Logistics and info flow

Starting April 2021, we began rolling out the NGL Friends Calendar. 

In a nutshell, you can find the events that are open to Friends in one of the following ways:

• Subscribe to the NGL Friends Calendar. You can find more details about that and how to configure notifications in the Friends Calendar Instructions. Here is a tutorial video on how to subscribe to it and view it, the video begins on the NGL Friends Landing page. 

• If you want to see the events in your personal calendar and RSVP to them, follow the instructions here to join the friends-invites group.

Thank you for offering support in this way! Please upload the recording to the Manual Uploads Folder. It would greatly support us if you use a descriptive name and the date for the meeting you are uploading. Here’s an example: “2020-11-03 NGL Coaching Call with Miki about capacity”

The first thing to check is what email address you are using to access the file. We manage file and folder access through groups, so it needs to be the email you used to sign up as an NGL Friend and that was added to the NGL Friends group (nglfriends@nglcommunity.org) See in this image how to check what account you are using.

Once you confirmed you are using the correct account and you still can’t access the file/recording:

• DO NOT press the request access button! The request for access goes to a dark place, where there is no capacity to check who you are and why you’re requesting access, and it is very unlikely that it will be addressed.

• If the file or recording belongs to a team that you are contributing to, ask someone in the team for access. 

• If the file or recording is something you think you should have access to (a meeting you attended, a document that is linked on the website), please submit a request using the Info Flow Request System. Please include in the request the link to the file you were trying to access.

It’s possible to change your NGL Friends google group subscription so that you receive less emails. Here are the different options:

• Each email—Messages are sent individually as they’re posted to the group.

• Digest—Up to 25 complete messages are combined into single emails and sent daily.

• Abridged—Summaries of up to 150 messages are combined into single emails and sent daily.

• No email—Messages from the group are not sent.

You can change the settings by going into your settings here.

ONLY if you are contributing to an NGL team, project or initiative, you might be asked to support by scheduling events, or you might want to create an event for other reasons.

Because of the way we use Google groups and the limitations that Google groups have, those that do not have access to an @ngl account cannot directly invite the Google groups allmembers@nglcommunity.org or allteams@nglcommunity.org and have the event be added to the individual calendars of the people within those groups.

Below is the process we have in place. We see this process as a “workaround” in that it requires extra steps. Nonetheless, in most cases this is the best we can offer at this point, and we hope you are able to both embrace it and possibly come up with tweaks to make this process easier and smoother for you to do.

We also note that a few teams (such as the Miki Scheduling Crew and the Noticeboard team) have been given an @nglcommunity email address for the purpose of creating calendar invitations. We sometimes create an @ngl email like this in cases where a team attends to a function that involves sending many event invitations to the community. Please reach out to the Info Flow Design team if you think this would apply to your situation.

STEP ONE:

• Identify someone who has access to an individual @ngl account who is willing to help you by adding additional groups as guests to your event (after you make it) 

  • This can be anyone with an @nglcommunity.org email, including someone in this list of people (who have said ‘yes’ to being listed here): 

    • moria@nglcommunity.org

    • marcela@nglcommunity.org – Marcela in training

    • Uma - WA +16313654135 

    • <enter additional people who said they are willing to be contacted for this>

STEP TWO:

• Follow the instructions here to create the calendar event – fill out the title, description, time, date, etc

• Invite ONLY the following: 

  • the person who you intend to ask for support (identified in step one)

  • admin@nglcommunity.org

  • The email address of the NGL shared zoom room (if using one)

  • If you are in the Google group nglfriends-invites@ngl, you can go ahead and add this group if you intend to invite all NGL Friends to the event. This also adds the event to the NGL Friends Calendar. 

    • Otherwise, skip this step - you can ask the person you are asking for support to add them (This is important, because if you add these addresses yourself, Google does not allow others to add them later.)

  • Any other @ngl Google groups you want to invite AND that you are a direct member of

• Do NOT invite allmembers@nglcommmunity or allteams@nglcommunity.org (This is important, because if you add these addresses yourself, Google does not allow others to add them later.)

• Look for the check boxes that say “Guest permissions” and take care that the option for “Invite others” is CHECKED. 

• Save the event and answer SEND at the dialog that asks whether to send the email about the event 

STEP THREE:

• Send an email to the person you identified in step one that says something like the below and cc the IFMC (info-flow-maintenance@nglcommunity.org) on the email to support us in co-holding and tracking this function:

Dear < name >,

I just created the event <name of event> on <date and time+timezone >

Please do the following:       

1. Locate the event and go to edit it

2. Add allmembers@nglcommunity.org to the list of invitees   

3. <If the intended audience includes this group > add allteams@nglcommunity.org to the list of invitees    

4. <If not already added when the event was created and the intended audience includes this group> add nglfriends-invites@nglcommunity.org

5. Add <other group email addresses you would like to be invited and that you’re not a member of>  to the list of invitees

6. Save    

7. At the prompt from google, answer SEND that you would like new invited guests to be sent an email.    

Thanks for your help!

That’s it!  

Thanks for your energy, initiative, and enthusiasm for creating events!