An idea for an initial proposal (phase 1)

I've been thinking about the issues highlighted by Mary during the interview, as well as the comments added by Jordi, Sheena, Jardine and Genie on our first post after the meeting, and it's brought two main issues to mind for me and a possible phase 1 proposal. Please let us know what you think, you might find that I've missed an important issue, or that the proposal is flawed!

Issue 1: Interest and Interaction.
Even if the most easy-to-use website on the planet is created for MCRN, getting people interested/interacting with the activities and information will still be dependent on the way that the site is used - does the information invite for/allow interaction and feedback... this is something that I'm still trying to learn: how to invite people to participate by the way I write - it's a massive evolving area of Internet publishing that requires a lot of practice, trial-and-error, reading etc. (Although there's some great tutorials out there too).

Often large email lists are just used for announcements and are not interactive at all (due to the size of the list). It provides an incredible way to 'disseminate' information to large groups of people, but the end result is a loss of community/relevance and hence interest in reading the information (in my limited experience).

One way around this is (as Mary identified) to have more specific groups that are small and specific enough that active involvement and member contibutions can be encouraged. But this runs into the other main issue.

Issue 2: Sending information to multiple groups of people
The MCRN currently disseminates information for a wide range of interest groups. Mary needs the ability to choose which groups of people receive which information. Unless precaution is taken, this may lead to some individuals (who are in multiple groups) recieving information twice, which will be annoying and discourage active involvement.

There are only 2 simple ways around this that I can think of:

1. Make sure the groups are mutually exclusive (an individual can only exist in one group), or,
2. Allow people to be part of multiple groups but make sure that each individual post is only ever sent to one group.

I reckon that option (2) is a better option as it gives more control to the members receiving the information and forces MCRN to be careful to categorise the information and avoid spamming. It is still possible to send a message to more than one group in extremely important cases, but should be done very rarely (if possible). Is this possible Mary?

Proposal for phase 1
Which leads to an initial solution for phase 1, that is free to set up and easy to use/build upon.

Step 1:
If, together with Mary, we can separate all the contacts on the contact list into the relevant categories (allowing contacts to be members of multiple categories), we can then set up individual Google Groups for each category (hopefully around 4 or 5, or am I dreaming? :-).

This will then allow Mary to send each piece of information only to the specific group as she does currently with a few additional benefits.

More importantly, this will open up the possibility for step 2:

Step 2:
Once Mary is comfortable using the google groups, one specific group can be chosen for a 3-6 month trial of phase 1.

We can set up a free Blogger website (like this one) for the one specific group (one of the more active groups), say "Mental Health in the Mountains", that Mary can use for all the Mental Health information postings. Whenever Mary posts to the site, it will automatically email out the information to the normal mental health email group, providing for a smooth transition for users. The only difference will be that the email has a small link at the end that will open up the website (if people want to comment/interact with the Mary's information.)

This'll enable a number of specific improvements:

• People can begin transitioning to an easy web-based system, but are not forced to - they can just stick to the email.
• Mary can involve others very gradually - initially engaging readers to add their own thoughts/experience/comments to each post, then as people become more confident, allowing other individuals to post info/articles to the site.
• Provides an opportunity to experiment with the way info is posted over a period of 3-6 months, aiming to build an active online community.
• All the information and comments are organised neatly on the site (including archives), making it easy to find information.

Using such a trial will enable Mary and ourselves to evaluate whether it is possible to get people involved in such a community based website (This blogger site is 10x easier to use than any custom site/Content Management System that I've ever seen - and it's free). When the trial is complete, we can re-evaluate with Mary the pro's and con's. If it has succeeded, we can continue this method with the other groups and integrate these blogs with the main website (which will be a much simpler website). The great thing is all the tools are free and available (and reliable).

If the trial with one group has not succeeded, then we can re-evaluate together with Mary while Mary continues to use the smaller email groups. Nothing to lose!

Are there flaws I haven't thought of? or other benefits? Please let me know what you think! Or perhaps you've got a different idea of your own!