Think Global, Act Local, Communicate How?

[Michael McAndrew]

A question for CiviCRM users around the world...

I'm getting together a usergroup for CiviCRM in the UK - the focus being on face to face meetings.  I'm also thinking about the best way to organise communication between meetings.  At the moment I've done it through a mixture of the forum, blog, and email, but none of these seems quite right.

I asked the embyronic UK group and suggestions included a civirm.org.uk site, a google group, and a UK forum on the CiviCRM website.  Then it struck me that other countries might also have similar needs, and so I am asking this question more globally.

Perhaps there could be some level of co-ordination between countries?  Maybe http://local.civicrm.org/[country] would work.

Interested to hear opinions from everywhere.

Michael

[Donald Lobo]

How about piggybacking off the infrastructure on groups.drupal.org for the short/medium term while civicrm gets more users worldwide? There is pretty good regional breakdown there, and you can also get folks from the region who use drupal to be part of the meetings?

lobo

[Dave Greenberg]

We discussed this at our weekly CiviCRM planning meeting (which takes place on our IRC channel - #civicrm on freenode.net every Tuesday at 10pm Pacific Daylight Saving time). Opinions were mixed - but the main two suggestions were:

* We can create a UK User Group "Board" on this forum. Interested parties can "subscribe" to it (i.e. say they want to be "notified"). This approach has some "functionality limitations" - but we would hopefully address those as needs become clearer.

OR

* You could set up a moderated Group on groups.drupal.org. This option would give you some additional useful tools - but there is some concern that active UK CiviCRM users would have their attentions "divided" between the forums and that new space. Some of us also felt strongly that we would NOT want folks to use that space for support requests, feature suggestions etc. as it would not be closely monitored by the core team.

Regards,
dave

[speleo]

piggybacking off a Drupal system doesn't always do it for the Joomla community (and vice versa). Just my 2c.

[Michael McAndrew]

Hi there,

Thanks for taking time to discuss this at the planning meeting.  I read over the discussion (which starts at 05:50 on this page: http://irc.civicrm.org/logs/%23civicrm.log.25Jun2008).

Made me think some more about what exactly we need this for and correct me if I am wrong but currently the only need is to organise meetings.

Until other needs arise, I am leaning toward a UK board on CiviCRM.  The notify button just about turns it into a web-based mailing list and questions can be easily moved if they make more sense elsewhere.  It also solves the Droomla/Jupal issue

I did have some concerns that I wasn't getting notified about every post, but on re-reading the notifications, I see this is normal: "More replies may be posted, but you won't receive any more notifications until you read the topic".  I presume you are always notified of new topics?

I'd be happy to help out with any admin/moderation tasks and would like to join you for a bit at the next planning meeting, but 6am BST is a little early for me

Cheers,
Michael

[Dave Greenberg]

Hi Michael - I've created a new board for the UK Users Group (in the "Community" section) and appointed you as moderator :-)

http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/board,34.0.html

Let's keep in touch as to how this is working for you / the group as an organizing venue.