Hello Devil. Welcome to Hell.
If your user id (hover your mouse over your name in any comment, look at the status bar in the bottom of your browser) is larger than 199214 you probably haven't had the opportunity to participate in one of my Welcome New Users diaries.
That would be 789 of you more or less.
There are 13 of them that I consider the New Users Guide and I encourage you to take a look at the table of contents at least so you can see what kind of information is already available.
But don't panic, I'm always happy to review.
Community Organization
| "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great."— Mark Twain |
When I organize a new community my primary concern is that it reflect the interests of its members.
This is because I'm essentially lazy and have no interest in leadership.
I'm much more comfortable setting up durable structures and norms that I can whack back into shape if they go off the rails and then moving on to my next project.
You recruit new members. You agree to meet at a regular time. You set an agenda, follow it, then socialize. Groups break off and organize action. In mature and active organizations sometimes factions evolve and consensus is lost. Hierarchies and channels of communication develop, phone trees for instance. Hard to get much more private than that, only the NSA can listen to you; unless, of course, you use the USPS and self stick envelopes and stamps in a clean room.
Not to make you paranoid.
I seldom gossip on a party line and yet sometimes co-ordination detracts from the conversation. On DocuDharma we have a team of 30+ of whom 7 or 10 contribute daily posts or promote user essays. Since you get 2 essays a day many people cross post and we like that. Even if it's been Rec Listed, it's nice to be able to look at it in Front Page Format and our HTML is cheap and easy.
But to get back on point we discuss these things on a private forum because they really have trivial relevance to the actual activity of our blog and what relevance they do have is mostly boring.
- Who are the next promotions?
- Are you going to be here over the Holidays?
Now DocuDharma has a fair amount of content and a large group to organize on a daily basis so our Admin forum is fairly active, but it's mostly me posting the weekly forms on the bulletin board and everyone filling them in.
Except buhdy because he hates structure and norms. Thinks it inhibits creativity.
But others mostly also and I've gotten used to the tumbleweeds.
The important part is that it's available for messages of urgency or topics for discussion and that we have at all normal channels of communication that are routinely monitored by a large group of people.
But not everybody.
My other model is What's for Dinner.
That's mostly conducted in public. While I have had emails I vastly prefer to simply put up the available dates and let first come be first served. It's potluck and there is plenty to go around, though you might miss your favorite Jello mold with the pineapple, shredded cocoanut, and bananas.
What's for Dinner is essentially simple, one diary at a flexibly regular time once a week- Saturdays. I say flexibly because within an hour or so is good enough, although at some point people will start to jones for it and offer substitutes.
Likewise if we have a week without What's for Dinner that's ok too. Things happen, computers go down, family emergencies, whatever. It doesn't mean you have to hang your head in shame forever because you missed a stinkin' deadline.
It's just a blog!
Target time is 6:30 to 7:30 pm (et). If it's not up in time to suit you- roll your own. It's ok. No one is going to be mad at you. On the other hand I'd spend at least an hour composing a substitute and check before I posted to see if someone hadn't put one up already before I posted, and I won't even start working until 8:30 pm because of the one hour rule.
Although I will be anxiously awaiting your contribution so I can post the schedule and get my own dinner.
I do check my public email for problem notifications and I should probably email out reminders to people the day before except I'm so essentially lazy and there is that public notice in the diary each week after all. I'll also admit that there is one contributor who emailed me and didn't include his public handle so I'm not sure whether he's signed up for a turn or not, and again my laziness and disdain for email as a method for co-ordinating has led me to not follow up.
My bad.
But when I say disdain for email it's because of its fundamentally private design like phone calls and snail mail. It is two way communication by nature and all the conference calls and carbon copies don't change that.
The customary way of resolving publication glitches is to email everyone in the usual suspects list demanding to know what is wrong and then wait for your 27 responses to trickle in along with the dozens of cross talking, cross quoting emails to follow.
Pfui.
I much prefer private broadcasting.
Each year I have an opportunity to work on a digital radio network. There are 20 or so channels and 200 or so radios. Each group has its own channel and uses it to co-ordinate their work. I frequently get asked questions that I can't answer, but by tuning to the channel of the group responsible for that I can broadcast my request to everyone in the group and at least one of them is usually listening on their assigned channel and will respond. When I'm done asking I switch back to the channel I'm assigned to listen to so I can answer other's questions of our group.
Mostly nothing happens actually, I'm listening 12 hours a day and if I get 1 or 2 messages it's busy.
This is the system I'm trying to set up for Overnight News Digest. If anything it's going to be even more of a ghost town than the DocuDharma Admin site because there is so much less to do. While we publish nightly our membership is fairly stable and there's no need to accommodate random user input the way Top Comments has to.
They solve that problem by establishing a common mailbox with multiple users. I suspect that co-operative setpieces like the nightly mojo lists are sent directly from Editor to Editor, but they just as easily could pass through the common mailbox. I imagine the mailbox is kind of hard to manage, but I don't know what tools they're using and maybe Outlook and Thunderbird are all that and a bag of chips, Yahoo sorts by folder and that's good enough.
It's also visible by anybody who signs in by the Password and they can pretty much do anything so you rely a lot on trust of your group that shares the key.
The site I've set up can have a public area, but it's not implemented yet because I want to ask the other Editors opinion of my concept for doing that. The private part is set up to handle that discussion among others and to answer the burning question-
If you read it once it flags all new content nicely and I never expect the traffic to get much more than 10 comments a day.
The current group of Editors have been diligent and dedicated. Each of them has a distinct style. This organizational effort is so we can work together in a more collaborative way. I don't want people to take the holidays off, but you should be able to if you want to.
6 of 7 Editors and Editors Emeriti are signed up. Neon Vincent and Magnifico are co-Admins, but I expect I'll have to handle most of the maintanence until they get used to the software. Most of it should be very routine and silent. A look every day to see what's new is plenty of commitment and actually once a week before posting is all I'm really expecting.
By working together we'll actually have less individual responsibility.
And if we miss a deadline or 2 it's not like that hasn't happened before, the important thing is to sing it the next time it comes around on the guitar.
With feeling.
What's for Dinner -
December 13 raines- co-hosting common dinners
December 20 Asinus Asinum Fricat
December 27 fireflynw- Party Food
January 3 ek hornbeck- Hangover Food
January 10 MaskedKat- Indian
January 17 indigoblueskies- Π
January 24 ???
January 31 ??? |
Overnight News Digest
Friday- Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse
Saturday- Neon Vincent
Sunday- ek hornbeck
Monday- jlms qkw
Tuesday- ek hornbeck
Wednesday- ScottyUrb
Thursday- Sidof79 |
Update:
I forgot to mention that Monday maggiejean is substituting for jlms qkw
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