The following are my personal views.
1. Many ILUGC members have fear on posting to mailing list. They have told
many times to me in person. They may have to learn many guidelines. They
feel that facebook has no guidelines.
2. They are already in lot of facebook groups and they are contributing a
lot.
Tons of questions/answers, news sharing, event sharing/contributing
happening there.
3. It is very tough to see the low contributions from the people
contributing the mailing list, for any of the "Call for X". Call for
speakers, Call for SFD demo stalls etc.
4. We need more events, more participants, more volunteers which the list
lacks.
5. What if we have a facebook group and via it we get more
questions/answers/interactions/events/participation/volunteers as it seems
very easy for many potential people. There are chances for good things to
happen. Why not to explore.
6. Yes. The mailing list may slowly become inactive. Still it will be a
choice of people to ask question in mailing list or facebook group.
7. I am too not a fan of facebook groups.
see my thoughts about them here.
https://goinggnu.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/bid-adieu-to-facebook-technical-groups/
8. Yes. Facebook discussions can not be searched/archived.
In the age of internet, the support we give is very less, while most of the
content is available on various forums/blogs/stackoverflow etc. Do we need
archiving? How are we using ilugc mail archives?
IRC is being used by many technical groups. Do we have all the IRC talks
archived? Still we can reach them in IRC and get answered or give answers.
9. We need more physical volunteers than the online contributors to conduct
local events and meetings. With the current active mailing list strength,
we can not conduct much events.
Ex: only 3 SFD stall submission till two days ago. Once I shared them in
other facebook groups, we got 12 now.
If we have more volunteers, we can have separate teams for managing
meetings, events, website,
workshops etc.
Hope we can give a try with new facebook group.
Community should be for people and by the people.
To get more events and activities, we need more people.
Let us reach them via one another medium.
If this experiment fails, no harm.
Still we will be having the mailing list running.
--
Regards,
T.Shrinivasan
My Life with GNU/Linux : http://goinggnu.wordpress.com
Free E-Magazine on Free Open Source Software in Tamil : http://kaniyam.com
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