just my opinion but if we are going to post a notice about an event-- call for coaches-- a blogpost on OTS blog would be preferred over sending out a forum post with several posts in the thread or?
If you really want to promote a discourse thread to the general public, how about making a separate “Notice” post with only the info-- then if people post to ask questions, great.
better than sending out a thread with different opinions on how best to promote the event, as we’ve done here: Flossie 2013 London
i don’t personally feel that is the best way to go about promoting ourselves and seeking help (i.e w/a discourse forum post thread).
anyone else agree/disagree/feel neutral?
i know @anaketa did that right-- she made an event notice which was perfect.
then that became a discussion which i know was partially my fault, but then it was still passed around to get coaches.
i guess i feel that a notice shouldnt have comments, it should just be a notice.
OR that calls for coaches should be a blogpost rather than a discourse forum thread.
theres a difference between public/private and my comments were meant to be private-- but as OTS tries to be transparent-- those lines get crossed imho.
sometimes if i send someone an email, its something i should theoretically have as a forum post.
its confusing. im thinking though that in general i like a distinction between public/private.
and i guess it would be nice to start discussion internally where we work out logistics and questions, and then promote something externally to the public once all those little discussions have been worked out.
hi-five to anyone that makes sense to!
its early morning and ive not had my coffee yet, think i will go do that now:)
My feeling of the forums is that they are home to internal discussion in OTS. So even if a person ‘outside’ OTS joins in any discussion, they would be joining the internal discussion.
i.e I don’t think they are suited for advertising / promoting as for the general public’s consumption, like a blog post would be.
I’m sure there might be opinions disagreeing with the above, so that’s just IMHO.
Even with that said, (accepting my above premise) I very much like the idea of keeping even the internal discussion had here, completely transparent and viewable to the public. This keeps every person honest, and makes sure everyone who would post is thinking about doing things right, because their contribution will automatically be on a public record of sorts.
In relation to the post you mention, however, this is a specific technical outreach (looking for coaches). I’d consider it similar to a company advertising job openings on their website. So since it is not purely an announcement relevant to the general public (like, for instance, a new workshop date announcement would be), but of a technical/logistical nature, it is fine to share a link to our internal communications channel for comment.
That’s my 2 cents.
edit:
I also saw that it was just generally trying to advertise the event’s existence as well as look for coaches for it. I think general advertising like this can/could/should be done on the blog, facebook and twitter.
One of the ideas of getting more mailinglist stuff on here, was to make those discussions more public and accessible and I think especially the HTML5-Workshop has shown that this is possible and working by people joining as coaches long with the our growing coverage of the topic. Something almost impossible with our former model of mailing lists.
Another idea was to make call for coaches easier and less gate-keeperish to produce than having a blog post every time. Blog posts is also a model that doesn’t scale so well, when there are more and more workshops. By allowing basically anyone to post their calls here, we have a good way to link people to these calls via social media and email.
But I also have to agree with @rachel that this can be a little messy and hard for people to join in – especially if this already a 80 posts long topic like the HTML5 one was.
How about implementing the convention, to make a new posts summarising the important fact in the Events category once a specific date is set and have that link back to the other conversation in case they want to join it, too. One important thing is, to link to the first post of such a conversation then (using the link-button on the post bottom) so people don’t start at the last post of a conversation.
I think the HTML5 conversation, for example, could have perhaps been split into three topics - A) talk of the general workshop B) troubleshooting of technical issues C) Discussion of the actual event/workshop that was held.
Discuss actually has a feature built in to do this - people just need to make use of it. Of course, they need to be educated about it to know to do so in the first place.
If you hover over any post, to the right of it, there’s a blue “(+) Reply as new topic” link to split your reply into a new conversation. So when someone wants to talk about an event for a workshop, they could use that link to split the conversation out into an event-related discussion.