[Ilugc] Creating a facebook group for ilugc
- From: benignbala@xxxxxxxxx (Balachandran Sivakumar)
- Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 11:20:32 +0530
Hi Shrini,
On Sun, Sep 15, 2013 at 11:32 PM, Shrinivasan T <tshrinivasan at gmail.com>
wrote:
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.
I don't know what's there to fear. When we make mistakes,
people tell so - in plain words and we correct ourselves. That's part
of the learning. And how is having no guidelines good ? Is having no
law at all good ? I don't think so. What we can do is, make the
guidelines newbie friendnly. But no guidelines at all is bad.
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.
Are people finding email more difficult than FB ? I don't know.
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.
I can think of why - A lot of us are not from Madras. I am
myself from Bangalore, and a native of Trichy. Only rarely do I visit
Madras.
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.
The concept of lugs started when Internet was not this wide,
there were far less users of GNU/Linux and documentation, if any, was
quite bad. So, people needed the help of others who had been in that
situation to guide them. But that time has passed. Most GNU/Linux
distros work on a wide range of hardware, the installation is
straight-forward and they are quite user friendly.
In general, lugs aren't the same as generic "user" forums, where
people expect to be spoon-fed. Historically, you go to a "lug" with a
question when you are in a situation where you have tried everything
you know, done your (re)search on the web and you are still stuck.
ilugc too has been this kind of list.
What we can do is, make it newbie friendly. We can help newbies both
with the problem they are facing and with the guidelines.
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?
Yes, we do need archiving.. The content available on forums
etc. is available because they decided to archive. Archiving
contributes to the existing knowledge base, irrespective of how less
the support we give is. For eg., the other day Noorul Islam helped
another member with the usb dongle(or something similar). Now that it
is archived, it will benefit everyone.
Ex: only 3 SFD stall submission till two days ago. Once I shared them in
other facebook groups, we got 12 now.
We can ask those who volunteered newly to join ilugc :)
I personally do not prefer going the facebook way. We should look at
ways to improve the list and make it newbie friendly. Of course, it is
just my opinion. Thanks
--
Thank you
Balachandran Sivakumar
Arise Awake and stop not till the goal is reached.
- Swami Vivekananda
Mail: benignbala at gmail.com
Blog:
http://benignbala.wordpress.com/
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