Proposer

@Veroca R. Sala

Proposer's Role

Board Member - Volunteer Coordinator

The advice process

Information gathered before posting

not much information gathered, I'm opening this process because I see the need.

• So far I have navigated the whole Talk space to have an idea of what could be done to improve it.

• I have some idea of how Tak works ( privacy settings etc) but i am aware I got much more to learn about it, plan is to learn on the go.

• I have read this thread about Talk Moderation that contains some interesting links to Loomio, guidelines etc, although there is a LOT more to read.

People/roles most affected by this proposal

• I guess all Admins of relevant Talk groups. Threads would be moved

• Communicorns:@Erin Jeavons-Fellows @Hanna-Maija (Animal) @Saskia (The Fuzzy Facilitator)

• Dreams team - not existing yet. current admins: @Waldo and Saskia

• Talk Moderation team - not existing yet

People/roles with the most knowledge and experience

I'm not sure!

The Proposal

Background

I navigate Talk, getting lost every time. I propose reorganizing the space for easier navigation of this platform.

This proposal includes two different but related topics Talk Moderation & Talk mapping. They would be serving each other. However, I don't intend to dive much deep into the moderator's role, guidelines, and its implementation or way of working simply because I don have much knowledge or good ideas on how to properly moderate Talk in the long run. I am at this moment more interested in reorganizing the content/threads that are already there, and maybe this structure is the first step to move forward with Talk Moderation.

• This will help us find threads and properly link people to the right places.

• It will also serve future moderators, hopefully.

I have no experience whatsoever.

The idea is to create subgroups within groups mainly as it was done last year in the Kiez Burn planning group 2020. Simple principle hard to implement...

How would the proposal be implemented?  

Talk moderation:

• I suggest grouping threads based on topics

• categorize threads

• use labeling

• All groups should be open. 

• All the threads will still appear in order of last activity first as usual.

So far what I see in 2019 and 2020 we have roughly these categories:

• Educational - tutorials, instructions,

• Callouts - initiatives

• Announcements - meetings, deadlines, information

• Discussions - collaborative threads --> towards advice process (or not)

• Requests

• Conversations, - uncategorized

• SUPER Random (there re some very very random threads)

Talk Map - Organizing what is already there

Groups and Subgroups Descriptions:

• Straight forward descriptions on the Groups and subgroups answering the questions "Why did I land here? What is this group for? How can I use this group? without so many misleading links.

• Perhaps a "footer" in each description linking to the rest of the Talk site (like borderland)

Here see these Slides that might help envision my ideas a bit better

PROPOSAL TALK ORG - SLIDES - Work in progress

Who would implement this proposal?

I volunteer to allocate threads and create groups and subgroups to build the structure. I'm not volunteering for the role of Moderation although I'll be happy to support

When would be this proposal implemented?

Whenever we have this proposal polished (?) and consensually decide to move forward with it.

What would be the cost (time, Money, effort etc.) of this proposal

No money involved, but probably quite a bit of time (?) not sure.

Advantages of this proposal

• Easier to find threads, while for instance searching for a specific Dreams-related thread from the past, instead of having to go to all archive groups of Dreams, the thread could be found in the Dreams Archive group I proposed. Currently, we seem to be going towards having a Dreams archive for every year where threads are put all together in a pool. Very hard to pick up.

• We could better link newcomers to the information they need to see. While joining the group, they would see the list of threads,plus they will also see the subgroups on the left to find what they are looking for or threads related to topics they might be interested in.

• Having a more carefully cared archive would help us pick up threads in the future

• I believe the longer we postpone this the more complicated it will get in the future.

• Having a sort of order established, (although not perfect) might lead to some order too, whereas if no order, we might just keep opening threads and sending bulks of threads to archive.

  What are the disadvantages?

  • Unfortunately, how Talk works, doesn't perfectly fit with the logic of organizing the threads in Groups and Subgroups as if we were organizing files/folders. This means people will have to JOIN the groups themselves in order to see the threads. We cant add them ourselves BUT only invite them. it can be a bit spammy to do so.

    We found a way around this disadvantage by keeping members of the group but moving the threads to archive instead.

    I don't see this as a major problem since these changes could be announced in a newsletter and/or specified in the description of the groups encouraging ppl to actually join all groups.

  • There might be more disadvantages I'm not seeing, hit the comments, I have no idea what I am doing😆

Note: This proposal is somewhat tied up to the role of moderators proposed in this thread