[Ubuntu-SG] Ubuntu Marketing

[Rui Boon]

Heidir wrote:
> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 09:32 +0800, C David Rigby wrote:
>> On Tue, 2009-02-24 at 09:08 +0800, Maung Myat Thu @ Billy Aung Myint
>> wrote:
>>
>> > I contacted LinuxNUS about it. Probably we can get them and it will be
>> > better because they themselves are students at NUS. The only problem is
>> > they have no idea about this presentation so we got to update them as we
>> > go along.
>>
>>
>> I am writing this just to TUSG for the moment.
>>
>> I have been copying Kheng Hui Yeo (icedwater at gmail.com <mailto:icedwater at gmail.com>) and linuxNUS
>> core team (coeteam at linuxnus.org <mailto:coeteam at linuxnus.org>) on most of our emails w/ Ho Fucai of
>> NUS-SoC on the subject. Kheng is also going to contact Ho Fucai of
>> NUS-SoC Computing Club.
>>
>> We ARE suffering the crossing and lagging effects of using email as our
>> only communications channel. For example, Heidir is working on a Google
>> Docs-based survey of users, but yesterday Ho Fucai said that he wanted
>> to do this via email from inside NUS-SoC. I saw that message, but I do
>> not recall if Ho Fucai used "reply all" when he responded to my email.
>> Perhaps not.
>>
>> We need to centralize communications. Otherwise, we are going to
>> duplicate and waste effort, because someone who really does need to know
>> is always going to get left off a CC: line.
>>
>> Google Docs is one option, but there are limits to what those using an
>> email account other than gmail can access. Perhaps one of the first
>> projects for the new TUSG site can be a project management module and
>> mailing list?
>>
>> Regards
>> CDR
>>
>>
>>     
> Hi David,
>
> If I could recall, the survey form can be accessed by anyone. They
> don't need to have gmail account or register with Google to fill up
> the form, unless they are collaborators.
>
> We don't want everyone to have access to private information.
>
> Are you proposing that our website have some kind of a document
> management system something like Google Docs? Why not we leverage on
> current cloud computing technology instead of building it onto our
> website?
>
> My proposal:
>
> For Edittable Documents: Google Docs
> For PDFs: Team Wiki
> For Images: Google Picasa
>
> IDEAS?
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Muhammad Heidir
> yahoo: dave33bravo | multiply:doksg
>
> Please avoid forwarding emails which contains little informational value.
>
I suppose that there are two issues here.
1) Email as our only communication channel.
2) Documents (both work-in-progress type and final copy) are all over
the web

Last time I checked, Google Docs does not support email notification of
updates to the documents. So by moving to Google Docs might mean a
longer lag time.

IMO, there is no technical solution to the
i-click-reply-instead-of-reply-all issue. What we need is to remember to
hit the reply-all button.

I propose linking this mailing list to the forum at new.ubuntu.sg.
Durpal has a module "that aims at inserting mailing list discussions in
Drupal forums and vice versa". It can be downloaded from [1] and the
instruction for setting this up is at [2]. If needed, I can help to set
it up.

This method is aimed at providing us with a centralise mode of
communication. By linking all mailing list messages to the forum, we can
get all the context we need there. The mailing list has the possibility
to get too long for effective communication. The forum, on the other
hand, is a better visual tool as it provides a better context. Moreover,
it is common to see forum threads that is more than 30 pages long, while
most email thread is shorter than that.

Furthermore, this allows us to widen our reach. Email, in this case,
will just be a mode of updating the forum. Users can also choose to
participate in the discussion directly via the forum. This is beneficial
to those that does not subscribe to the list.


For issue (2), I am in the favour of setting up a version control
system(vcs) such as git or bzr on the site or on launchpad. All
work-in-progress-files will be committed via the vcs. Again, this will
provide a centralise platform for the team to work on the documents. One
advantage of vcs, is that it forces you to provide a changelog, which
might be omitted if the document is changed elsewhere. Vcs, in the case
of git, can be configured to allow only certain users to sensitive
documents. However, I do recognise that we might need to use other
plaform to get our data. One example is the use of Google Spreedsheet to
get our user registration.


[1] http://drupal.org/project/listhandler
[2] http://drupal.org/node/40777

--
Cheers
Rui Boon