Hi Sean and MHVLUG friends, We've found Slack to work really well for Hudson Valley Tech Meetup and we have added additional channels for related groups periodically with the intention of helping all of the tech community of the region to connect more easily/consistently in a single system. I think it's working well and I offer, for your collective consideration, to invite all MHVLUG members to join the HVTech Slack and create public or private channels as you see fit. Perhaps the more we all congregate in a single digital space the more easily we will all connect?
best regards all around, Kale Kale Kaposhilin Co-founder Evolving Media Network Hudson Valley Tech Meetup Catskills Conf 914.388.4480 @kalekaposhilin > On Nov 11, 2016, at 7:18 PM, Sean Dague <s...@dague.net> wrote: > >> On 11/11/2016 10:42 AM, Chris Knadle wrote: >> I'll offer my opinion, plus a number of options. >> >> Sean Dague: >>> This is a subject that came up last night at dinner. Right now we've got >>> a couple of low traffic virtual communications spaces. This mailing >>> list, and IRC. Both are kind of small subsets of the folks we currently >>> have. >>> >>> The mailing list used to be a lot more active. But that included folks >>> drifting way off topic and common civility. Both of which I think made >>> people wary of using this more. It's also a chunk of infrastructure that >>> needs to be maintained, including spam processing. >>> >>> This is kind of an open discussion about what should we do with this >>> list. Is having an email discussion list still valuable? Should we >>> instead double down on IRC (which sees a bit more activity, but with a >>> smaller group of folks). Or should we look at a something more web based >>> like Slack/Gitter.im/Mattermost? >>> >>> If you have an opinion now is the time to express it. We'll probably >>> make some decision by the end of the year here. >> >> IRC mailing lists serve different purposes. IRC is for more "immediate" >> communication, where the mailing list posts can be referred to later and >> is thus more "timeless" and more "public". The way one writes in each >> medium is usually different. >> >> In practice, I've found that Meetup doesn't seem to be a good >> replacement for a [separate] mailing list. Meetup is relatively >> expensive and seems quirky in a number of ways. For a LUG there's a >> suggestion (in the documentat on the subject at TLDP) to "eat your own >> dog food" -- that is, to use the open source software to run the LUG. >> Meetup is proprietary (AFAIK) and commercial. The "search" on Meetup >> seems limited to finding groups -- but groups I'm in are regularly >> frustrated that particular meetings and/or topics for a group never come >> up in search results, making the search "useless for that". Relying on >> Meetup for the mailing list and paying $10 or $15 / month doesn't feel >> "fitting", even though it can work. >> >> https://www.meetup.com/pricing/ >> >> Furthermore we find that the various mediums groups use for contact have >> different people on them, and coordination between running a Facebook >> page, Twitter, Meetup, website, mailing list, etc, usually doesn't work >> and thus the information is disjoint. [MHVLUG seems more organized, so >> if you're not having this difficulty -- congrats.] > > I'm already paying for Meetup, it has definitely brought in a lot of new > folks that weren't finding us otherwise. So I don't see that as much of a > barrier. > > Also, fortunately, we don't have a sync issue with meetup, as we used > mhvlug.org as our master copy, and events are synced in real time with > meetup. The code that does that is a drupal module that's GPLed here - > https://github.com/sdague/meetup_events. > > The current monthly email announces happen from the website as well with > node_announce, GPLed here - https://github.com/sdague/meetup_events, which is > pretty automatic. > > One of the reasons we don't update Facebook much is that the API that used to > exist for event creation got removed. Sadly. > > I'm totally fine keeping an announcement email mechanism outside of meetup. > That might stay as mailman, or the email addresses might be imported into > mailchimp or something, as long as the website can email it. > > > I think what I've gathered from various conversations is the following: > > * people depend on the meeting announce emails, make sure that remains super > easy to sign up for. > * the folks most likely to use the mailing list, are unlikely to use it if > it's hosted in meetup. > * for real time, IRC is preferred over a new tool. > > Given that, what I'm going to do is as follows: > > * shut down the ability for anyone to post to the general mailing list except > authorized users (that are sending announcements). Everything else will be > black holed. > * change the Reply-To for the list from List -> Sender, so that if someone > wants to ask a question, it will go back to the poster, not the list. > * not bother with an alternative location for a general discussion list. > * make it more clear on the website about joining IRC to discuss with the > group in real time. > > That's at least some less moving parts. > > As to why general mailing lists are dying off, in my experience it's a > generational thing. With so many communication options, younger folks see > email in the same way my generation sees letter writing. Which isn't good or > bad, it's just different. I've seen the same thing in open source projects I > work on, where there has been a shift from mailing list for design to IRC. > It's just a different thing. > > So, if part of the goal of the group is to give folks the tools and patterns > for interacting open source, IRC is probably honestly a better thing to focus > on than email discussion anyway. > > Thanks for all the feedback folks, it's been helpful! :) > > -Sean > > -- > Sean Dague > http://dague.net > _______________________________________________ > Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org > https://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug > > Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College * > Dec 7 - Saving It All And Then Figuring Out Where To Put It: Life With The > Internet Archive And Archive Team > Jan 4 - Jupyter Notebook > Feb 1 - Home Assistant _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org https://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) Vassar College * Dec 7 - Saving It All And Then Figuring Out Where To Put It: Life With The Internet Archive And Archive Team Jan 4 - Jupyter Notebook Feb 1 - Home Assistant
