Group Communication for Projects

Question

Hello Project Leaders and those heavily involved in Projects!  I am asking for suggestions on how you are best able to communicate with your group members as a whole.  Can you give me pros/cons of the method you use?

Tina and I have been constantly working on organizing everything within the Poland Project and are now at a point where we want to start checkins with members, and ask for small commitment to tasks or join a "team" set up for tasks.  It's a great stage to be in.  I do believe we have many members that will help, but have had no idea how or where to do so.

Thank you for your input!

p.s. I would REALLY love something within Wikitree, even if Projects could have their own G2G for communication.  I only say this because not everyone has or wants a google account, Facebook account, etc.

Comments

Poland Project has a Goggle group but it's been inactive for many years for lack of Polish speakers.

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Great question

Answer 1

Projects use google groups as their official method of communication, and many projects use discord as a way to have conversations in real time.

Answer 2

As Jen said, each project has a Google Group set up for official project communications. However, a lot of folks don't like using Google Groups. So, if folks don't want to use Google Groups or Discord, a third option would be communicating via profile comments on each team's page. You'd have to add team members to the trusted lists of each team page so they'd be notified about the comments added on the page. Example:  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Space:Prussia_Team#comments. We did that in the Germany project for a while but found that Discord was what people generally preferred using.

Answer 3

Google groups is the official communication tool and Discord, though it is quicker, is good to use, but not for "official" communications.

Answer 4

The Mayflower Project uses G2G. You do have to make sure that all your members are using whatever "tag" the project uses. Of course you can't guarantee that everyone will pay attention, no matter which platform you're using.

Answer 5

My thoughts are in line with Traci's. I think Wikitree should be the primary platform, I just don't have a good model to work from today.

I think it is a problem if the average user has to change platforms (e.g.Google Groups or Discord). It is OK if you are looking at the different places regularly but harder if you are looking at comments infrequently.

Answer 6

For the U.S. Southern Colonies Project, we have several teams.  Each team has a project coordinator, and there are numerous sub-teams that have a team leader.  We have a membership coordinator that badges new members and gets them to select at least one team to join (required).  Team members are added to the trusted list for the team(s).  The membership coordinator does an annual check-in with each project member to see if they want to continue to be a member of the project.  We have a Google group for discussion, but discussions can also occur on the team pages since everyone that is a member of that team is on the trusted list and therefore notified..

Comments

Very helpful, thank you.

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Tina, I agree.
Darlene has sent out an excellent example.

I note that the U.S. Southern Colonies Project is very large, with tens of thousands of profiles connected. Nevertheless I do admire how the project is organised.

This is the example I was looking for. A lot of the communication is inside Wikitree and avoids jumping between different platforms. Discussions that end as comments in a team free-space page are easily archived and retrieved.

Answer 7

All of these examples are wonderful and we (Poland Project) appreciates all of you leaving them!  This gives us a good basis for what will work for our project! :)