Help me find an online/space site to host community reflections?

September 8, 2023 8:56 AM

What is the current landscape of sites/services set up to allow a specific group of people to answer questions and read one another's responses?

I am part of a community that meets 2-3 times a month over Zoom for spiritual/religious services. Each service includes a talk on a particular theme (these aren't sermons, exactly, but something along those lines). Right now, each service is self-contained, meaning that there isn't any structured engagement with these themes once the service ends. We're interested in adding continuity and depth by offering a question/prompt related to the most recent service sometime in the between-meeting intervals and inviting community members to share their thoughts/reflections.

Currently, the best place we have for this is a Facebook group, but many community members are not on Facebook. Discord has been floated as a possible alternative, but I think that kind of chat stream (or anything like GroupMe) isn't the best solution because it moves so quickly. Ideally we'd be hosting this somewhere that allows responses to be static (i.e. not swept away in a stream of messages) and easy to access, add to, and read. I'm wondering what's out there these days that might serve this kind of purpose.

Other notes:
- members of this community range in age from ~18 to ~80, so something that requires a lot of setup/work to learn probably wouldn't work
- we don't currently need whatever this is to do anything but be a space to offer one's thoughts and read others' contributions
- budget is limited; something free would be great

Thanks!

posted by wormtales to Technology (5 answers total)

Not free, but I believe discourse would meet your needs. It’s open source, so you could self-host for “free” but there is certainly overhead.
posted by rockindata at 9:20 AM on September 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I see a revenue opportunity for private Ask Mefi instances. *

* Not really, as I suspect the effort to work that into the Mefi spaghetti code would have an ROI measured in decades, but it would be a nifty service if available.
posted by COD at 10:48 AM on September 8, 2023

To provide an answer, as much as I hate to recommend FB for anything, a private Facebook Group will probably work, will be free, and is probably accessible to anybody in the congregation.
posted by COD at 10:49 AM on September 8, 2023

Take a look at Padlet. Here's a sample layout that gives you a sense of what could work for your purposes, where everyone can post their own reflection to a prompt. There are lots of other possible layouts, too.

I've seen padlets work for 5th-6th graders and up (so, 11 yo and older), so I think it would work for your age range.
posted by cocoagirl at 2:32 PM on September 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: Thanks for these suggestions (and whoops on that truly gnarly error in the question title). Discourse and Padlet each look like solid options.

For anyone who happens upon this in the future, I'm also looking at a few different whiteboard collaboration sites as possibilities: FigJam, Miro, Mural. (Jamboard, free via Google, seems like it might still be the option in this area with the lowest barrier to entry, specifically in terms of both allowing people to contribute without having to register them as part of your team, and not having to pay for additional contributors. It has pretty limited features and I don't love it compared to the alternatives, but would get the most basic parts of the job done.)
posted by wormtales at 2:23 PM on September 9, 2023