To follow up on the poll about keeping posts on-topic:
The majority of folks that had an opinion want us to keep posts in this group on-topic and believe that we should pay attention to the signal-to-noise ratio of content in the group.
Below is my suggestion for posting guidelines to help people self-moderate what they post to the group.
This group exists to facilitate discussion about topics that directly relate to the New York City drupal community. We ask that posts stay on-topic, and relate to both drupal and New York City.
We make this request out of respect for the time of those that belong to the group and for the larger drupal community. The more content in this group/the more emails members get from this group that are not NYC related, the less they will pay attention to the group over time.
Beyond that there is an impact on the drupal community at large when we discuss generic hosting or module/drupal questions outside of the most appropriate forum. When people look for this sort of information in the future, they will look in the primary drupal.org forum or in the appropriate group, not here.
By posting content where it is on-topic we not only get to discuss issues and get answers, but we do a long-term service to the community at large.
As a general guideline:
If your post is a question about a general drupal topic, it belongs on the drupal.org forum not in the NYC group.
If your post is about a very specific detail of drupal, it belongs either in one of the special interest groups on groups.drupal.org or on the primary drupal.org forums, not in the NYC group.
If your post is about an event or issue of direct interest to the NYC community, and only peripherally about drupal, this is the place.
If your post is about drupal use by a group, company or project in NYC, this is the place for your post.
If you have cross-posted your content to more than a couple groups, it's probably not appropriate for the NYC group.
Before you post, ask yourself two questions:
1: does the topic explicitly relate to NYC (if yes move to q2)
2: does the topic at least peripherally relate to drupal
if the answer to both is yes. post!
Comments
Wonderful first draft.
People that have better luck with spelling than myself, please step up to contribute your $0.02 on what you think the guidelines should be.
------------------
Sometimes interesting things appears on http://litwol.com
Don't shut the door to dialogue
I agree that we need to keep things somewhat on topic, however, we also need to foster a vibrant local online community where people can participate, learn, and grow their Drupal knowledge. Too many rules about what can be posted here will kill the excellent discussions that I've seen going on at Drupal NYC recently. I really don't want to go back to the stage where we are only posting meetup and DrupalCamp announcements.
Dynamic discussions create a lot of posts and comments, which will flood your inbox if you are getting them all as emails. Unfortunately, the system doesn't support one email wrapups of the groups discussion. However, if you turn off email notifications and just check the site often you can very easily participate in the dynamic discussions going on.
There is a real value to getting local answers from local people you know and trust. Regarding hosting, I also did not find the hosting form on Drupal.org very helpful. I went with a personal recommendation from a friend in choosing my host. Ideally, that's the value you get here, the personal recommendation of a friend who you know. This naturally prevents members of hosting company marketing teams from spamming the list as they generally do.
The value of local discussion about other Drupal issues is important too. When I ask a question about a Drupal issue on the NYC site I get the personal opinions of my friends. When I ask a question on the Drupal.org form I generic response from someone I don't know. I think the personal touch is also helpful for working out answers nearly all significant Drupal related questions.
I want people to feel like they can post lots of stuff to the group site and make it a dynamic vibrant community. I have no idea what SHOULD be posted on Drupal NYC. Except for defining very general guidelines, I don't want to tell people what they can or can't post here. Doing this will kill the discussion we have been working so hard to foster.
I do find a lot of value in
I do find a lot of value in people asking questions about Drupal and would agree that there is value in posting a question in a place where the people know each other. I certainly wouldn't want to see that go away.
I know the current site doesn't offer a Daily Digest email, but if that's something that could be implemented in the future I think it would go a long way to minimizing peoples' concerns over the numbers of emails they receive.
There is a real value to
I totally agree here. I would much rather pop into #drupal-newyork or this group to ask for advise on how ready a certain dev module is for Drupal 6 than to put it into the abyss of drupal.org or #drupal-support. It's just a fact that if people know you, you're more likely to get the feedback/discussion you are looking for.
Given that, I do think it is appropriate to ask all to ask themselves, "Where should I post this?" and consider that we want to keep things local on this list.
But I've got to say that the notion of moderating a list rubs me the wrong way. If this is a truly a flat organization, then who can rightfully claim the authority to boot one thread over another? Furthermore, if off-topic threads are so annoying to the group, wouldn't the thread die immediately after the initial post? While I think some gentle coaching of, "You might do better posting this over in ______" is appropriate, removing posts amounts to censorship and therefore bad.
editorial policy aimed at building community is not censorship
First, I think we'd agree that we should consider postings to this g.d.o group and discussions in IRC as separate issues. They are very different things, especially due to the informal nature of IRC and the history of IRC's use in development communities -- rules/guidlines for posting on the g.d.o group should never be applied to conversations in the IRC channel.
I really respect the desire to ask within the local community. to some extent there are two competing desires and on the surface both seem aimed at keeping the local community useful.
For me, I exist within many communities, if I have general server questions/hosting questions, I generally ask them in other places.
For me, hosting questions are best asked to server experts, hosting questions are not drupal questions, they are apache/php/mysql questions and might be better answered by those that focus on those issues.
I do not want the NYC g.d.o group to become my only place for information, the only place I talk about anything related to drupal or technology. I want it to be the place it was intended to be -- the place for discussion where the circle of nyc and the circle of drupal overlap.
This is not about censorship or preventing discussion, it's about understanding that there might be a more appropriate place for the discussion. It's about thinking long-term based on the history of this group and other Free Software communities.
It's about thinking in a community-centric manner, understanding the relationship between what we do here in our g.d.o group and the larger drupal community.
As groups like this allow for more general questions (the ones that are appropriate for the primary drupal.org forums), the less we all pay attention to the primary drupal forums.
It's a shame, because slowly the health of the larger drupal community is being effected, as more and more forum posts go unanswered, or answered poorly because we're all answering the same questions but only in our private island.
When these posts happen, they should be re-posted in the right place and if not unpublished, the ability to add new comments should be disabled.
We could leave the off-topic post in place with a link to the appropriate post. Then you could get the benefit of asking your local community, and the community as a whole grows stronger by having the discussion where it is most appropriate and useful.
There is no desire to censor, there is a desire to make sure we are building community and not a small clique.
The primary danger is a situation where there are a dozen or so people in a group of 500 that like to chatter on about off-topic issues.
While having the appearance of being lively discussion it could easily cause the other 485 people to stop paying attention to the group. So, in the long run, both the local community and the larger community suffer.
Most importantly, I just want us to have a policy so people can make informed decisions about what they post. My proposal is meant as a starting point, not a position from which I will not compromise.
hosting questions
I think questions about hosting Drupal sites (as opposed to more general hosting questions) should be asked and accepted here. I had a really hard time finding good info about who could reliably host (and occasionally support) Drupal (and CiviCRM) sites, and it is clear from countless posts all over the place that many other people have as well. It's not like there we see posts asking about hosts all the time. I suppose if we had a forum where we could host such discussions and restrict this listserv to more pressing drupal group business (related to our various events etc), that might be attractive. Maybe that debate has already happened somewhere, sometime, too?
Christopher Pelham
Director
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing)
http://www.crsny.org
CRS (Center for Remembering & Sharing) is an arts & healing center located just south of Union Square in Manhattan.