I'm wanting to get a discussion going, primarily about creating a Facebook page for the South African Drupal community, secondarily about the other communication tools at our disposal and how best to use them.
To grow the local community, we need to get the word out to as many people as possible, and I believe that the networked reach which Facebook provides should be strongly leveraged. I know there are already a couple of old style groups but my feeling is that we should consolidate by creating one "Drupal in South Africa" page - we can then pool resources to maintain the page, and by not being separate, we'll be able to easily see what the other local groups are up to, how each is organising and promoting events.
I know that we have http://groups.drupal.org/south-africa as well as http://drupal.co.za and Cape Town is wanting to put together a Cape Town specific website, add to that a Facebook page, the question is: how do we use them all in such a way that we leverage the strengths of each tool intelligently without too much duplication if possible. Some duplication is going to be unavoidable, like the posting of events on both the g.d.o group and Facebook page, and you do actually want people to sign up for events on Facebook so that it's posted to their newsfeed. We could decide to use g.d.o for discussions and information that would be useful to the global Drupal community (for example this post which could be used by other user groups around the world). I think the drupal.co.za site is important for people to get a sense of the local community as a whole, but it's also useful for each local community to have control over their own 'domain', and where content overlaps (i.e. case studies, portfolios, jobs maybe) that the main site is set up to pull these in without having to manually duplicate content.
I think if we can try and figure out some guidelines for what's best for each communication tool, then we'll be more efficient and have a better chance of reaching more people without it being too confusing for potential newcomers to the community to get interested and involved. From the guidelines we can put together a clear strategy for directing people to the appropriate place to achieve their particular goals.
So, here are the tools that we currently have at our disposal, and it would be great to get as many people as possible to comment on what they think each one should be used for, and why:
- http://groups.drupal.org/south-africa
- http://drupal.co.za
- national newsletter
- local specific website, e.g. drupalcape.co.za
- local newsletter
- facebook page (national)
- ...
Any others I've missed?
While I'm specifically focused on the South Africa user groups, input from other countries would be appreciated too.