CRAG steering group website & tools

I agree with John that Steering Group is wrong but think there still remains a requirement for ways to communicate around specific projects that are harnessing the skills and attitude of people who originate from CRAGS but are not really CRAGgy things like partnership funding bids which would have a time and space then disappear.

I dislike the idea of a ‘secret’ group or forum but there again it is either private email or public to the world, there may be needs some thought as to an inbetween world which provides a better function than endless emails amongst a group on a project verses shared here where most or some of the content is not relevant and or private.

Solutions on a post card!!

I can reveal myself as one on the group and since reading ‘The Starfish and the spider’ over xmas reaslised what we had done was really inappropriate. So lets get on and fix it before we have another funding bid or some such which requires plentiful exchanges but is of no real interest to the larger group.

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

Hi John, I pretty much agree. Putting too much behind closed doors is not transparent and can prevent new keen members from getting involved. This wasn’t intended to draw anything away from the existing forum, rather provide an upgrade for the cragcentral yahoo group, which became unmanageable when we were in full flow. We needed to be able to separate out discussion threads, which was the main aim of this site. Only me, Jessica and Tom are in there at the moment, but anyone’s welcome to sign up, if that’s what we still want to go for.

The separation of discussion into public and private spaces is a difficult balance. There are some cases where privacy is needed. For example, when we want to discuss competitive bids, or projects with partners that require confidentiality. There also are various email lists and other documents that need to stay private.

The other issue is that the sheer volume of posts at busy times can overwhelm and dilute forum discussions, but I agree that could be handled by a separate space on this site if we wanted. We could do that, but when we’ve had a standard group page for Network or Steering matters in the past its not been well used. I suppose we could split off a duplicate Forum, but there’s still the problem of deciding which subjects should be posted where.

Overall I’m happy with the current arrangement of most things going on the Forum here, and only those things that need to be private, or especially high-volume projects, going on privately. Whether the private spaces are integrated with this site or not doesn’t matter too much to me. It’s just that it was quicker and more convenient to set up a new space than integrate it with this one.

Anyone else have any thoughts on how best to organise ourselves, whilst staying open, transparent and dynamic?

david

website team CRAGger Sevenoaks

Well, I’ve had a mull over on this. I’d to second John’s proposal to put all CRAG-related discussion in a group or separate space on this site. We could just use a standard, local group page, with the ability to toggle posts and between public and private, and between this public Forum and the private network space. What other tools would be useful, do you think?

There are a few more good reasons for doing this, to add to John’s. First, it’s easy to add existing members here to that group without the need to sign up twice. Second, we can post threads on both the Forum and on the Network space, giving greater flexibility as to what goes where.

Thanks John, for reminding us of our principles of openness and transparency. All the bids we’ve been involved in pushed us down the road of working in small closed groups. That model has proved frustrating and quite damaging for the community here, so I think now’s the time to explore alternatives. Ideally, I’d like to see a space where anyone with a creative spark or initiative (like Shane’s organisation of the CRAG gathering this year) or time to contribute, can check in and get access to all the tools they need to make it a success. In my view, that’s a more rewarding, fun, and productive approach to working together.

Any other inspiration or ideas? Is that approach the right one?