Project- Organising the Base and onboarding groups from Mattermost

[Garryw (Garry)]

Project- Organising the Base and onboarding groups from Mattermost

Summary :

In order to improve communication, organisation and national collaboration within XR Australia we propose to work on the Base and move certain elements of planning and discussion from Mattermost to The Base.

Objectives:

• To create an effective environment for groups to onboard themselves to the Base. This will require a coherent structure and tutorials and example for new users.
• To transfer and organise resources from Mattermost to The Base.
• To transfer key statewide and national discussions to The Base.

: Tasks :
(Listed in editable post below)

[Garryw (Garry)]

Editable list of Tasks - Add your name to each task you wish to take on -

• Reach out to groups

  • @ManicMax Invite NSW & QLD & SA & WA & Tas & Australia mattermost
  • Invite National Conversation re: coronavirus XR responses to Base
  • Create list of which groups have been contacted, consulted and onboarded.
  • Consultations with groups, how do they use mattermost? How Base will fit those needs.

• Create a guide to onboarding your working group to the Base (Informed by guide to self-organizing using the Base).

• Library of Resources on The Base

  • List resources to be transferred

  • Completion of test resources

  • Translate french sources - @Garryw will do this

  • Coronavirus community action

• Admin / Moderation Group

  • Get admins from each State

When Action Points are done move them below:

Finished action points.

• Get “Paint the Streets” project page off the ground as example of how things will work

  • @everyone Add some stuff to Paint the Streets topic:
  • @garryw Start setting up wiki-editable Australian Paint the Streets topic
  • @ManicMax Contact Rosario

• Create project to create a Guide to self-organizing using the base .

  • Create a topic to house the project plan. - @Garryw will make this.

• Library of Resources on The Base

  • Paint the streets

• Reach out to groups

  • Consult with Welcoming group @serena - @Garryw and @ManicMax will do this tomorrow at 6pm

• Reorganize National Categories

  • Use French XR Base as example
  • @ManicMax give @garryw a French RDV login, look into French Base account
  • @ManicMax Plan for restructuring National categories

• @ManicMax give @garryw a French RDV login, look into French Base account

[ageorge (andrew)]

Q: Should we prioritise posting content and work etc in the national categories first before state categories ? I personally think, particularly at this time of digital existence, we should.

[ManicMax (Max)]

Yeah I think at this point, anything that is not about explicitly local stuff should go into the national categories. I’ve recently rearranged it so that there’s no “National Discussion” category but a list of areas of interest e.g. Actions, Arts, Outreach, etc.

[ManicMax (Max)]

Just my noted from the Base meeting last week:

Finding ways to make resources more accessible.

Can use the topic headers now the way we used channel headers on MM. done

Checkbox:

• Yes, I’ve joined the local group(s) done

Groups to focus on:

• Those on the verge of joining
• Those that don’t have a precedent on mattermost
• Groups that have a problem with communication or transparency

e.g.:

• Pledge action
• Forest action
• Australian Mass Mobilization

We also talked about how the Paint the Streets project was successfully launched using the Base.
The steps were:

1. Floating the idea
2. Seeing enthusiasm in the replies to the idea
3. Inviting the people who were talking about it to a launch “visioning” meeting
4. Maintaining contact with people and directing people to add new parts in the “Paint the Streets” Base category

[ManicMax (Max)]

Base health check, by the numbers

First, a glossary of the metrics.

• Consolidated Pageviews: The number of page views for logged in users (dark blue), anonymous users (light blue), and crawlers (orange).
• Signups: New accounts registered.
• Topics: New topics posted.
• Posts: The number of new posts made.
• DAU/MAU: The number of users logged in that day, divided by the number of users logged in in the last month. Indicates community “stickiness”, or how many people who visit the Base keep coming back to check on it. Discourse advises to aim for 30% or more for a healthy community
• Daily engaged users: Number of users who have liked or posted in the last day.
• New contributors: Number of users who have joined the Base

The last quarter, 29th Feb 2020 to 30 May 2020

Here we can see that after going through a bit of a lull in March, we’ve had a surge in signups, topics and posts in late April and May. The DAU/MAU community “stickiness” factor rose from an average of 17.1% in the last quarter to 19.6% in this quarter.

The last month, 30th April to 30th May 2020

The first graph shows the whole quarter. The last month is highlighted within the purple brackets and expanded on below with all indicators shown.

I have marked the saturdays with a red dot, to demonstrate that there seems to be a weekly cycle in use of the Base, with troughs on fridays and saturdays and peaks during the week.

In this last month there have been huge increases in the number of new signups, posts, daily engaged users and new contributors. New contributors is about half the people who sign up, and stickiness is going up. I would probably attribute most of this to the awareness brought to the use of the Base by Paint the Streets, and to organizers in various states becoming aware and bringing other rebels along.

The last week, 23rd May to 30th May 2020

Here we see that almost half the signups, posts and new contributors in the last month were in the last week. This would seem to indicate the Base is rapidly growing.
We should probably move to onboard a few more admins from various states to help out with the job of moderating posts, creating new categories and helping with technical tasks.

Other indicators

Flagged posts for antisocial behaviour: There have been no complaints of user behaviour during any of this time. This is a major contrast to my experience with the Facebook group “Extinction Rebellion Vic Discussion” which needs almost constant monitoring by group admins to watch out for flamewars, spam and other nasty stuff. The Base is still quite a bit smaller than that group, but it is good to see that users are very well behaved here.

Flagged posts for other issues: In the last month 9 posts have been flagged for moderator review:

Why	Result
Question about how to link directly to a post.	Question answered
Report that emails from the Base were failing domain name authentication.	Reporter made aware that the issue was known and was waiting to be fixed by the IT team.
Request to remove references to Zoom from first steps topics.	Rationale for zoom remaining (for now) explained to requester. Explanation posted publically here.
Automated flag because of an IT team account testing a script which typed it’s first post suspiciously fast.	No action.
Request to change username.	Support offered.
Request that user could not progress past introductory steps.	No error found, user directed to categories page and was able to progress.
2 reports that users were still seeing message that they had not joined their local group, while their local group was not available.	1 had local group added for them. The other is a recent request pending completion (needs local group added).

These metrics above are shown in terms of today, yesterday, the last 7 days and the last 30 days.
In this case “yesterday” is saturday the 30th of May - and we know that Saturdays are in general “low use” days. Note the dropping “Time to first response” indicator which is the average amount of hours for a new topic to have it’s first reply. This was 342 hours in April, and is now down to less than a day.

[ageorge (andrew)]

Thanks for this Max. This is useful for the discussion re tech recommendations etc for the Aus Mass Mob group to propose. I will connect people to this thread.