Messaging with project contributors

[Matthew Thompson]

Hi everyone. I'm going to talk about this in today's community call, but wanted to close the loop on what we talked about last week in terms of making it easier to see who has "joined" your Drumbeat project, and how to message with them.

--Matt

In our last community call, we talked about the difficulty for Drumbeat project leads to:

a) clearly see everyone who has joined your project.
PROBLEMS:
* The "people working on this project" stream displays only the last few contributions, not a complete list.
* Usernames should be clickable links to the user's profile. (Bug 555043)

SHORT TERM SOLUTION:
* Project leads: click on "Project Administration"
* Select "manage users"
* This displays a complete list of everyone who has joined your project, with clickable links to their profiles

b) messaging with project joiners
PROBLEM:
* no clear way for project leads to send messages to project joiners

SHORT TERM SOLUTION:
* Organic Groups module contains this functionality, but not user-friendly or easy to use right now
* Matt can export a simple CSV file for any project lead who wants one. This can be imported into existing mailing list or email client.

MEDIUM TERM SOLUTION:
* Simplify workflow for sending email blast to all
* Spec workflow for including mailing list functionality (e.g., Google Groups, etc.) right into "Join" process
* Work out a plan for the complexity of supporting multiple third-party messaging services (e.g., newsgroup, Google Groups, Mozilla "triples," etc.)