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A few ideas have been rattling around in my brain. I guess there are two issues: (1) How to make Grex more visible, and (2) how to entice people to stick around, once they've taken a look at it. One easy, low-cost way to address (1) is to put out information about Grex in public places. In the pre-internet days of the early 1990s, the Grex publicity committee used to walk around Ann Arbor putting up fliers with Grex's phone number. The hardcopy flier approach was pretty effective in its day. Nowadays we can do the equivalent on the World Wide Web, on a global scale, by putting up electronic "fliers" on places where people can post things and which other people use as resources for finding things. I'm thinking of social sites like Upcoming (http://upcoming.org) for announcing upcoming events, and Delicious (http://del.icio.us) for sharing bookmarks. I've started putting up a few of these electronic "fliers" myself. On Upcoming, I've started posting announcements, in the "Ann Arbor" metro section, of weekly Saturday walks and lunches. At this writing, the URL for the March 10, 2007 walk is http://upcoming.org/event/158733/ (although it will disappear once the date has passed), and I'll be posting the lunch info on Upcoming as well, as soon as I know the location. Anybody who keeps track of upcoming Ann Arbor events (URL: http://upcoming.org/metro/mi/aa) will see this announcement. (I'm attaching a "grex" tag to each such event, so that http://upcoming.org/tag/grex gives you a complete list. Google indexes upcoming.org - try a Google search on "ann arbor" grex. Another source of visibility is http://del.icio.us, a very popular social bookmarking site. People can post URLs of websites and attach descriptive category labels called "tags". The tags help me find websites I've bookmarked and, since they're public by default, help other people find websites relevant to their interests. For example, somebody interested in the PHP programming language could open the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/php to see a list of all sites any user has tagged "php", or go to http://del.icio.us/popular/php to see sites that a LOT of people have tagged php. Sort of like a search engine, but returning results based on human judgement of relevance rather than Google's algorithmic approach. As an example of what can be done, I posted http://cyberspace.org to Delicious, attached a brief description of what Grex is about, and gave it the tags "annarbor", "forums", "unix", "ssh", "free", "501c3", "organization", "nonprofit", and "shellaccounts". (And anybody else with a Delicious account can do the same, perhaps with a different tag set.) Anybody tracking any of those topics on Delicious will see the listing. (Go to http://del.icio.us/jremmers/grex to see my description.) I don't know how much effect this will have in attracting new people to Grex, but Delicious has over a million users. There are no doubt a lot of other places on the web where Grex can be publicized with little effort and no cost. And anybody with the time and interest can do it - you don't have to be a board or staff member. Issue #2 - how to make it more attractive for people to stick around once they're here - is more difficult. I have some thoughts about how this might be approached for the "bbs" part of Grex, but this response has grown way long, so I think I'll save the ideas for later.
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