[Chapter-delegates] [Chaptersadvisorycounciltaskforce] Chapters Advisory Council

[Evan Leibovitch]

On 15 November 2014 00:59, Alejandro Pisanty <apisanty at gmail.com> wrote:

> Evan,
>
> we are complaining about the communications tools that removed standard
> e-mail and list functionality, not only Netiquette. Some chapter delegates
> are showing how this is breaking our communications, discussions and
> participation.
>


​Fair enough. But this raises a challenge.

A segment of Chapter membership prefers the long-form editing, threading
and attribution that has long been available using email. For long-time
users it is not broken and does not need fixing.

Another segment -- one not well represented ​within leadership right now --
had grown up on game systems, web apps and small screens, which has led to
a very different kind of multi-user-conversation preference. Think (in
order of age) Slashdot, XDA Developers and the current king of the genre --
Reddit -- for examples of this style that have been implemented. They can
be very scalable and very effective, and codes of conduct can be strictly
(and easily) enforced. But their techniques and culture can be VERY
different, indeed jarring, to a long time email user.

There are many questions at hand:

   - Is the current Connect software a good implementation of the
   cloud-based-forum method of communications? Now that we've given it some
   stress-testing, I would say that the preponderance of opinions is negative
   on this.

   - Might other tools offer easier integration with mailing lists? Would
   email users be happier with a style more like, say, Slashdot?

   - Is there a need to expand the communications offerings in order to
   encourage those who are more comfortable with the online-forum style of
   discussion? And must this be done at the expense of traditional users who
   will find the style completely alien?

   - Is inertia from email-users good enough reason not to diversify
   communications methods?

The invocation of "netiquette" and breaking of standards has not brought
clarity to these issues; indeed it has obfuscated them.

One of the reasons I am moving so hard on the Advisory Council is because I
think that is not only a Good Idea, but absolutely necessary to assist in
the kind of collaborative problem-solving that could have made this issue a
lot less painful. It might indeed be able to help extract us from the
current situation.

Perhaps one good start now is to survey the membership on their preferences
of communications tools. I did that using SurveyGizmo for the Canada
Chapter and the results -- even with a small sample size -- were stunningly
diverse. Without this kind of research, we never know how many people are
being shut out of participating because of the insistence on email-only for
multi-user conversations. (and that's just from _existing_ members!)

Cheers,

- Evan
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