Grex Coop Conference

Item 295: New Conference Proposals

Entered by jgelinas on Fri Nov 26 20:05:20 2010:

This is where you should enter proposals for new conferences.
 
The normal procedure is this:  People kick around your suggestion for a
while - say, a week or two.  If the cfadms see that there's a lot of
interest, they'll normally email you to discuss a few details.  If they
don't, you can email cfadm to say *you're* still interested, and the
conference will be set up.
 
Obviously, there are no guarantees that anyone will ever join or read
your conference.  If this matters to you, you may want to gauge others'
interest before starting.  (We've had a very few people grouse along
the lines of "What's wrong with this system, anyway?  I set up this
neat conference, but it's been completely dead!".  Other
conferences have just quietly expired, to nobody's apparent dismay.)
 
Ideally, you should propose a name for the conference, give some idea
what it's intended to discuss or accomplish, and propose a fairwitness
or fairwitnesses - preferably with the agreement of those you propose.

-albaugh, Coop9, Item 8.
13 responses total.

#1 of 13 by cross on Fri Nov 26 20:20:06 2010:

This seems overly cumbersome in this day and age.  We have so little usage
on Grex, that kicking around ideas for a few weeks isn't likely to generate
much, if any, discussion.  To the extent that it did, I'd imagine that much
of it, while probably well-intentioned, would ultimately be counter-productive
in the sense it would likely take the form of asking the requestors to justify
their requests, which, I think, is a waste of time.  At this point, if anyone
wants to use Grex, let's just let them use it how they like, without a lot
of vetting.


#2 of 13 by rcurl on Fri Nov 26 20:49:11 2010:

Very few people use any conference except agora. Is there a counter for the
use of all the present conferences? 


#3 of 13 by cross on Fri Nov 26 20:51:18 2010:

I reallydoubt it.


#4 of 13 by jgelinas on Fri Nov 26 20:53:04 2010:

Dan, all I'm doing here is giving folks a place to request conferences.
 What happens next, we'll determine when someone asks for one. :)


#5 of 13 by cross on Fri Nov 26 21:06:21 2010:

That's fine, Joe.  But grex does tend to get wrapped around the axle when it
comes to following procedure.  I think that's going to hurt us going forward;
people need to get used to being more agile and accepting of things that
aren't the way that things have always been.


#6 of 13 by kentn on Fri Nov 26 21:24:11 2010:

Given the low usage of conferences, we probably should create new ones
rather quickly if there is a little interest and someone willing to run
it.  The amount of disk space is rather trivial nowadays, so no big
issue there.  And seeing some new life in the conferences would be good.
If we create a new conference, be sure to announce it in agora so others
can see and maybe try it out.


#7 of 13 by veek on Sat Nov 27 14:39:08 2010:

resp:5 totally!
---
1. What is the command tsty runs to add new accounts? Is it done via 
sudo? On M-net, you had this command that a volunteer could manually run
 that would create an account.. I was thinking, to speed up account 
creation, would it be possible to allow ANY member to create said
account?


#8 of 13 by jgelinas on Sat Nov 27 16:03:00 2010:

To *create* an account, or to *validate* an account?  The command to
validate an account is, IIRC, "validate."  It can only be run by members
of the 'porters' group, again IIRC.


#9 of 13 by veek on Sat Nov 27 18:36:40 2010:

oops! apologies - 'validate'. thank you.


#10 of 13 by tsty on Sat Dec 11 07:17:31 2010:

  
re 7 ... cmmand is   validate .. i actualy use an alias for it.
  


#11 of 13 by remmers on Sat Dec 11 17:39:58 2010:

The procedure outlined by Joe in resp:0 dates from an era when there
were lots of active conferences and folks were concerned about topic
overlap.  A reqest dialog might go like this -

    REQUESTER:  I'd like to have a conference where we talk about ABC.

    RANDOM RESPONDENT:  There's already an XYZ conference where they
    talk about that.  It's pretty active.

    REQUESTER:  Oh, ok, never mind then, I'll go to conference XYZ.

Nowadays it's difficult to imagine that dialog taking place.

I'd favor simplifying the process.

Now, does anybody want a new conference?


#12 of 13 by veek on Sat Dec 11 17:56:08 2010:

we still need to advertise and update the website to reflect all this..


#13 of 13 by cross on Sat Dec 11 21:43:07 2010:

Anybody can check out the web repository and start updating stuff.  Send
patches to staff.


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