection to threads. If I'm on a thread and can just respond via email, that'd be great. We should be able to make that happen.
I would need something persistent on my desktop where I can see activity in the community easily. If I saw a teaser like: "2 new community entries" - I would definitely click on the link to get to the entries. I would also use it if I knew that our team was using it. But a question for me would be: when should I use the DL OpenEI list and when should I use the Community forum. Differentiating between those may be tricky. I assume the community doesn't need to know when our team OpenEI meetings are, but maybe we do want all that transparency out there???
We could probably show pieces from http://en.openei.org/community/dashboard on the frontpage of OpenEI – so if you were logged in, it'd tell you about recent stuff happening in the communities you are involved in. We'd have to think about something on the desktop, but I like that idea. (Perhaps we could tap into the OS-level widgets and just show a website frame?)
That's an interesting idea to share our group meetings (or the last half of our group meetings) with the community, so that others could call in.. That would be a big step forward in transparency, and possibly in getting more partners on OpenEI. If they could call in weekly, we'd have the public feel more involved in OpenEI, which seems like a great idea.
I think most topics would go onto the community forum. If there was something specifically for NREL folks, or there was something sensitive (server configurations), we obviously wouldn't want that on the community. But a lot of other stuff, like our excitement around the UAM traffic, would be fun to put online.
Comments
Point structure?
I'm a big fan of the way Thumbtack and other platforms award point values to discussions. Even if it doesn't give you anything in the way of prize returns, it could still make you drift to the top of the activity list and perhaps give you a "gold' profile. I know i fall for that sort of motivation :)
Guidelines for use
Since most of my email traffic is external to the team, communities will never replace email for me. To prevent confusion of what to post where and why, some well-defined guidelines would be helpful. Obviously sensitive information or internal discussions should never be posted here, but a quick and simple list or even super-basic decision tree might help people determine which means of communication to use.
Ryan's response
What would I want? Ease of use, pretty format, for the community to feel "alive". One of Jamey's old requirements, which I think is important, is an email connection to threads. If I'm on a thread and can just respond via email, that'd be great. We should be able to make that happen.
Debbie's Response
I would need something persistent on my desktop where I can see activity in the community easily. If I saw a teaser like: "2 new community entries" - I would definitely click on the link to get to the entries. I would also use it if I knew that our team was using it. But a question for me would be: when should I use the DL OpenEI list and when should I use the Community forum. Differentiating between those may be tricky. I assume the community doesn't need to know when our team OpenEI meetings are, but maybe we do want all that transparency out there???
More thoughts