some operational questions from my last message a week ago remained up until now unanswered, why I am replicating them here for easier traceability.
Choosing visibility and joining permissions of your group
If you allow me to make all groups semi-public people can join or request to join any of the groups at their individual pages, or all in all at Degrowth
Do you want to find short taglines for each group, like a short description in few words?
Since most of the categories are private, general users will not be able to read the description texts right now.
One still need to request membership, or send an email, if you want to post to a group. You are also asked to decide, whether you wish to form open group, to have e.g. an open lobby and an intimate space, or leave everything as it is, privately.
Please tell us!
Does the degrowth.info group exist; do they wish to separate their communications from here, or join later?
Who are contacts for the education and politics groups?
Are the descriptions for the two right above, plus narratives still being written by someone?
Will the support group want to have a public entry point, or a private space there?
In which canonical order do we wish to present the groups, if?
Sorry, I donât seem to be getting those notifications that thereâs messages in here. Arenât they automatically turned on?
I am an owner of the narratieves forum. I shall try to respond to your questions below in that capacity.
Communication
First, however, a note on communication between us and yourself: I know this coding stuff is second nature to you, but some of the things you write are hard to deciphre. You are up against the fact that much of the community have 1) much lesser technical skills, and 2) english is not our native tongue. A 3rd element is that when you adress @ gap - exactly whom are you adressing? All owners of forums? All in the core group (whom many wouldnât know who are anyway)? All members of the entire Agora? I, for instance, do not know if @ gap adresses me.
Please try to think of this when writing us. Your efforts are much appreciated (!!! ) and we want to help - but need to know when weâre explicitlybeing asked to do so, and details on what it is you need. Think Agora for dummies
Privacy
We would like to be quite visible as weâd like more to join - what are the possibilities in this regard?
A public lobby and a private space behind sounds like a nice solution re. privacy. How does it work? And do we need to then often check for messages in the lobby?
If asking people to send a request to join, would it be possible to ask them to describe their take on narratives, story and the need for degrowth and transition? In a form, for instance?
Description
I thought I had already added a description for the narratives forum. Can you please provide a link to the exact box I need to fill?
Is the âshort taglineâ that you request the same thing?
Links
Also, we are finding it difficult to get people to join the Agora. Could you post me a link to the exact page where one chooses to make a profile? Since I have one, that page does not appear to me.
I shall place this link in a mail to our group.
Agora
And yes - Iâd have to look up Agora to know the meaning. This may be true for more people.
[âŚ] I just looked it up, and I love the connotations. Maybe an intro text upon entry that explains what the word means? And a nifty picture of such an anciient public space
Mapping
I donât think Iâve come across this before. How do you intend to map us? And what is the purpose/categories? We (the narratives group) are presently trying to do this in a google doc. But not very successfully soâŚ
How do I make sure that this message also gets to Francois, who is co-owner of the narratives forum? @Francois perhaps?
Again, thank you for all that you do - and please be patient with the non technicals amongst us
Very best,
Frederikke
thank you very much for your detailed response. It helps me understanding where the caveats of the tools and omissions in our communication lie.
This platform tries to minimise the amount of email messages it sends to its users. Notifications always appear on the website agora.degrowth.net and are only sent by email if you do not log in for a longer while. You can always subscribe to individual conversations or categories with the circle button right next to the New Topic button at the top of every category, and with the last button below a conversation.
Generally this system will only notify you of activity in conversations that you participate in, to reduce the overall noise that is being delivered to you.
Yes, when addressing @assembly I am notifying the people whom I came to understand are group coordinators. Try clicking on it, which shows a quick overview who is part of it. Clicking on the groupâs name also sends you to Groups - Degrowth which gives you more details on whoâs addressed.
We can provide different see/write/reply permissions for user groups. For instance, a category can be publicly visible for guests, but would only allow joined members of a group to post or reply. Checking for messages ties in with the notification system above. You either select to watch a certain category, which will send you notifications for every action, or we can set certain categories in mailing list mode, which will also increase the amount of notifications that participants in conversations get in there.
I think it would be good to go through the security options of the categories, and the membership and interaction options of the groups together during the call that @jean proposed via email. We need to find a way that renders the groups visible, but eventually the conversations invisible, if group coordinators decide. Iâm mostly in for making all groups and conversations publicly visible, so anyone using a search engine can profit from our discussions here.
Adding a reason for joining should also be possible:
Yes, the description text from the pad https://etherpad.net/p/degrowth_working_group had been put into the category descriptions. The one for narratives is unfortunately still empty, as is the headline in the pad:
Do you remember where you wrote or sent that text? The short tagline is only a small thing I came up with for the group overview in
if it appears useful to anyone.
You can invite people by using the invite button at the bottom of every conversation, which also gives you the chance to copy an invite link, or they should use the blue Sign up button in the top right of every page, when they are not logged in. You can always check the site without login when opening a private windows (Firefox) or incognito window (Chrome) from your browserâs menu.
@jean and @gandhiano had been in charge of the survey on Degrowth, which I had turned into a geographical map for map.degrowth.net. I had proposed to create a separate group assembly for this purpose, but they were not interested in creating a more participatory process around the map. Could you share this Google Document (privately) with me?
To send a private message here, please click on my user avatar icon, and use the blue button Message.
Pinging people indeed happens with at-mentioning their username.
Please get back to me with any questions that you may have,
I seem to recall that we talked about being open to everyone, so do make a test of our forum re. rendering the forum public and all discussions visible. Then we can see what happens.
Have you made @ahac an owner of the narrative space also - this would be much appreciated as Ahac seem to be a little more tech savvy:smile:
When adding people to the forum: presently, people are asked to ârequestâ membership, but there is no âacceptâ button for us on the inside. Wouldnât that be practical?
Iâve replied to the About the Narratives of Degrowth group assembly with pieces of text that may be used for our forum.
If I change the text on the pad, will it automatically change on the forum overview?
We have a mail for our forum. Which users are on the receiving end? Francois and Myself? Adding Ahac here will be fine too, I think. Thank you!
Are the allocation of rights, like the above, something that we can do ourselves?
Now itâs in both places, I guess. But it will not be synced with the pad. Please, forget about the pad for now. Weâre working here for now, Iâd suggest.
By the way, as a moderator you could have edited the category description in About the Narratives of Degrowth group assembly by yourself. Remember weâre trying to move administrative responsibilities off of my shoulders and distributed it with you, in so I will be lesser and lesser involved over time and you take over curation and moderation here.
Allocation of permissions is unfortunately only available to site administrators. If any of you feels safe with maintaining ICT infrastructure, please step forward.
Great. Thanks!
And yes - we should try to not overburden you guys. All that we can do ourselves is great.
I tried to substitute the text in the about section as it said, but I couldnât write anything. Thatâs how it landed back with you;)
) and we want to help - but need to know when weâre explicitlybeing asked to do so, and details on what it is you need. Think Agora for dummies
