[Eg-oversight-board] Ideas for fostering community participation: survey, IRC practice time

[Yamil Suarez]

Hello everyone,

I wanted to bring up a couple of things by email instead of during the EOB meeting or perhaps both. As a board we had discussed how we could increase community participation. Also, as a member of DIG I am trying to increase DIG participation, specially since participation has been down recently. At DIG's August monthly meeting I suggested two ideas that run parallel to the board's interest, and I wanted to share them with the board.

My first suggestion was to create a DIG participation survey to see what is keeping people from participating in DIG, how to better influence them to participate, and to gauge their current understanding of DIG. We are still just starting to plan this survey, but I wondered if the EOB would like to eventually use a similar approach of creating a general or targeted survey. For example, to get a better understanding of what is keeping folks from participating, and to get ideas of how they can be influence, etc.

My second idea, inspired by the DIG survey discussion is to offer IRC training and practice time. Kathy already made a very nice tutorial page for using IRC [1], though I can't seem to find a link from the chat page[2] to it. I would like to try officially reserving a time on the EG IRC channel for people to practice using IRC commands without feeling like they are interrupting others or that they will embarrass themselves. I would specifically like to schedule this practice time soon after one of our conferences where excitement will be hopefully still be running high. Though we can also have this meeting at a different time of the year, or more than once. 

These all makes me wonder if we want to come up with other online events meant to promote participation without waiting for the next conference. For example, for DIG we started discussing having a Google Hangout based DIG training session or even a DIG "open house". By open house I meant a time to give a quick DIG intro presentation and have time for viewers to ask questions about our process, etc.

Thoughts?

Thanks,
Yamil




[1] http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=community:irc-quick-start&s[]=irc&s[]=quick&s[]=start

[2] http://evergreen-ils.org/irc.php