Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Group Communication

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

> On Dec 8, 2015, at 9:04 PM, Jasen Robillard <jasen [at] 
> connexuscohousing.com> wrote:
> 
> Having
> someone take a "tech" lead within your group will likely pay dividends in
> the long run.

This is very important. People under 50 may have grown up with technology but 
others have not. If you want diversity, this is one. If you get too techie, you 
will not be attractive to the non-techie. And make the orientation of new 
members a nightmare.

Even the most savvy will forget passwords or forget which site does what. We 
have two websites — one public and one private. We have two calendars— one 
written in-house for the guest rooms and CalendarWiz for reserving other CH 
rooms, parking spaces, and reminders about inspections, deadlines, etc. A wiki 
that the facilities team uses to track maintenance and replacements, and store 
facilities related information. And many YahooGroups.

We are looking at using Association Advisor to put all of these under one roof. 
It may work with the exception of the YahooGroups. Email lists are quick, 
immediate, and easy to use. While people proclaim forums more organized, 
immediate is better and often essential. Most conversations are ephemeral. We 
did run into a major mess when Yahoo dropped several years of attachments. Now 
we paste everything into the message and store minutes, etc, on our website.

The files on Yahoo have not been useful except in the formation stage. People 
couldn't remember how to access them. ALSO Yahoo has started requiring phone 
numbers to register. (I don’t know if Google Groups does or not.) In the past 
you could answer the marketing questions untruthfully. They check the phone 
numbers in some way I forget. For people who don’t want to give all this 
information, I subscribe them directly. This means, however, they can’t access 
the files. They can only send and receive messages. 

Lists work better when the replies go to all members of the list. Otherwise 
conversations die and not everyone has all the information. Our main list sends 
replies only to the sender but the smaller team lists send responses to the 
list.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC
http://www.takomavillage.org