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What can this forum help us accomplish?

Started by Cramulus, September 01, 2010, 04:16:21 PM

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Telarus

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Placid Dingo

Quote from: Triple Zero on September 06, 2010, 05:04:58 PM
Almost!

Cause even if we would always get a kind benevolent and wise temp leader for a project (not so far-fetched, we had a couple), I think it's not so much a problem as delineating the temporary leader, as well as getting the project participants to suck it up and do what she/he tells them to. Even if it's the most awesome leader.

Just plain charisma only seems to motivate participants for so long.



I think defacto leaders just 'happen' (being the one or two people who do/care the most).

But Goals are great. I'm told in PR you MUST always set goals so you can measure success.

IE Xproject is a success if it generates

At least 20 posters

Buzz in at least five blogs including one major (Boingboing/Disinformation/Fark etc)

At least one new contributing member to PD com.
Haven't paid rent since 2014 with ONE WEIRD TRICK.

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Quote from: Kai on September 06, 2010, 03:33:00 PM
Referring to the thing back a page or two:

The reason projects peter out around here isn't because we don't have organized goals. It isn't because there's a lack of energy. It isn't the lack of good newbies. It isn't even the occasional (or often) drama. The reason is that we're all so independent that we can't work on projects together without getting in each other's way. We're all a bunch of control freaks. Control freaks with itchy trigger fingers.

The common factor for the projects that haven't made it yet, in my experience, is a lack of clear goals. Moreso than people being control freaks. While this goes hand in hand with people not willing to compromise, as you pointed out and I've observed, I would say they're correlated sometimes but not necessarily connected.

In fact, I think more often, there aren't enough control freaks so key decisions don't get made and the target is lost in a fog of everyone waiting for someone else to make a move.

Specificity in attitudes predicts behavior, I could even dig you up the studies.
P E R   A S P E R A   A D   A S T R A

Richter

OP:

This place (current population and motivations over the past year ish), is great at chrunign out ideas and minor publications.  For the false starts that do get going, we get good quality when something does get off the ground.  Internmittens is a prime example here.

If anyhting were to get expanded, or be subject to doing MORE, I'd say that's the palce to do it.  (Just pondering where else this could go has given me a few other project ideas too.)

Since the loose, freewheeling association and participation attitude has driven it this far, I don't really see any changes in the structure or format of how this gets done being contructive.  It would add EXPECTATION and DEMAND, both of which kill my motivation in any situation on projects I do in my free time.  If anything, I'd look for ways to rope in new brains / Points of view, and ways to whore out what we've already done.
Quote from: Eater of Clowns on May 22, 2015, 03:00:53 AM
Anyone ever think about how Richter inhabits the same reality as you and just scream and scream and scream, but in a good way?   :lulz:

Friendly Neighborhood Mentat

Triple Zero

Net and Dingo basically say the same thing, and I think they got a point. If you want a project to go well, you need a clear goal.

For example those letter writing campaigns we did, they worked (somewhat) because of a deadline. If everybody's just waiting until stuff happens, nothing may happen, but if it's "write / join / post / create something NOW or it's too late and the opportunity it over" a lot of people will at least give it a shot and put in a littlebit extra to get it done on time, which for a lot of projects not only means something happens on time, but something happens at all :)
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Cramulus

interesting tangent: Unlike infectious diseases and news, behavior change spreads faster through online networks that have many close connections instead of many distant ties. Redundancy is key, as people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see many others doing it.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/09/network-behavior-spread/



Net & Dingo both say that it would be easier to participate if there were clearer goals.

Richter adroitly points out that expectations and demand can kill a volunteer's motivation.

Perhaps there is a way to join these two points...



perhaps there is a way to make a goal explicit without making it imperative


one suggestion would be to come up with some kind of form we could fill out about a project. Remember the Volunteer Thread? The idea was that people would post things that they need help with, and other people would post if they wanted to help out. But it didn't work that well. why? I'm not entirely sure, I think it has something to do with thread structure. In the thread architecture, a request for help gets the same weight as a single-emote reply... Thread drift will rapidly obscure still-active ideas.

MAYBE we need to set up something like a wiki page where members can create or modify a project's goals and to-do list... that way, if everybody has equal access, nobody's going to feel like a tyrant.

Triple Zero

Net came up with a couple of form-like questionnaries once. On the headquarters that no longer don't exist, but also in O:MF, I think.
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Placid Dingo

Wiki would be awesome. I should point out, I like goals, but if you're just throwing stuff out there, what-ifing or having fun, then that's awesome too.
Haven't paid rent since 2014 with ONE WEIRD TRICK.

Nephew Twiddleton

For future projects I initiate I'll keep the goal thing in mind, but try to keep ot open ended. I think a wiki adjunct is a good idea too.
Strange and Terrible Organ Laminator of Yesterday's Heavy Scene
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Cramulus

So as Richter pointed out, one of our talents at this forum is producing little booklets, pamphlets, small publications.

Other than posting on the PD blog, 23ae, and scribd, what are the best ways to spread these ideas?




bds

I think a good way would be to start submitting our stuff to aggregators - Digg, Reddit, ways that will get us a large amount of traffic and possibly even the "jackpot," front page of Digg style.

Faust

If you want to make those absolutely viral, you have to spread hooks far and wide, easiest through social networking sites. People have short attention spans so throwing the full content at them in one go can scare people off. These hooks have to inspire interest and a want to know more with morsels of info.
Social media makes it easy to spread far and wide, but getting people to actually focus on material depends on how Market it. Fortunately we have the memebomb database which gives us a little stockpile of marketable pitches.
Sleepless nights at the chateau

Triple Zero

Also I get the idea that if you pitch a booklet to the right subreddit, there will be people with a slightly longer attentionspan reading and checking them out. Some regions in redditspace are in fact quite intelligent.

Also, about Digg, I heard it's not going very well with that, since they got a huge user backlash after the latest change in the codebase, interface and ranking algorithms. Seems that big mainstream news channels and popular blogs are automatically more likely to hit the Digg frontpage.

But for Reddit, sure. If anyone ever submits something to Reddit, drop a note on the forum here and I'll give it an upvote. There's more people with a Reddit account on here, right? I know TTM has one, and I spotted somebody called "stgulik" on there, but I'm not sure who that is (maybe Rat or Iason, is my guess).

As far as I can observe, timing also plays a part in getting to Reddit frontpage. I get the idea that recently-submitted articles getting like five upvotes in their first hour also drift to the top, if for a short while, compared to older articles that need tens or hundreds.

Also know that every Reddit reader makes a selection of subreddits they like, and subscribes to then, then when they are logged on, on Reddit.com they will see a mix of the top-rated articles from only those subreddits. This means that, if you pick the right subreddits, that are very on topic, but also don't have a lot of competition, you will have a good chance our articles will float to the top for exactly the right subgroup target audience Reddit readers.

Additionally, TTM made a PrincipiaDiscordia subreddit, that hardly has any activity right now, but for one, we could just dump any cool stuff in there, regardless of anything. And more importantly if we pitch articles to other on-topic subreddits (politics? religion? philosophy? I dunno) you can submit them to the PrincipiaDiscordia subreddit as well. Just to sort of tie them together. I think it helps if the duplicate articles in the PD subreddit have a few comments, because then the link to the PD subreddit shows up as an "other discussions .." tab in the original subreddit, which will give us exposure.

Oh, adiitionally, speaking of comments, I believe articles are also rated depending on the number of comments they get.

So yeah. What shall we submit?
Ex-Soviet Bloc Sexual Attack Swede of Tomorrow™
e-prime disclaimer: let it seem fairly unclear I understand the apparent subjectivity of the above statements. maybe.

INFORMATION SO POWERFUL, YOU ACTUALLY NEED LESS.

Placid Dingo

Quote from: Cramulus on September 14, 2010, 03:00:06 PM
So as Richter pointed out, one of our talents at this forum is producing little booklets, pamphlets, small publications.

Other than posting on the PD blog, 23ae, and scribd, what are the best ways to spread these ideas?





Real world projects. Absolutely.
Haven't paid rent since 2014 with ONE WEIRD TRICK.

Adios

#89
Slightly altered.