Slack Channel Growth & Support

NOTES from Dec . 2017 email between David & Kimberly:

There are 57 people in the Collaboratory workspace. Very few posts. What portion of your Collaborators mailing list is this?

There are 220 Consulting Collaborators on our wiki, and about 30 - 40 sign up to attend each collaboratory.

Have there been some success stories of people in the group teaming up to collaborate? Maybe ask people to post their stories?

Yes, there are plenty . . . for the past 10 years I have passed hundreds of thousands of dollars of work on to Nathalie, Jeff, Alan, Francine, Juan, Cynthia, others. And last month Jeff handed me a check for over $10,000 for referral fees plus facilitation support that I gave him for 2 clients.

Perhaps see whether people would be willing to set up a monthly rotation of moderators who would be willing to take turns finding and posting a few questions, discussion topics, or articles of interest for discussion during the month and doing some light moderating of discussions, including reaching out to people to solicit comments if participation is weak. Half a dozen volunteers would mean each person only having to do it twice a year.

Yes, that's a great idea! Get more people actively involved!

One way to pitch the value in people signing up and using the Collaboratory Slack workspace is that it is a way to demonstrate and get experience with a collaboration tool that is becoming increasingly popular in industry and could be handy for consultants to use with each other and with clients.

Yes!

Some things that might help...

1. Need a short statement of how we expect to use it and the benefits. (Do you want to circulate a draft for comment? Or give me some bullet points so I could write something?) Maybe this would lead to thinking up a few channels to set up within the workspace to set up besides existing.

Use this to grow ourselves professionally and share information that leads to collaborations that are fun, profitable, and ideally both.

1. Consider a live session in front of room - project screen while attendees do their own signups on their laptops (for me, would have to be in the evening or weekend)

Yes, happy to do this in future collaboratories.

1. Consider live webinar showing sign up process and examples of usage (record and post for repeat playback as desired) (for me, would have to be in the evening or weekend)

Yes, hope to do this before the March collaboratory.

1. Supplement with one-pager on sign up and usage processes

OK, happy to have this 1-pager, and make it easily accessible on Slack channel and our wiki.

[One last thing: Have you thought about the need to check on how to control who joins; otherwise, might end up with non-members. Probably not an issue at start, but could come up later, so good to have a plan in mind. Something modeled on discussion group principles that have worked in other forums.]

I have to add each person individually, and only add those whom I know.

SLACK CHANNEL ORGANIZATION & USE: consultingcollab.slack.com