response 51 of 84:

Mar 5 17:34 UTC 2007

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.