Continuing the discussion from BoD Mtng Time - clarification:
@Kriskat30 @Robert_Davidson @AlexRhodes @Lampy @Tapper
Is or isn’t Talk the official DMS discussion forum? If yes, should any discussion or decision of any significant rule, policy, procedure, logistics change, etc. that has potential to impact the general membership be occurring outside of it? If so, why?
I’m not sure we can curtail when and where discussion about DMS happens. From the common room to meals at Whataburger.
Do you mean the board and committees specifically and officially?
I’m sure you were in some of the Google Hangouts that predated Discord?
Their primary use was as a chat. So quick messages, quick responses. That form of communicating has significant merit in certain situations. For example when trying to schedule something amongst multiple people.
My understanding is the wiki is the official information page.
Only by general agreement. If a topic/discussion is likely to impact general membership, where should it take place? 4Chan? or Reddit? or Discord? Or Talk? Or all of the above? Common sense would dictate a single platform for a “single version of the truth” with which to better foster both transparency and inclusion. If that is agreed, then what should be that single platform? (it’s a rhetorical question…we all know the answer.)
Nope, never. Which is part of the point: I don’t want to have 2, 3, 5 10 apps on my phone or computer pinging and dinging and chiming just because someone decided they wanted to take their ball and go home. It is hard for me to believe anyone really does want this…
I think that makes perfect sense. But I also seem to continually hear about discussions being held and decisions being made that generally/potentially affect all of DMS, and that is concerning. Hence my starting of this topic.
Agreed, that’s my understanding, too. But we don’t have discussions & debate there.
Mostly I am just trying get some sort of official understanding, by which I guess I mean significant majority of membership OR a vote/ruling from the board, as to whether important topics, conversations, debates that potentially impact most or all of DMS should occur here on Talk or not. If so, we would then have to depend on people’s good sense and integrity to move any chat that reaches such a threshold over to Talk, or begin it here in the first place.
I thought this is exactly why board agenda items are first introduced here on Talk with the “Discuss…” directive immediately following?
I don’t think we needed a talk thread of Robert saying he had to schedule a flight that conflicted with the meeting and it needed to be pushed up a few hours and then the resulting, okays, sure, etc., We just needed (the part that was missed in this event) an update on the talk form of the result of the conversation between the 5 board members. A thread could have easily gone on with a bunch of other people (who absolutely don’t need to comment on it) saying things like “but I can’t make it”
The board could have easily had this conversation in person and someone else would have thrown a fit about unscheduled meetings, or wanting access to their digital convos to make sure they weren’t trying to schedule to be devious.
They at least had the conversation in a digital space that only they can post in but everyone can see.
It’s also slightly more private than a board member posting that they were going to be flying out in the discord than in the talk forum. We talk about the Google crawlers all the time.
You could, there’s a discussion feature for every page and section built into Mediawiki software. We simply haven’t evolved as an organization in that manner. Discourse and Discord fulfill different purposes that people seem more willing to use for various things. If you want to have an “official” discussion then send a registered letter to the board of directors.
I ask for conversation on talk, in committees and in person.
Yes, that’s essentially what I said when I wrote “we don’t have discussions & debate there.”
Again, that’s fine with me, as long as we don’t have multiple platforms for information dissemination and policy discussions/debates that impact all of DMS.
Thanks for the nonsense suggestion.
Not to be rude to you Marshall, but this seems like an overreaction to the meeting time changing.
I changed it on the wiki to say noon. I thought to do it because I was already making updates on that page of the wiki, and I’d seen the chat on Discord, so I asked Robert and he said the time had changed to noon. As soon as I did it I messaged Kris about it saying if it was incorrect let me know and I’ll fix it. She replied thanks. Since then it’s now changed to 1pm.
So the error was mine wanting to update the wiki sooner rather than later, and worrying that the task might get forgotten altogether.
Most importantly now though, since the time is officially 1pm can we get the calendar to show the right time? The wiki is now correct again.
I have updated the calendar.
Thank you Alex! 
To be clear, this isn’t about, or specifically a reaction to the time change, actually, although it did have the effect of triggering what I wanted to be a real examination of what Talk is for and whether or not people should be making a concerted effort to start or re-locate certain types of discussion here, to help foster both transparency and inclusion. I think there have been other instances over several months, and even before Discord (which I am fine with!), where issues impacting general membership seem to have been discussed, debated, and decided without any visibility on Talk. And even if not, is it crazy to say there should be a single platform/location where these conversation and debates should take place?
Also, you are never rude! (to best of my knowledge, at least.)
Could you give us some examples of these instances to help us understand your perspective?
Talk is a tool. Some people use it and some people don’t. Discord is also a tool, Hangouts, or any other software we use around the space. I don’t get the need to call something “official” when it just is what it is. At one point there was a Minecraft server hosted at DMS. Was it the official Minecraft server of the Dallas Makerspace and all others were invalid? It doesn’t matter. Just use the tools and when we find new tools we’ll use those too if it makes sense to do so.
Nope.
But it’s funny, because I was going to include parenthetically in previous response that I wasn’t going to play the game of “name some”, and then decided to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Let’s just pretend I made it all up and that it couldn’t possibly have happened.
Providing specific reasons is not playing a game, it’s supporting your viewpoint and brings some validity to your question (which it seems to be lacking right now).
I understand…we don’t do “official” here; you are using the word in a stronger sense than I was/am.
I’ll ask again: is it crazy to want or say or agree that there should be a single platform/location where members can count on being able to read and participate in conversations and debates that have the potential to impact them, e.g. policy changes, rule changes, bylaw-changes, etc.? Or get “softly official” information e.g. “our parking rules will now be enforced!”
I understand that the answer for DMS, for some, might be “yes, its crazy to want/say/agree that”.
I get what you’re saying, and that’s the talk forum. In this case a volunteer forgot to update the forum. It happens. But talk is the default place to go.