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Gsuite and supporting continuity and community
There is a trend lately for cons affiliated with nonprofits to take advantage of Google for nonprofits to use gsuite for email management and file sharing. These are useful tools, but what happens when the convention is over?
A couple of years ago I helped out with Capricon, then later went to look something up in those files, only to find that my account had been suspended, without notice, subject to my signing up to help the following year.
I would posit these tools unless used thoughtfully, actually threaten necessary connection making that oils the gears of both sf community building and conrunning in particular.
Because we are using gsuite, for instance, we don't always tend to maintain even a spreadsheet version of a concom directory. Some gsuite admins turn off people's ability to edit their own profiles, so often the gsuite directory includes only a name and the con domain specific email. No personal email, and no phone number. No picture, not title and department.
If I'm running a con later and want to recruit that great assistant ops head, how might I look him up and contact him, unless we happened to have exchanged info directly?
If I have been cut off from that account and the files, how can I go back and make sure fanac got a copy of the pdf versions of our pubs, or grab a copy of the text of a bio I want to post on sfbios, once I get permission from the author?
Unless I already saved a local copy, I can't.
I could go on with examples from programming and art show and other departments, but I expect you get the point. I hope convention IT admins will think carefully about how info is or isn't archived, how you communicate with volunteers about what's happening with their accounts, and how you set permissions and fields for profiles in the directory.
I also encourage every such volunteer effort to have your crew opt-in to a directory of personal contact info or social media handles to distribute before you go your own ways after the event. Being a volunteer can be one of the best ways to make friends. Let's support the flowering of those friendships.
A couple of years ago I helped out with Capricon, then later went to look something up in those files, only to find that my account had been suspended, without notice, subject to my signing up to help the following year.
I would posit these tools unless used thoughtfully, actually threaten necessary connection making that oils the gears of both sf community building and conrunning in particular.
Because we are using gsuite, for instance, we don't always tend to maintain even a spreadsheet version of a concom directory. Some gsuite admins turn off people's ability to edit their own profiles, so often the gsuite directory includes only a name and the con domain specific email. No personal email, and no phone number. No picture, not title and department.
If I'm running a con later and want to recruit that great assistant ops head, how might I look him up and contact him, unless we happened to have exchanged info directly?
If I have been cut off from that account and the files, how can I go back and make sure fanac got a copy of the pdf versions of our pubs, or grab a copy of the text of a bio I want to post on sfbios, once I get permission from the author?
Unless I already saved a local copy, I can't.
I could go on with examples from programming and art show and other departments, but I expect you get the point. I hope convention IT admins will think carefully about how info is or isn't archived, how you communicate with volunteers about what's happening with their accounts, and how you set permissions and fields for profiles in the directory.
I also encourage every such volunteer effort to have your crew opt-in to a directory of personal contact info or social media handles to distribute before you go your own ways after the event. Being a volunteer can be one of the best ways to make friends. Let's support the flowering of those friendships.
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You get a similar effect on zoom for meetings. Many a meeting where the chat box has been filled with useful info ends with four minutes of instructions on how to save that to a text file.
Especially with a scheduled meeting, it would be so great if instead that could default to 'email the chat record to everyone invited to (or registered for) the meeting' or some similar form of accessible archive.
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Fortunately, the webmaster is not only a former SMOF, he's my ex-flame, and he is forced to to be exquisitely polite to me and give my incessant whinging actual weight. That helps.
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You're a tall person, when you hold your head up high. Just do it. :)
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