For those of you that don’t know me I’m Michelle the new Vice Chair of PR.
In an effort to keep all of us on the PR team connected I would like to request that all ACTIVE members who attended the last PR meeting to send me their email.
If you are interested in joining our team please reach out as well!
Currently we are looking into utilizing an app that lets us update in real time as well as work more cohesively. Meetings are fantastic, but they are not the end all and we need to be able to stay on the same page during the week as well as update progress on our projects.
Slack is our first option. I would like to have a trial run with it so we can see if it is a good fit. So keep an eye out for that invite after you send your email.
I aim to be on Talk more, but should you need me sooner by all means feel free to reach out to me at 252-775-1292 or find me on Instagram @noblegoblin16
We would def be open to using Talk. The reason I would like to use emails would solely be for the monthly email out. Currently we are using slack. Slack offers a variety of ways to work together and is similar to Discord with a focus on being workspace friendly. You should try it out and see how you like it! I can add you to the one I started.
We do have a fair amount of communication platforms that are fantastic in their own way.
Talk is great, but it is not very efficient when it comes to coworking on projects. It is a forum board and things get lost very easy in the matrix.
Bulletin boards are awesome as well, but again, we need a place for active work.
Slack is very similar to discord with a focus on work. You can integrate many apps such as Google Docs and even work on the same projects together. Think a more professional Discord!
Just like I stated above, you should try it out! It’s the early stages and with the various events and projects various team members are working on the leaders need a concise space to track progress and post updates.
Kudos to the guy printing out things! I don’t blame him. Talk is considered toxic by so many and we are hoping to revive it within the year.
Laser conducts its business on Talk DMs (prevents the dog piling of a public Talk post, yet not a hard-to-find forum like the Google Hangouts, as anyone can join the (at)Team_Laser group here) and Discord (public like a Talk post, but not prone to dog piling).
Recently I used a Talk DM as a forum for presenting and fielding questions from (at) Committee_Chairs regarding honorarium class data.
As I stated above, Slack is similar to Discord with an emphasis on work.
Btw I like your picture I wish the Navy would bring back the Waves uniforms for the girls. They did just give us the same dress blues as the guys so at least we don’t look like flight attendants anymore haha
I should clarify. Laser is using the Laser channel on the DMS Discord, in full view of hundreds of members. There is no reason for us to use a non-affiliated Slack or Discord.
I can applaud PR for using what ever channels to get word out there of our wonderful Makerspace. We must keep up with trends in order to bring in new members that use other forms of communications. Markets change & so do trends. We can remember days of ICQ, AOL, MySpace, Facebook, etc…
I personally dont use any other communications besides Talk, & the all valuable face to face. I haven’t even been on Facebook in over a year.
Discord is just fine for workplaces, Slack doesn’t offer anything additional of value without a cost and it’s memory usage scales linearly for every new workspace that’s added, rather than scaling fractionally.
We’ve already used slack, there are reasons we moved away from it.
Except only in the premium versions. There is nothing of value to us that can’t be done on discord that can be done on the free version of slack, and it creates performance problems for users whom are already in too many slack workspaces.
I’m guessing you’ve never used it across several orgs at once where the performance will tank your machine. Slack is great if you have a single workspace, but otherwise is pretty terrible.
This is a self-perpetuating problem in that our own tour guides are now telling people that talk is toxic and to avoid it. We are now not getting tool breakage reports, and members are being told to avoid entire swaths of our communications and wealth of knowledge based on some bad eggs.
You can mute threads; don’t tell them to ignore entire platforms based on a lack of understanding how the platforms work.
This.
Use the official comms methods. You are otherwise fragmenting the ecosystem and creating havoc.
@noblegoblin please find a communication method that has a computer algorithm with a time complexity Big O notation of at least n log(n) to please @hon1nbo
in laymens terms for what I’m talking about regarding memory, for those that have to use slack for work or other things (FD my work does not use slack, but some of my clients do) every slack workspace added to a computer causes an excessive usage of RAM that will slow down the computer as a whole.
Normally when a program adds a tab or similar, it doesn’t reload a second copy of the entire program but rather only the contents of that tab. Slack doesn’t do that, it effectively loads an entire additional copy of itself for every workspace. On top of Slack already being a bit bloated, this can escalate quickly.
Combined with the fact that the free version of slack doesn’t offer much to begin with compared to other ecosystems, and the fact we have a well established Discord already on top of everything else, is my reasoning that we do not go down this road.
Holly mother of high density blade server rack computing and mother of Moore’s law. How will we ever be able to find the compute power to handle Public Relation’s text messages and occasional jpg computing needs. You should put up an agenda item to disallow such evil paths in life to permeate through the spaces working bodies
I’ll reply here as well for all the comments mentioned above.
-I checked out the Discord. It lacks what we are specifically searching for and it is a glorified chatroom that has similar problems to talk.
-I have never used slack and it has been updated. We will give it a trial for those who want to participate and go from there.
-I can use google docs aside from premium. In any event, PR has a budget that may be able to facilitate coworking software if and when we find one suitable.
-You’re right, I have never used it. There is no reason to get up in arms about this. You should have brought up the performance issues first. If you don’t state the issues with a program then I don’t know what to look into further. Saying to “just use discord” comes off as more of a personal preference based on emotions rather than professional experience.
-I have been on several tours and I have never heard that Talk is Toxic. I’m sure it happens. What I do hear is that it is toxic from many of our members across committees. I also have seen and experienced how it is currently toxic. We can have a separate discussion on the issues with maturity and Mods if you like. I am only using Talk because I am interested in changing it and bringing members back to it.
-There are many reasons to use other platforms. If the board wants access to whatever we choose then they should ask. I believe in transparency. Other committees have private groups for their needs. I do not think that having a shared coworking space is a threat when there will be no official business on it. It will be for tracking projects and events. Things that we will be putting out to the DMS as a whole anyway. Anything official will be conducted in meetings with voting and minutes.
I understand that many of these concerns are from the right place and I thank each of you for bringing them up. Currently it feels as if with all of the current “drama” around DMS that the Board is worried that a group will go rogue and is therefore taking a micromanagement approach to new changes.
Don’t ask the blacksmith the taste of metal,
Ask the horse silenced by the bit.
As I’ve said elsewhere, there is nothing that we as DMS can do in the free version of slack that cannot be done in Discord.
We do not qualify for free upper tiers of slack due to the nature of our organization, and the upper tiers are what make slack usable at all beyond being a glorified chat room itself. You’re willing to give slack a try, but seem unwilling to give discord a serious try.
Name one feature we can use of as an organization in the free version of slack that we cannot in discord, a feature we can actually use, and I will concede that point (i.e. jira integration doesn’t count since we don’t have a usable instance of jira).
Personally I like slack’s interface, but it lacks functionality in the free versions like not being able to restrict who can post in a channel besides the #general
Then give other options the same serious consideration; just because one is branded as business use doesn’t mean it actually provides anything of value.
We provide G Suite Professional for every member since it is free to us up until 10,000 active users. Every member has a DMS email, with all the professional bells and whistles. Mailing lists, group archives, team drives, granular access controls, Single Sign On to various services, hangout meetings. Everything.
We’d have to pay for slack for every member. We’ve talked with them before trying to price it out on the previous times we looked into getting it. Since we don’t have fixed employees and members are required to have access to everything that isn’t operationally critical or safety related this means they would be entitled to it.
As I’ve said repeatedly in multiple channels now, we have tried slack already. Many of us have been forced to use it at work or clients before.
There are many reasons we went with Discord.
Saying to “just use Slack” comes off as more of a personal preference based on emotions rather than professional experience.
See what I did there? You’re choosing to ignore the collective experience of what’s been tried as an organization before. If you find some value, please do share it.
But right now you’re doing the exact thing which you claim I am doing. I’ve provided technical and practical basis already for why we’ve moved to Discord. It’s been far from preference.
I would encourage keeping tabs or getting feedback from new members about tours. This is strikingly common, and one of the reasons I see members not reporting tool breakages recently and struggling to get help.
I’m not talking about official business, but the active collaboration that makes DMS great. You can make personal channels all you want, but in the end you won’t get effective collaboration outside of a small set of people since you will lack the effective reach. Regardless, if you try to pay for it it cannot get the non-profit discount, unless it’s for every member because this is not something critical or safety related to keep it away from members to access it.
Adding more technology into the process creates technical debt, fragmentation, and poor user interaction. I’ve deployed unified communications for orgs, and multiple chat methods has always been a cause of problems in effective communication.
We have sponsors where the PR chair is not getting involved in the thread because they aren’t checking their DMS email and are clueless when it’s brought up to them otherwise despite the sponsor asking things like if we can make a blog post or some photos of members interacting with the sponsored equipment.
We need to get PR to actually be active on the existing channels before we grow more channels just for the sake of having more channels.
I have personally posted on a minimum of nine or ten Talk threads and sent direct messages requesting to be added to the PR committee.
I’m very glad to help. I’m not glad to offer to help and not be able to connect with anyone.
I’ll use Talk or Discord or Slack or email or whatever is going to be answered. So far, nobody has answered my offers.
My background includes multinational PR agency experience, a corporate communications internship with IBM, Google Ads certification, SEO, social media management of a team of over 100 people, and runner up for Blogger if the Year. I know HTML and WordPress and how to write media releases. I have customer service experience and media and blogger relations experience.
Most importantly, since fundraising is tied to PR for some unknown reason, I have experience with nonprofits and am very interested in fundraising. Please see my other posts, I’m not shy about wanting to help.
Please reach out to me. I have limited time available and would like to get started.
Thanks!
P.S. I think we should use the budget for a social media service like Buffer to let members post as DMS, but it only goes live if approved.
Trello is free, and it might offer the functionality you want from Premium Slack without the price tag.
Hi Holly. Now that we’ve scheduled our next PR meeting, I’ve responded to your latest message. Looking forward to hearing all your ideas! I’ve left you my personal contact info in a PM if you feel your messages aren’t getting through. I hope to see you at our next meeting, or i’m happy to set up a call or in-person meeting with you at DMS. Just PM me a day + time next week that works for you! (Other than the 31st)
