Update: the feedback i have received is that it is nearly impossible to make these decisions. so lets approve groups that are properly titled, descriptioned, and welcome messaged. overlap will be tolerated except in extreme circumstances
I'm open to suggestions, folks. If you are an editor, you will see a block which reads group moderation queue (you can disable it if you wish). The queue has some questionable entries like North Texas and Benelux (belgium, netherlands, luxembourg), and Germany. Those are fine places, but they are a bit general and overlap with existing or obvious city groups like Brussels and Munich. So what to do? I am inclined to require that we accept cities only for geographic category. Rural drupal fans will join the group of their largest city. If you don't like that plan, please provide an alternative which helps us decide to what decline. Overlap is bad, because it hinders groups from achieving the ever important critical mass. And please don't reply with a Darwinism rant.
Comments
In my case
I live in Cape Town, but also have lots of events / contacts / drupal users in Johannesburg.
My group is 'south africa' , because I have users in cape town, johannesburg and durban. All in different provinces of the country. I can't limit it to just one city =)
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Oops! I'm sorry...
I had accepted those because I thought they were just sitting there.
I put them back in moderation queue now.
However, by that logic we need to ditch:
- Ireland
- Brazil
- Vancouver Island
- Central Ohio
- South Africa
- Bay Area (?)
- Denmark
Basically, half of them.
I also noticed that there seem to be 3 Germany groups:
- München/Munich
- Heidelberg and Mannheim
- Köln & Bonn
So I think the "Germany" one in particular is indeed a bit unnecessary.
I won't argue darwinism here, but I do think it might be worth a community discussion about it. I've never been outside of the U.S./Canada so it might make sense in other countries that are much smaller for them to be called "Denmark" as opposed to "Copenhagen," where of course here it would be silly to make a "California" group and probably better to have San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. groups.
Central Ohio
Actually Webchick, Central Ohio is what we here in central Ohio call the greater Columbus Ohio area. It includes the cities of Dublin, Worthington, Bexley, White Hall, Reynoldsburg, Groveport, and GroveCity which are all surrounding Columbus. It also includes the smaller towns that are just outside that circle. And we are smak-dab in the middle of the state. I don't think anyone here in Central Ohio will have a problem with the name.
second thoughts
the feedback i have received is that it is nearly impossible to make these decisions. so lets approve groups that are properly titled, descriptioned, and welcome messaged. overlap will be tolerated except in extreme circumstances.
Ok
I approved these groups:
http://groups.drupal.org/sydney
http://groups.drupal.org/north-texas
http://groups.drupal.org/austin
http://groups.drupal.org/benelux
These groups are a little light on welcome text. Thoughts?
http://groups.drupal.org/philippines
http://groups.drupal.org/czech-republic
http://groups.drupal.org/enterprise-intranet
Some folks like listing the country of their City. IMO this could be useful:
http://groups.drupal.org/hellas-greece
Should we allow this in the title? If so what is the punctuation standard we should use? I think i'd prefer City, Country.
"bigger group" vs. country
I like the idea of including a larger container for the group, but not necessarily country. For example, the "Denver" group has members as far as 6 hours drive away and several spread outside of Denver, but still within reasonable driving distance (~1 hour).
It feels more appropriate to be the Denver-Colorado group instead of the Denver-United-States group.
So, I would say that "Smaller area, Bigger area" might be the best guideline, but still letting people organize as they please.
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
Poland group ?
hello
What happened to "Poland" group? i crated it yesterday, i was in moderation, then some on approved that and now its again not published. i have send an email via contact from but no reply yet (i could not create new case).
I have invited other people from Poland into it and now they cane not sign-in :-/
Nice website by the way, cheers!
Group node type reverts to unpublished after non-admin edits
I asked the same question to someone with regard to a group I joined which mysteriously disappeared.
This is what I was told:
I think you're Poland group will reappear...very soon. My group did. :)
Walt Esquivel, MBA, MA, Captain - U.S. Marine Corps (Veteran)
President, Wellness Corps, LLC
Walt Esquivel, MBA; MA; President, Wellness Corps; Captain, USMC (Veteran)
$50 Hosting Discount Helps Projects Needing Financing
More overlap
So now we have "The Netherlands / Nederland" and "Benelux" which both include the Netherlands. Thoughts? Should we remove one or the other?
Also, we may need to look at more localizations if they exist. There are several groups now with additional languages.
Moderated
I have added them back to the moderation queue while we think about it.
well
to quote moshe below...
Are these extreme circumstances?
Unpublishing groups has the drawback of potentially pissing people off and "quieting" the growth of that group. The group owner may have just sent out an email to his 20 friends saying "go sign up" and then the site doesn't work. That's not a good image for the site or drupal in general.
My feeling is that we should generally promote the pages first and ask questions later.
Were log messages disabled on OG or is that a feature that is not available? I can see how logs would be handy for the gaggle of admins to not step on each other's toes (e.g. I just published Netherlands/Nederland knowing that there was some overlap...).
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
not unpublished
Well, I didn't unpublish them. I just put them back in the moderation queue so that those of us with editor perms can think about what to do with them. (It will keep it in the back of our minds.) The groups are automatically published by default now so that they don't need to be re-published after every edit. So, they are both still visible and available...just in the mod queue as a reminder for us.
good point
good point
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation
decided - unpublish
i unpublished benelux because belgium and netherlands are quite capable of own group. maybe several. i also emailed the owner.
approved a handful
I just approved a handful and denied the Pasok group because I have no idea what they do (and I told them as much).
I agree with Moshe's update above about proper titles etc. and have an additional tweak in perspective.
The two models for discouraging a behavior are preventive and detective: preventive stopping it before it happens and detective finding a problem and removing it later. The major problems we want to avoid are
It strikes me that both of these can be handled in a detective manner instead of preventive - that is,
There is a difference in perception "why haven't you approved my group" vs. "why did you take away my perfectly functioning group". But we can get over that.
So, this is just a long winded argument for people to be more liberal in their approvals.
Cheers!
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Growing Venture Solutions
Drupal Implementation and Support in Denver, CO
knaddison blog | Morris Animal Foundation