[Ubuntu-US-CA] Use of Social Networking

[Grant Bowman]

Hi Nathan,

Thanks for responding.  I understand and share many of your concerns.
I think our goals are just about identica(l).  :-)

If you want to use the new channels you are welcome to do so.  If you
don't you are not required to "stretch" yourself in any way.  I think
even limited use of these new tools for meeting announcements would be
beneficial with almost no additional resources and better leverage our
existing efforts.  Rereading the log at
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/CaliforniaTeam/Meetings/08November16 it's
clear to me that you and I were in strong agreement about the
usefulness of microsharing.  I don't see this as contrary to what we
agreed on.  Discussion immediately moved to the mail list with Joe and
James and you responding.

I am happy to accommodate the use of identi.ca, enabling further
notifications and LoCo member involvement.  All it would take is to
link the accounts.  As I already emailed you and Neal privately, I
look forward to getting you both the twitter account password.  Out of
curiosity I looked at the darcs repository to get the php source that
runs identi.ca.  http://laconi.ca/trac/wiki/Source

Right now I see that http://identi.ca/ubuntucalifornia has few
subscribers while http://twitter.com/ubuntu_us_ca has 14 including
both you and I and several others from Northern and Southern
California regions.  One of the benefits of using the same
microsharing platform is @replies facilitating conversation.  For the
benefit of others on the list, the full benefits of microsharing
extend beyond the use case of "short blog entries delivered to SMS."
See the URL in the next paragraph for more on this.

I also noticed in a quick search for ubuntu on identi.ca that there
are some official sounding channels.  Unfortunately they seem either
empty or (like ubuntunews) the same data is available as twitter
channels.  Unfortunately whoever is behind ubuntunews isn't following
it's followers.  The reasons for doing this are I think pretty well
explained in this audio call recorded as O'Reilly TV available on
YouTube. http://snurl.com/5ho3e - #twitter4biz

As for the facebook group, the discussion was tabled.  Being impatient
and seeing (to me) obvious value I created it and am again
volunteering to keep it maintained.  It's an experiment that can
easily be deleted if that's the best course of action.  Again this
helps us leverage our existing communications.  The facebook group has
14 members already.  Some names are familiar to me, some are not but
may be familiar if I knew their IRC nicknames, lol.  I am pretty sure
there are names on facebook that are unique which is great.  We can
use messages to inform more possible LoCo contributors.  It is a
little easier to maintain as at present any member technically is
capable of updating and adding content.  Again, administrative
overhead is next to nothing.  In my experience default permissive
collaboration forums work well as long as moderation is present
if/when spammers show up.  I will provide moderation until others step
forward such as you and Neal if/when you join the group.

More follows:

On Sat, Nov 22, 2008 at 10:26 PM, Nathan Haines <nhaines at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2008-11-22 at 14:23 -0800, Grant Bowman wrote:
>> >> I enjoyed the conversation last night on IRC [1] about using social
>> >> methods to help promote the Ubuntu and Linux cause in California.
>> >> I've setup two areas to experiment with spreading the Ubuntu message
>> >> in California.
>
> Actually, I'm a little concerned.  The conversation during the meeting
> was focused on whether or not social networking *would* be appropriate
> ways to promote Ubuntu in California.  We only discussed Twitter, and in
> fact, I promoted identi.ca as being far more appropriate because it is
> an Open platform, unlike Twitter.  But even then we agreed that we
> should use it simply for out-of-band notifications of events and such,
> and that we should discuss the level of detail on this list.

That's a little simplified from my read of the log file, but I am glad
you expressed this concern more fully.  As I mentioned in the meeting
I share your concern of having communications methods maintained.

>> Now we just need participation: events, discussion, wall posts, photos
>> and videos.  All suggestions are welcomed!
>
> That's the whole heart of the issue now: participation.
>
> The LoCo is working with an utter lack of participation.  We're
> constantly asked why we don't do more or provide more free stuff, but we
> have just a small handful of members who are active and resources are
> stretched very thin.
>
> I thought we agreed at the meeting that we would in any case have to
> proceed carefully with any new medium we ventured into.  It's very
> important to know what the expectations and scope of any new form of
> communication will be.  And most importantly, who will be responsible
> for maintaining each new presence?

Rereading the log I think it's clear we agreed to move forward with
microsharing and work out the details.

Right now as I set up twitter and facebook I am the defacto volunteer
keeping them updated.  I'm happy to show other interested people how
to fill in as needed for redundancy sake as any formal or informal
organization is well advised to do.  Since all this is public
information any interested party can see what I'm doing and do the
same.  Therefore, in a real way the communications are
self-documenting.

> The tenor of the meeting's discussion was that we need to be very
> careful not to put out a presence we cannot maintain, nor one that will
> draw attention away from the mailing list and the IRC channel, which
> remain our core online presence.  Even our wiki pages are neglected.  We
> really do need to address this before we can even think about anything
> else.  Microblogging works because it's an occasionally "heads-up"
> suitable for subscribing to on a cell phone.
>
> I don't wish to quench any excitement or new ideas but I'm very
> disappointed that we're being stretched even thinner now, and contrary
> to what we had all just agreed upon.
>
> --
> Nathan Haines <nhaines at ubuntu.com>
> Ubuntu California Local Community Team


I'm glad we are discussing this further now.  I see these new
communication methods as clearly reinforcing the usefulness of
existing mail list and IRC methods with minimal effort from anyone.
The wiki pages will get more effort as the group groups and that's
what I hope these tools will help us do - expand the group and
encourage participation.  I see nobody disputing the core online
presence of the group.  If I am misrepresenting anything I certainly
need to know now but I don't think I am.  Maintenance is covered right
now; relax and enjoy these new tools.  If you have additional concerns
we'll address them as they come up.

-- 
Grant Bowman <grantbow at gmail.com>
Ubuntu California Local Community Team


P.S. I'm following the ubuntu-us-ca list digest instructions and
updating the subject line.