[Blackpool] more on moving on

[MJ Hewitt]

I still can't shake the feeling that we are going 'downhill' as a group, so
I dredged up some stuff from the archives. Quite old now, but probably
still relevant. (see it all on the blog)


*"Many communities don't take a particularly organised approach to
projects, which can kill motivation. If there's one thing that can cause a
community to struggle, it's a sense that nothing happens or gets done."*


The above quote struck a cord first time around, and still does.


We have already discussed a robot project, but did not get as far as how we
would organise/collaborate on it.

We still have the wiki, with just the MythTV project on it from the last
formal attempt at collaboration. It only 'sort of' worked.


In my last post I noted that some of the past events we put on had been
quite popular, but they have been few and far between. *Should we do more
of these?*


We all have different interests and skill sets, and I started to wonder if
there might be a better way to bring it all together somehow. Some of us
use Twitter or Facebook or G+ or ...........


Instead of making more work for ourselves by forcing ourselves into a
collaborative project, perhaps we should try to utilise what what we
already do, and showcase it somewhere.


For example, last week, Les posted pictures of his robot on Twitter, I
posted schematics of a logic probe, Ollie posted on G+ and Tony has a blog.
Les also described taking a scanner apart for robot parts.

Perhaps we should  'curate' the appropriate  posts/tweets onto an open wiki
or similar, where people could participate if they wanted to.

A project could evolve organically if it was popular enough for people to
want to join in. Even if joining in meant asking questions, rather than
actual input.



I realise that we are all busy, but if we make it really easy (or better
still, automatic) for these tweets/G+'s...etc to end up on some platform of
our choice it is more likely to happen.

It would also be a better showcase for the activities that we do than the
rather bland and generalised blog posts I have been doing lately.


*What do we think?*


Mike