This is super interesting and useful, thanks Peter! I wonder how much common tools we all use. Let’s all jump on this bandwagon.
- slack - just for the organisers to chat about organising things. Around the time slack became the de facto online hangout place for communities was also around the time we were struggling with some moderation issues on the mailing list and we didn’t really want to add a unmoderatable platform to the mix
- team inbox - custom shared inbox software for letting all the organisers read and reply to the various email addresses we use for organising. It’s deployed on a vps and uses aws ses from mail delivery (it’s not oss as it was developed by an organiser as a potential saas product)
- gandi - our registrar - we’ll almost certainly move off to porkbun when the next renewal comes up.
- zoom - originally for remote meetings in the Covid era, now for getting recordings of our meetings
- domain name - w
e’ve used community pledge drives to fund the registration in the past, will probably do so again when it next comes up for renewal- dreamhost - it’s hanging off a shared hosting plan two of the organisers have for lots of personal projects so again - just swallowed by them
- eventbrite - originally a free plan, but we scripted in a bunch of draft events for the next year to avoid the price hike
- slack - free plan - but we share the same struggles Peter mentioned about the paywall and losing institutional knowledge
- harmonia.io - on a custom free plan (it was built by one of the organisers) - team inbox - not a public saas product, but essentially the same as harmonia (the tool was developed by the same organiser)
- socials - mostly mastodon (https://ruby.social/@lrug) these days, but there’s a vestigial presence of twitter. In both cases almost 100% meeting announcements. We have a group on LinkedIn that basically says we’re there to name squat, don’t join it and to follow us elsewhere.
Things we’ve considered :
- moving the mailing list to google groups
- pros: better moderation; better delivery (dmarc etc); better archive UX
- cons: needs a google account?; importing the old archive?
- public slack
- pros: people like slack more than mailing lists these days
- cons: cost; lack of moderation tools
- meetup
- pros: discoverability - there’s a definite cost to not being on here
- cons: cost; lock-in; literally every else about the platform (I hate it so much - but maybe I should swallow that rage)
- eventbrite replacement
- pros: cost; we really only need ticketing nothing else from eventbrite
- cons: will the alt platforms pull the same “no more free” that eventbrite and meetup have pulled?
Things we’ve struggled with:
- sharing the load among organisers - our original plan was to have each organiser be responsible for a single monthly meeting, but this didn’t scale (easy to just switch off when you’re not actively engaged in making something happen for a few months). Almost certainly this is a personal failing as I ran the group solo for ~10yrs so just didn’t really know how to share
- maintaining a pool of organisers - partly the above, partly were not really set to work with organisers of differing (& valid!) levels of engagement (e.g. keen to help, but not to host)
- finding venues - we had a single venue sponsor for a long time, but they folded in 2019 and ever since we’ve been touring offices in London, but it’s a struggle and it means we don’t know what the AV or capacity situation might be for any given month
- advance planning - we’d really like to get to place where meetings are organised months in advance, to give plenty of notice to people and drive up attendance, but it’s painful to get ahead especially if a venue or speaker pulls out and we have to go into reactive mode
- diversity - our record on speakers is pretty poor; our record on organisers was good when it initially stopped being just me, isn’t anymore; our record on attendance is ok, could be better. There’s a “most of the speakers are white men” problem for sure, but it is also hard for us to get _new_ speakers at all. There is a core group of people who are often keen to talk and we favour a policy of “accept any talk so that there’s definitely a meeting each month” which probably works against us here.
Almost certainly there’s more! Would love to hear other groups tools and struggles! In particular I’m interested in how you keep your community alive outwith the meetings.