Seeking user-friendly tools for online discussion and collaboration
August 5, 2020 11:57 PM
Please help me find the right discussion / communication / file storage solution(s) for a group of relative strangers to collaborate on a community project.
I'm part of a localised giving circle (in Australia) and we have recently recruited a lot of new committee members. In previous years, most committee members knew each other and so we mainly used email and Dropbox to communicate and share files - and of course we all met frequently. However, email in particular was a horrendously bad idea and we have all ended up with packed inboxes of looong email conversations which are unsearchable and unwieldy.
Now we have a new committee, I would like to find a solution or combination of solutions which lets us use a single email address to email everyone on the list (this is the most important thing). Like a listserv (ah the good old days) but easy to set up without technical expertise. And preferably free or very low cost; as we don't take an admin fee from donations, we pay for any extras ourselves.
Bonus points if someone knows of the perfect system (or combination of systems) which will also provide file storage, maybe a joint calendar or task list, and is accessible to people without a long learning curve. I've looked briefly at Freedcamp, Slack and similar things, but they all seem to rely on people going TO a site to engage in discussion and they're probably more complicated than we need.
I'm part of a localised giving circle (in Australia) and we have recently recruited a lot of new committee members. In previous years, most committee members knew each other and so we mainly used email and Dropbox to communicate and share files - and of course we all met frequently. However, email in particular was a horrendously bad idea and we have all ended up with packed inboxes of looong email conversations which are unsearchable and unwieldy.
Now we have a new committee, I would like to find a solution or combination of solutions which lets us use a single email address to email everyone on the list (this is the most important thing). Like a listserv (ah the good old days) but easy to set up without technical expertise. And preferably free or very low cost; as we don't take an admin fee from donations, we pay for any extras ourselves.
Bonus points if someone knows of the perfect system (or combination of systems) which will also provide file storage, maybe a joint calendar or task list, and is accessible to people without a long learning curve. I've looked briefly at Freedcamp, Slack and similar things, but they all seem to rely on people going TO a site to engage in discussion and they're probably more complicated than we need.
Have you thought of using Gmail and Google Groups? You could sign up for a free gmail account, or spend a little bit and get a Gsuite account, allowing you to use your custom domain name. It is per user so if you have only one user as the designated communicator/clerk/secretary, it should be about $12us a month.
Non-profit groups that are registered with government may be able to get Gsuite for free. That's what I do at my place of work.
That would give you an email, a shared calendar with video or phone conferencing, and google docs/sheets/drive to collaborate. You can setup a Google Group to use email as a private listserv. You can even turn on daily digests to reduce the constant stream of messages.
The good news about this is you don't have to ask people to join something. If you take a bit of time, you can make all of the Google stuff available to anyone with email or web access, even if it is not hosted by google.
You can have people create a Google account with an existing email and not creating a new gmail address.
Google Docs and Google Drive Folders can be made web-visible or privately shared as links to anyone with a web browser.
If there are rotating duties, or a change of leadership, you can hand off the credentials to the new person.
I feel your pain, as I'm trying to participate in multiple professional groups right now, while still having to stay on top of 100+ incoming emails a day. What happens is, if it is not in email is, I have to remember to check it. If I have to remember to check it, it's going to be checked at best once a week.
I have also hired talented people and tried to get them onto a custom platform (check the Trello board for the design deadlines!) and it has never taken. I end up translating all the material to email and sending it to them, then getting the email response and updating the group.
posted by sol at 10:34 AM on August 6, 2020
Non-profit groups that are registered with government may be able to get Gsuite for free. That's what I do at my place of work.
That would give you an email, a shared calendar with video or phone conferencing, and google docs/sheets/drive to collaborate. You can setup a Google Group to use email as a private listserv. You can even turn on daily digests to reduce the constant stream of messages.
The good news about this is you don't have to ask people to join something. If you take a bit of time, you can make all of the Google stuff available to anyone with email or web access, even if it is not hosted by google.
You can have people create a Google account with an existing email and not creating a new gmail address.
Google Docs and Google Drive Folders can be made web-visible or privately shared as links to anyone with a web browser.
If there are rotating duties, or a change of leadership, you can hand off the credentials to the new person.
I feel your pain, as I'm trying to participate in multiple professional groups right now, while still having to stay on top of 100+ incoming emails a day. What happens is, if it is not in email is, I have to remember to check it. If I have to remember to check it, it's going to be checked at best once a week.
I have also hired talented people and tried to get them onto a custom platform (check the Trello board for the design deadlines!) and it has never taken. I end up translating all the material to email and sending it to them, then getting the email response and updating the group.
posted by sol at 10:34 AM on August 6, 2020
I too am looking into this. The only thing I've found that comes close to the old school ListServ or Majodomo (spell?) is Da Da Mail however I've not used it yet. I was about to post the question and the search here found your post. the only reason I've haven't tried Da Da Mail is it would seem my ISP's hosted email always get sent directory to spam. :(
posted by usermac at 5:21 AM on September 9, 2020
posted by usermac at 5:21 AM on September 9, 2020
I think I found it for myself and hopefully you: groups.io
posted by usermac at 1:40 PM on September 9, 2020
posted by usermac at 1:40 PM on September 9, 2020
This thread is closed to new comments.
It comes with 250GB of online storage per user account, and that storage is very well-behaved and easy to live with. Unlike Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive, the Keybase online file system is conceptually completely online, rather than operating as a backing store that synchronizes folders across local devices. This means that if you have a 16GB iPad and a PC hooked up to the same Keybase account and you put 100GB of stuff in there from the PC, the iPad won't get overfilled in a doomed attempt to sync it. The tradeoff is that you generally need to have active Internet access in order to get to your Keybase files. However, it is possible to get the Keybase app on any given device to cache selected files and/or folders for offline use if you'd rather not simply make local copies by hand.
It also comes with a well-considered teams feature that makes doing listserv-ish things with it both easy and sustainably maintainable. The online storage and teams are nicely integrated; you can create online folders with easily controllable degrees of access, all the way from totally per-account private to world-readable via the Web.
Keybase messaging and file transfer is all end-to-end encrypted, so not even Keybase staff have access to any of your stuff, and it's easy to create identity links between Keybase accounts and other kinds of online identity like email addresses or social media handles which makes finding people pretty smooth and straightforward.
A localized giving circle also strikes me as the kind of thing that might be able to make good use of Keybase's inbuilt cryptocurrency support: all the Keybase apps integrate a Stellar wallet and make it very easy to use. Like Bitcoin, the Stellar currency (Stellar Lumens, XLM) is decentralized and worldwide; unlike Bitcoin, the underlying protocol does not involve consuming electricity at whole-country scale to make it work, and transactions are very cheap and settle in seconds.
Australians can easily trade Lumens for Australian dollars by setting up an account at Independent Reserve.
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 AM on August 6, 2020