Note: OGM Forum is no longer active. This is a static snapshot as of February 2022. You can browse the site to see posts, but the functional features of the site will not work. You can search or download a zip archive of the files from the site at github/OpenGlobalMind/forum.openglobalmind.com.

OGM Forum Needs You!

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#1

(also cross-posted to the OGM mailing list)

As mentioned at the end of the workshop, OGM hosts our “OGM Forum,” a discussion service using the open source Discourse software.

Sign in here: https://forum.openglobalmind.com/

Or if you don’t have an account yet: https://forum.openglobalmind.com/invites/33167533e3908379553bb28752a57dbc

In the spirit of community and barn-raising, I will say that we need to put some more time and energy into making it a more welcoming, more effective place to host our shared conversations and artifacts. It is currently not all that it can be, or all that we deserve.

For OGM Forum, I set up the software, and Jerry and I set up some initial categories. But I’m just the system administrator. And Jerry is certainly our muse and inspiration, but he is not the Chief Discusser. We need more people to chip in and help make OGM Forum, itself, better.

We need:

  • better onboarding for new people, and a better new user experience
  • short video demos of how to use Discourse in general, and OGM Forum in particular
  • more people thinking about improvements to the information architecture
  • more people doing network weaving: cross-pollinating, seeking to make connections between people and conversations both within OGM Forum
  • more discussion there!

The good news :slight_smile: is that we don’t have some big company that we do all those things for us – we get to do it right, ourselves!

If you need it, I’d be happy to give you a 20-minute personalized introduction to OGM Forum via Zoom, just pick a time on my calendar: https://calendly.com/peterkaminski/ogm-forum-intro

Or, if you want to volunteer to lead projects addressing the needs above, let’s talk! Send me email or ping me at +1-650-918-6101 (sms, whatsapp, telegram).

I’ll also schedule an OGM Forum Betterment meeting next week sometime to introduce / brainstorm / act.

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#2

Pete, I tremendously appreciate your selfless service in the ways you’re helping us to become a community, including the scaffolding the pieces of our enabling infrastructure’. It inspires me to support what you’re asking for to the best of my ability. The problem is that although I have deep (30+ yrs) experience in online community design n facilitation, my ability to deliver that support has significantly narrowed down in the last 5 years since I launched, Enlivening Edge, Campus Co-Evolve, and Future HOW.

What I could still do, is to play a coaching/advisor role if there were people stepping into the strategic role of Community Architect and the more operational role of Community Host/Facilitator. My role could include:

Sharing good forum design ideas/practices from other Discourse platforms, where, I’m participating, e.g.:

Screenshot 2020-10-30 at 12.07.38

See the “Knowledge Explorer” link in the right column in the screenshot below?
Screenshot 2020-10-30 at 13.26.18

It leads to this page:

Screenshot 2020-10-30 at 13.29.36
Screenshot 2020-10-30 at 13.29.36567×736 61.5 KB

Methinks when we’ll have more tags (and some tagsonomy guidelines to save us from getting lost in the tagrafitti jungle), then something like that can be useful for us too, no?

I’d also recommend we re-use, with mods if need be, the Discourse New User Guide that you can copy/paste into our forum form here.

Btw, does OGM have a Standard or Business account on Discourse?

#3

Thank you so much, George!

Perhaps along with individuals playing Community Architect and Community Host/Facilitator roles, we can have “steering committee” meetings every other week, and you can help there with more great ideas?

We are self-hosting Discourse.

I will look into installing the Knowledge Explorer plugin during the next maintenance window.

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#4

Super helpful, thanks! To copy it to our forum, it’s both copy/pasting the text, and downloading/uploading (or recreating/uploading) the image attachments.

For now, I just made a link to it, from the Announcements category:

#5

“steering committee” meetings every other week, and you can help there

would be happy to

maybe “hosting team” would be a more relaxed label

#6

lol! i agree, something like that is better.

background for my initial term: i was blessed to be part of a covid relief project earlier this year, that grew to be quite large and well-organized. “steering committee” was a term of art there for “relaxed, ad hoc, servant-management team,” being better than the alternative terms anybody could think of, and i still harbor that connotation.

sort of similar to [[USENET]]'s backbone cabal / There Is No Cabal.

I miss the old USENET.

#7

For a temporary on-boarding hack, if you want to post somewhere prominently on the first login our calendly links I’d be happy to add mine to yours. Or anywhere we suggest people join it.That way we can alk people thorugh until we get a good onboarding. Maybe we can record them as well (with permission) so we can see what questions come up.

https://Bentleydavis.com/schedule

I’d also like to sen people to OpenGlobalMind.com and they would find it easy to get involved. Right now it seems to be a leap. Maybe we add a “Join US” menu item and have the walk through there. Let me know if I can help. Maybe on the “hosting team”?

1 Like
#8

Thanks for joining the hosting team, Bentley!

I’ve added our calendly links here, let me know if you’d like any changes:

1 Like