best practices

[susan wu <su...@arctic.org>]

Danese:

I would love to hear about some of the best practices you have experienced 
at other female-oriented community lists.

-s

Re: best practices

["Jean T. Anderson" <jt...@bristowhill.com>]

Danese Cooper wrote:
> I've been trying to figure out the best way to introduce that  
> discussion.  I think it would be a good idea to do separate topic  
> threads about different things I've noticed.  Earlier this week I  wrote 
> about the practice of always announcing new subscribers, and  I'm 
> noticing that Susan is giving it a whirl (with her intro of Anne  
> Manes...Hi, Anne!!).  I guess I was expecting discussion about the  
> practice.  If everyone is feeling okay about it, I'll start talking  
> about what they do next, I guess.

It may have gotten lost in a welcome email. I reraised it with the 
subject of "Practice of announcing newly added people"

  -jean

Re: best practices

[Danese Cooper <da...@gmail.com>]

I've been trying to figure out the best way to introduce that  
discussion.  I think it would be a good idea to do separate topic  
threads about different things I've noticed.  Earlier this week I  
wrote about the practice of always announcing new subscribers, and  
I'm noticing that Susan is giving it a whirl (with her intro of Anne  
Manes...Hi, Anne!!).  I guess I was expecting discussion about the  
practice.  If everyone is feeling okay about it, I'll start talking  
about what they do next, I guess.

At Debian-Women each newbie is contacted offline by a list member to  
(hopefully) start to create mentorship.  What actually happens is  
still a little fuzzy to me, but it seems as if the newbie is first  
announced by the moderator, then encouraged to write a bit about  
themselves and why they subscribed and based on that information one  
or more of the list members who have been around awhile make  
contact.  When this happened to me I got five or six emails from  
different list members welcoming me and asking questions about the  
bio information I'd already submitted, and encouraging me to report  
back on talks I would be giving, etc.  One list member in particular  
seems to have attached herself to me now and if I've not had much to  
say for a few days she pings me to see what I'm up to.  So this works  
very much like joining the PTA or any other "social goodness"  
organization where there is a welcoming committee.

Just in the last 2 weeks there has been quite a bit of discussion on  
the D-W list about whether this technique will scale as D-W gets  
bigger.  Most of those deeply concerned about scalability seem to be  
the men on the list (but I might be over-generalizing).

BTW, I want to emphasize that D-W is not a "perfect place".  Of  
course there are controversies (which I'll report on as they come up  
in discussing the practices I'm seeing).

So, perhaps we should use this example (if not the previous one about  
moderators introducing new members) to discover a set of questions we  
should ask ourselves as we think through whether this practice would  
work for us?

Danese

On Aug 19, 2005, at 9:52 PM, susan wu wrote:

>
> Danese:
>
> I would love to hear about some of the best practices you have  
> experienced at other female-oriented community lists.
>
> -s
>
>