This Google Group has been and continues to be one of the most valuable resources for coworking discovery, learning, sharing, and discussion.
As Coworking pushes beyond the fringes and enters the dialogue of more and more people, though, the format can become challenging to enter and access. Google's UI isn't the most elegant, and it's tough to know you're in the right place and what the best ways to "get involved" are. Beyond that, the same questions get asked again and again, and as the mountain of knowledge becomes bigger it also becomes more difficult to know where the really good stuff is hiding. Rachel's email a couple of weeks ago about moderation policy reminded me of the problem, and I'd been thinking about doing something about it for a while. Switching away from the Google Group itself is a feat of insanity. Options for customizing the Google Group is very limited We don't want to lose what we already have, only add to and improve it's usefulness. So I'm excited to present the (very very very early beta) of http://discuss.coworking.com It's really just a very simple wrapper for the Google Group, but it lets us accomplish a few things now and more moving forward: It's easier to remember the URL and point new people to. It lets us continue interacting with the group the way we always have - a mix of email and the website. The website is just able to be tailored a bit more to try fitting our needs and fixing our problems We can take community submissions of hot threads and FAQs to post for newbies (more below) We can keep the Coworking Wiki (another extraordinary resource) present for discussion list users We can use the left hand column recommend best practices for getting into the google group beyond moderation guidelines, as needed Neat, huh? Like I said, this is beta, early release, and anything but "done". To move this thing forward, I need help with a few things: FAQ I'm not the only person who hangs out on this list a lot, so I'm not the only person who sees the same questions asked often. I really could use a hand gathering up frequent topics and, even better, links to threads with strong replies. Best Of… Has a thread saved your butt? Or really impressed your? Or really made you think? If you're like me, you "star" these in Gmail. If you're not like me, you might need to do a little extra work to track them down but please share these threads. I want to create a directory of them, highlight their contributors, maybe even excerpt them to help call out the most valuable parts. Any other ideas? Remember that this is a community resource, so I'm open to including other "discussion" related tools and resources. Let's work together to make the discussion group (http://discuss.coworking.com) better! -Alex -- /ah indyhall.org coworking in philadelphia building a community? http://masterclass.indyhall.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to coworking@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
