In our back-and-forth of emails amongst the Berlin group, we’ve been organising sponsorship meetings, talking about potential partnerships, etc, and planning visits to companies/organisations. This is all stuff which we don’t feel like we should be posting in a public forum, so it goes in an email.
But then, very soon we’re back to the old email quandary: there are constant emails, you never know if you should include the whole Berlin team, if it’s too much email for some, or if people would feel left out if they don’t receive the email…
So we’re experimenting with a hidden Berlin-Internal subcategory on the forum. I’ve added Berlin team members to a group called Berlin-Internal and only they can see this category. (We’ll be talking in German most of the time anyway, so it’s not so exciting for everyone else!)
As I mentioned to the Berliners, this feels a little weird, as we’re saying transparence this, and open that, and then we sneak off into our secret closed forum for champagne and caviar (oh - you don’t have that in the public forums…?)
But I think it’s a better system than emails - as long as there are clear guidelines (and we stick to them) which say what kind of thing is suitable for the private forum and everything else should be on the public forum. It would also be good having a weekly update in the public Berlin forum, summarising what happened in the internal group in the last week, but with names and addresses etc left out.
So far we haven’t used it, but I’m interested to know what others think, and I’ll report back once we’ve used it for a few conversations.