[kwlug-disc] Summary of restaurant discussion

[Spencer Hughes]

Hello everyone,

I would, first and foremost, like to apologize for the inevitable length of this
email. As I write this I've only gone so far as to draft an outline of my
thoughts, but if I am guilty of anything it is of verbosity, and if I'm guilty
of a second thing it's of being opinionated. I'll put a TL;DR at the end but I
don't want to taint the mind of the dedicated reader by putting it up front.

Secondly, I would like to preemptively make some disclaimers.

> What I am not interested in: people demanding new communications
> channels and then expecting me (or other members of the the secretive
> society that operates KWLUG) to babysit it.

I would like to say first that everything that I am about to propose and
advocate for is approached by me with a thoroughly volunteer spirit. None of these
are things that others ought do, so much as things that may be good to do. Many
of these things are things that I am personally willing to do.

Next, I would like to be clear that I am advocating for these courses of action
*if* we have certain desires based on a set of assumptions on my part. My
understanding of the question that was asked that sparked this discussion had to
do with promoting the group on social media. This question involves, in my mind,
the assumption of a desire to bring new members into our group and/or to promote
continued member involvement. As such, this assumption goes somewhat
unquestioned in the following commentary; I assume that a thing we want to do is
to develop the group in terms of membership and attendance. This assumption may
be questioned, but I am not doing so at this time.

Preface concluded, I feel that there are several issues with the current
channels of communication, that being the website and the mailing list.

Firstly, these methods of communication lack visibility. In order to find them
you effectively need to be looking for them, and even if you do they are not
particularly easy to find. Additionally, we don't promote these channels very
prominently; while it's entirely possible that I've just missed it, I don't
remember the email list being mentioned during the meetings, at least not more
than in passing.

Secondly, these methods of communication have a relatively high barrier to
entry. While signing up for a mailing list is not hard in objective terms, it
does require the user to seek it out and interact with a frankly somewhat
archaic web form. To speak from personal experience, I had literally no idea
this conversation was happening until a coworker of mine who happened to already
be on the mailing list and asked me if I was the Spencer mentioned in the
original email.

Given this, and my assumption that expanding group participation is one of our
goals, I feel that we should create online presences on more modern platforms
that can be used to facilitate ongoing communication. I think that this will
lower the barrier to participation in group conversation. It is a more
accessible forum to paricipate in the group in between meetings and for us to
remind members of group meetings. Even though we have a regular schedule, it is
useful to remind people of upcoming meetings close to when the occur so that
they are reminded to plan to attend. I also think that having ongoing
conversations will help to foster the community.

Ongoing community discussion will, I believe, promote the community in the form
of improved ideation. Presentations are the lifeblood of the community, and
a forum where we can have ongoing communication, I feel, will have the effect of
generating more ideas about projects that could be attempted and presentations
that could be given.

To digress briefly, the social media giants are referred to as giants for a
reason: they have the eyeballs. What follows is not and should not be read as
advocacy for using any particular social media platform per se, but the decision
not to is one that comes at the cost of reach, and that is something we should
be considerate of while discussing our options. Additionally, I believe that
there is a value in ideological purity for a group like this. We are not trying
to reach a general audience, and I feel that our target audience is both
appreciative of our ideology and more willing than average to make inconvenient
decisions in the name of ideology.

I am also not advocating for migrating *off* of the existing communication
platforms. There is both pedigry and charm in the local Linux user group still
having a mailing list or an IRC server. It is, to some degree, an expected
convention of the genre, if you will. If anything, this should be read as an
argument for integrating the existing communication channels into whatever
emerges from this discussion.

In my mind, there are two somewhat competing courses of action that I would
like to propose: the mainstream option and the FOSS option.

In the mainstream option we utilize existing, popular social media platforms to
create community spaces. Make a subreddit, setup a Discord server, create
Bluesky and X and Threads and whatever else accounts and use this to engage with
the community. The allure of this option is that we go where the people already
are and don't need to worry about moderating the community *and* administering
the service. No one needs to be responsible for updates or pay for a VPS or
setup backups. We just use Reddit like regular community organizers and focus on
making posts about upcoming meetings and room updates. The downside is that many
of the people who would be interested in participating in a group like ours are
interested *specifically because* they are not the type of people who want to
use mainstream social media. Not to mention the inevitable, unending stream of
people asking why we're on Discord instead of whatever their preferred
alternative is.

In the FOSS option we deploy and manage the FOSS alternatives to the mainstream
social media platforms and promote using them to participate in our community.
Instead of Reddit, we run Lemmy. Instead of Discord, we have a Matrix. Instead
of Twitter, we use Mastodon. This option is, in my mind, more respectful of the
core principles of the group. We are using the solutions we ostensibly meet to
promote and discuss to run our own community. We are also, to some degree,
promoting the platforms themselves; we might be the reason people learn about
and how to use these FOSS platforms, spreading knowledge and awareness. However,
this option requires *much* more involvement on the part of the community
organizers. Not only do we now need to do community moderation, we need to run
and maintain live services. This should not be taken lightly; while we have
access to many people with the skills required to do this, ongoing maintenance
and moderation is no small task. Additionally, as previously discussed, we are
limiting our potential reach by increasing the barrier to entry to include
learning how non-mainstream social media works; there's a much higher chance
that when people join us on these platforms, it's because they heard of them
from us.

One additional advantage of the FOSS approach is that it potentially creates
opportunity for presentations. Deploying and maintaining services such as these
is not a trivial process and I'm sure that there would be some interest in a
discussion of what is involved in doing so.

Personally, I find myself coming down on the side of the FOSS option, though not
without some hesitance and apprehension. I think that, in the big picture, the
thing that makes the most sense is to run our own services and use them to
facilitate our community. I do think that the questions of administration and
moderation are serious considerations, as these services would be performed on a
volunteer basis and the effort involved is considerable. However, I think that
what truly has decided my opinion is that if I look inside myself and ask myself
how I'd feel if I came to the Linux user group for the first time and they were
advertising their Instagram, I think I'd be disappointed.

I do also think however that we should be promoting the community on mainstream
platforms, if not running our primary presence there. In particular I think we
should be promoting ourselves on local community forums, e.g., the Waterloo, 
Kitchener, and university subreddits. Our primary differentiating factor is
locality; we are the Linux group in *KW*, and we should be leaning on that fact
to reach out to new members.

We should also be promoting the communication channels before and after every
meeting. In addition to verbal callouts during the introduction, I think we
should have a slide that is displayed before and after the meeting with
links and/or QR codes to the places that can be found online. If we're putting
the effort into running this, we should be telling people about it, and a group
of people who are particularly inclined to socialize with us online are people
who have made the effort to attend a meeting.

I am far from absolutely convicted on any of this, and wanted to propose these
ideas more for discussion than decision. I'm interested to hear what everyone
else thinks about this.

Sorry again for the absolute essay.

Spencer

The promised TL;DR: I think we should run a Matrix instance and maybe a
Mastodon instance and socialize on there, and promote our meetings on
local community forums on mainstream platforms.