Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Experience with community use of Dropbox?

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

On 15 Apr 2012, at 7:03 AM, Susan Sweitzer wrote:

> At Cobb Hill we've been using google docs for many committee processes
> successfully.  We even have one committee which edits the tracking system
> during committee meetings ­ three of us on the doc at the same time.  It's
> great.  The maintenance committee uses google docs for all the info on how
> to run the systems, track who's turn it is to do various tasks etc.

The wiki is much better for this — and very easy to use. Same accessibility. I 
have a sewer of Google docs from ~12 people who use it. They give me access but 
it creates a hodgepodge of documents with strange names that I have to sort 
out. And people have really weird sense of good color. As an artist, the 
choices are jarring.

The wiki is as easy but has an organization scheme. I set up a demo a long time 
ago of a wiki that our Facilities Team uses. They now keep _everything_ in 
theirs.

https://sites.google.com/site/wikifacilitiesdemo/

> However, there are those in our community who don't like google, so for our
> official calendar we have a paper version in the common house.  Which is
> synched by hand with one on our website, which is again synched by a person
> with a google calendar.  Clearly we are not about efficiency!

We use CalendarWiz and it works very well except for people remembering their 
passwords. I set it up so their name typed as [First Name] [Last name] is their 
username and the standard community password. People who don't use the calendar 
often can't remember their user name and don't believe me when I say — Type 
your name just like you would any other time, caps and space in the middle. So 
I advise you not to do this. Make it weird like no caps, first initial, the 
letter x, and the first 3 letters of  your last name. That they will remember 
(joking but only 50%).

It's far superior to Google Calendar. There is a similar calendar as a 
Wordpress plug in that I would like to develop for cohousing communities to use 
but haven't had time to work on it. And need programming help. Learning php or 
whatever it's called is where I draw the line.

Sharon
----
Sharon Villines, Washington DC
"Behavior is determined by the prevailing form of decision making." Gerard 
Endenburg