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| Author |
Message |
danr
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Increasing our Membership
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Oct 3 18:02 UTC 1998 |
A couple board meetings ago, I accepted the job of increasing membership. I
haven't done anything since then, but I guess it's time we get started. There
are two, non-exclusive approaches to this problem:
1. Converting more of our current users into members.
2. Attracting more users and members from the outside.
I suppose a third thing we need to find out is why more members don't renew or
continue to be members.
Anyway, let's use this item to talk about what we can do to increase our
membership.
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| 72 responses total. |
danr
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response 1 of 72:
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Oct 3 18:08 UTC 1998 |
As far as converting more users into members, I do believe that we have to
communicate more with the users, laying out how Grex is run and who pays for
what. I suggest that we draft an email message that gets sent to each user
that sticks around for some period of time, say two months.
I think we need this email because a very low percentage of the users get into
the conferences. Because this is so, few of them probably even know who pays
for the system. If more of them knew, I think more of them would be willing to
send us a few bucks.
Also, people like getting some attention. If they feel we're making an effort
to draw them into the community, perhaps they'll feel like they're part of the
community.
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danr
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response 2 of 72:
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Oct 3 18:12 UTC 1998 |
To draw more people into Grex, I'd like to propose that we start a "speakers
bureau." The idea behind this bureau would be to make available to local civic
groups, such as the Kiwanis, Rotary Clubs, and maybe senior citizen groups,
speakers that would go out and give a short talk about Grex. The talk would
discuss a little bit about our mission, our history, and our vision for the
future.
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mary
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response 3 of 72:
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Oct 3 21:35 UTC 1998 |
Those are great ideas. My only concern is how that mail
would stick around for 2 months. Would this mean it would
be un-deletable? Keep arriving every few days? I'd hate
to see any attempt at sharing information turn into harassment.
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scott
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response 4 of 72:
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Oct 3 21:43 UTC 1998 |
I suspect that was an ambiguous sentence on Dan's part. I took it as "users
who stick around for 2 months".
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mary
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response 5 of 72:
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Oct 3 21:52 UTC 1998 |
Of course. (Duh.)
Would it be helpful to have a couple of months a year
designated as membership drive months. During those
months there might be a mail push and items explaining how
our financing works entered not only in Co-op but also
in Agora. It might be easier to keep up enthusiasm for
the project if it was for a finite period of time, with
stated goals.
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steve
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response 6 of 72:
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Oct 3 23:56 UTC 1998 |
As long as we took the Grexian approach to sending mail to the
two-month folk, I think it would be a great idea to do this. I
think that one piece of mail sent would be reasonable. The impact
on Grex's mail system would be minimal, and if we got only a
few new users it's well worth it.
I like the idea of the speakers bureau!
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valerie
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response 7 of 72:
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Oct 4 01:38 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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devnull
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response 8 of 72:
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Oct 4 07:02 UTC 1998 |
If it's believed that very few users get into the conferences, then
I'm curious about what most users actually do with grex...
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remmers
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response 9 of 72:
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Oct 4 10:41 UTC 1998 |
Mail and party. (Mostly mail.)
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desolato
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response 10 of 72:
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Oct 4 16:04 UTC 1998 |
one solution might be to remove pine from the system. if people want to use
grex for mail, then they can learn mail or elm, both of which are less
resource hoggy than pine, and a possible side benefit might be that some
people who use grex exclusively for email might find it easier to use another
site...
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steve
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response 11 of 72:
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Oct 4 17:00 UTC 1998 |
In the grand scheme of things the choice of mail client isn't as
important as the fact that mail comes in. When sendmail catches mail
thats more of an impact on the system cumulitively than the user
reading their mail, later.
I think perhaps we should start work on the reasons why people
should join Grex, in this proposed letter to people.
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valerie
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response 12 of 72:
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Oct 5 04:13 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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rcurl
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response 13 of 72:
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Oct 5 04:53 UTC 1998 |
The idea of sending users of some period that have not joined an e-mail
message seeking their support was made several months ago (I would not
be surprised if it was a few years ago too). It does require identifying
those users, and of course writing the letter. Many people can do both.
I'd like to suggest the board, or just the president, ask someone to do
it with an understanding of when it would be done. The draft message
could be reviewed in coop - so us members can feel that we are also being
consulted (and maybe generate some good ideas).
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rtgreen
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response 14 of 72:
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Oct 5 05:00 UTC 1998 |
I think it's useful to ask the question about what do our users do here?
If we knew the answer to that, we'd better know how to appeal to them.
I don't know the contents of the syslogs very well, but is there a record
written at the termination of every PID, giving the userid that started
it, the program that was run, and resource usage info like CPU-seconds,
memory, etc? That would be a great place to start, if we knew which
programs were consuming the resources, which ones were started most
frequently, by the most number of users, etc. We could even derive
several demographic user profiles, and 'target market' individualized
mailings.
Are there any professional data miners in our ranks?
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davel
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response 15 of 72:
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Oct 5 12:16 UTC 1998 |
"You'd better watch out for the eggplant that ate Chicago,
Cause if he's still hungry the whole country's doomed."
I suspect a log for each pid would quickly consume all available disk, even
if we added more disk, on this system.
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steve
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response 16 of 72:
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Oct 5 19:02 UTC 1998 |
We have something like #14 -- the process accounting logs.
We already know however what the #1 usage of Grex is: mail. More
people use mail than anything else, in that mail is kinda like the base
usage of the system. People do lots of other things here like games, party
talk, conferncing, learning UNIX, etc, but mail is the universal constant.
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valerie
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response 17 of 72:
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Oct 6 21:24 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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valerie
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response 18 of 72:
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Oct 6 21:41 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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scg
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response 19 of 72:
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Oct 6 22:03 UTC 1998 |
ps is somewhat processor intensive. I really hope we don't get some really
large number of users doing ps whenever the system starts to get slow.
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lilmo
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response 20 of 72:
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Oct 7 03:42 UTC 1998 |
Why so many "w"'s?
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valerie
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response 21 of 72:
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Oct 7 16:48 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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danr
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response 22 of 72:
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Oct 7 17:12 UTC 1998 |
This response has been erased.
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mta
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response 23 of 72:
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Oct 8 03:06 UTC 1998 |
Ummm, I could use the practice with public speaking, so if it's not a problem
that I don't already speak like a pro, I'll do it, too!
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steve
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response 24 of 72:
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Oct 8 15:45 UTC 1998 |
I volunteer as well, for any kind of event that does not require
me to wear a suit. ;-)
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