Re: Groups.io [was How does your community handle internal communications?
From: Beverly Jones Redekop (beverly.jones.redekopgmail.com)
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2016 13:12:36 -0700 (PDT)
#7 sounds amazing!!!! That would solve most of the "too many messages"
issues.

"7. Each subscriber can mute a message thread. Like the recent gardening
dispute or the nanny requests, one can select mute and not see any other
messages in that thread. Your own groups page shows what threads you have
muted."

On Sun, Sep 18, 2016, 12:46 PM Sharon Villines <sharon [at] sharonvillines.com>
wrote:

>
>
> > On Sep 18, 2016, at 2:39 PM, Beverly Jones Redekop <
> beverly.jones.redekop [at] gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > An hour away, at Groundswell Cohousing at Yarrow Ecovillage, we use a
> > Google group email too. In the footer of each message is a link to the
> > "cheat sheet" with links to everything (calendar, community dinner
> > schedules, guidelines for using our wastewater system, members of
> > committees, minutes, etc...). A lot of this will move to a new website or
> > strata software "soon," but we've been using the Google group for seven
> > years.
>
> A new platform for group communications is Groups.io. They just
> transferred my ~3000 member neighborhood list from Yahoo without a hitch.
> All settings remained the same. They also transferred the 12 years of
> archives — the list now receives ~900 emails a month. They can’t transfer
> files. We had watched YahooGroups decline in services and reliability for
> years but exploration of Google resulted in the conclusion that it was not
> much better and we couldn’t transfer easily.
>
> Groups.io also sent a message to each subscriber explaining the change and
> only one person has asked me what the address of the new group was. 1 of
> 3,000. I assume I will get more questions later from people who don’t read
> or post often, but that was amazing. People love the new list. (I’m still
> looking into transferring our cohousing lists.)
>
> I pasted in two messages below  that I sent to my list about why Groups.IO
> was better
>
> ONE — THOUGHTS ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF CHANGING
>
> Groups.io was recommended by a list member. I’ve been exploring it and am
> considering moving the list there. It has many advantages:
>
> 1. They will transfer the whole list and our archives. I have assurances
> from other groups that this has been done for their much larger lists
> without a hitch. There are no storage limits except for files and
> attachments. We don’t allow attachments and don’t use the files often. But
> the limit on those is 1 GB.
>
> 2. The list works very much like YahooGroups with many more features.
>
> 3. People can sign up using only their name and email address — no account
> set up. No email account. No phone number.
>
> 4. People can be automatically be removed from moderated status after a
> set number of approved messages. This will be a great service to
> moderators. (We moderate new members to prevent spam.)
>
> 5. We escape from the Yahoo mistake of making us a restricted group so new
> members are automatically approved. Removes the appearance of being a
> elitist list.
>
> 6. The list can have unlimited subgroups. An example is a travel list that
> sets up subgroups for those who take specific trips or have visited
> specific countries. Then the list members can find people who went on that
> trip or that country or ask questions. Anyone on the main list can also
> subscribe to subgroups.
>
> On TakomaDC people frequently have set up separate lists for children’s
> issues, sales, crime, Metro Development. That would not be necessary they
> could be subgroups of the main list.
>
> 7. Each subscriber can mute a message thread. Like the recent gardening
> dispute or the nanny requests, one can select mute and not see any other
> messages in that thread. Your own groups page shows what threads you have
> muted.
>
> 8. For those who use #hashtags, they can be used in messages to make
> searches for those messages are easier. I once tried to search for Takoma
> Station Tavern, but it was impossible. There were too many messages for the
> Takoma  Metro Station, Takoma gas station, etc. There were hundreds of
> messages. #Takoma Station Tavern would have been possible to search. Of
> course not everyone would use these, but … Hashtags that have been used are
> available on the group’s webpage.
>
> 9. A Wiki. A wiki is an organized information resource like Maggie’s List
> that all subscribers can update. If “all members” becomes a problem, a few
> can be authorized to do this.
>
> 10. A calendar, where you can schedule events and send reminders. We
> haven’t used this often but did use it one year when we had few trick or
> treaters and wanted people to know where there would be treats.
>
> 11. A poll feature similar to what we have now.
>
> 12. A full featured database, where we can define tables with different
> column types.
>
> 13. Photos and files sections.
>
> 14. A good business model. This ensures there will be no ads and that
> features won’t be withdrawn because Yahoo has a new CEO The focus of Groups
> IO is specifically making the best email list service available. For $10 a
> month more features are available including 10 GB of storage. It is
> unlikely that we would need this but I think we could easily get
> contributions from subscribers equal to $120 a year.
>
> More information:
> https://groups.io/static/about
>
>
> TWO-- WHY I TRUST THE CHANGE
>
> I’ve received questions off-list about why Groups.io better than
> YahooGroups.com. If groups can be so clear and simple, why can’t
> YahooGroups? You would think they would improve themselves the same way.
>
> The answer is that Yahoo is not focused on groups. No one knows what they
> are focused on, but it isn’t groups. They do the least they can, and even
> eliminate features, to retain enough group members to raise the most money
> possible. If a feature makes users happy, but doesn’t increase income over
> costs, it is eliminated. Does that hurt anyone? The day they summarily
> deleted all attachments to messages? To 10 years of the history of an
> organization?
>
> Groups.io isn’t a charity or volunteer organization either. Instead it has
> a good business model that is focused on its key product. It offers free
> services to groups to attract and develop the possibilities of groups. As
> businesses and social groups become more developed and need more services,
> they pay an affordable fee for those services: $10 a month. In time, there
> will be more services, I’m sure, as the Groups.io founder, the staff, the
> moderators, and the users have more needs or see more uses for groups.
> There is active interaction between the founder, other programmers,
> moderators, and  users.
>
> The founder of Groups.io, Mark Fletcher, is a programmer, not a CEO hired
> for management skills, although he has lots of  those and a history of
> leadership in software companies: founder and CEO of the news aggregator
> website, Bloglines, and the Vice President of Ask.com until June 2006. (Ask
> Jeeves acquired Bloglines on 8 February 2005.) He won one of the annual
> Rave Awards, presented by Wired magazine.  He has been a software engineer
> at Pixel, Inc.
>
> Fletcher started the free mailing list service ONElist. ONElist merged
> with eGroups, which was later acquired by Yahoo! in June 2000. Fletcher
> wanted better. He loves mailing lists and saw more uses for them.
>
> Announced in September of 2014, here is Mark Fletcher’s statement of
> purpose:
>
> https://wingedpig.com/2014/09/23/introducing-groups-io/
>
>
>
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