Published
2007-07-12 09:44
In the past few weeks a few events have occured that make us proud of CiviCRM and the community around it. It has also been a good learning experience for some of us. As a growing project, we are glad that to have such a open, supportive community around us.
- The list has to begin with Wes and the team at Code for Change. Seeing them move forward with CiviCRM standalone and CiviCRM integration with WebGUI is awesome. We have a pretty active IRC channel, and its nice to see them and a few regulars out there providing support and help to folks
- There was a pretty good interaction between Keith and John on the CiviCRM mailing list regarding support for contributions and households. The end result was a mockup by Keith of a potential solution, something which definitely helps us a fair amount
- There was an interesting interchange between the CiviCRM team and a few users on the forum regarding IE7 compatibility. David Geilhufe has a good blog post about this. I think both sides got a better appreciation of life on the other side.
- In the recent past, a few people have asked for references on the mailing list. The response to this has been extremely low.
- Both Dave Greenberg and myself sent mail to a specific group of people who we know use CiviCRM quite a bit with regard to the above. I had a success rate of 33% (1 out of 3), Dave had a success rate of 12.5% (1 out of 8). Coincidentally it was the same person who responded to our emails (thanx joanna!). Its a bit disappointing when folks do not respond to email.
- We need to figure out how to get folks involved in responding and helping people on the forum. This was working quite nicely on the mailing list, but the switch to the forums has decreased this significantly
- We need to get more folks to scratch their own itch and contribute back to the community. There are lots of ways that folks can contribute back even if you cannot code. Some ideas are listed here
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Comments
Hi there Lobo --
A few thoughts, which I hope supplement David Geilhufe's:
a) A useful way to ensure that more people keep aware of more topics on the forum is to do a weekly digest of all unanswered or partially-answered requests for assistance made on the forum. This weekly newsletter could be sent out to the all registered users of the CiviCRM site, both reminding them and giving them another opportunity to contribute back.
b) Ensure that knowledge is folded back into the wiki. Putting lots of prompts in the forum email alerts and pre-placed text in the textareas could help remind people to do this; moderators should ensure that threads are "wrapped up" to the satisfaction of the original poster, strongly encouraging them (and pointing them to the right wikipage) to add to the wiki themselves.
c) The newsletter I mentioned above could also have a "weekly wiki swarm" section, where you put a few specific pages up for review, and focus the community's attention on it. A little hacking could also choose a link to a random documentation wikipage (or page in a sequence) to put at the top of each SMF forum topic, encouraging readers to visit it and review if necessary. This would complement the excellent work already done on the documentation.
Hope these are helpful,
Tom L
hey tom:
those are some pretty good ideas. Considering the above work is weekly, we could potentially harness a volunteer from the community on a monthly basis to do the above
So, could you be the first monthly volunteer (for rest of july/august) to do the weekly forum capsule and weekly wiki swarm (ideas a and c). With regard to b, can u be a bit more specific and give us examples of how we sould do it with regard to some current forum topics
thanx
lobo