New User Introductions
Alanna Irving PublicSeen by 91I manage and participate in a lot of online communities, and one thing I've found to consistently improve the cultural cohesion, sense of group identity, and welcoming vibe, is a good process for introducing new users. I have yet to find a platform that does this well, and I think we have the opportunity to do so. I currently spend a lot of time doing this manually.
Right now I run a manual process on Google+, Yammer, and of course here in the Loomio community whereby new users of various communities are welcomed by tagging them in a post that introduces who they are. This allows other members to know they exist, find common interests, and makes the new person feel welcome. It also creates a very useful reference of who is here and what they are about, which can serve to set the culture and tone strongly.
I'm constantly inspired by who the people here are, and I would be missing a lot if I didn't know anything about them. (Check out the inspiring introductions in the Translation subgroup for more awesomeness.)
But as I said this is currently manual and time consuming. Also it's an imperfect system because sometimes people don't provide info about themselves. Or sometimes we just forget someone and they slip through the cracks (human error).
So here's what I suggest as a Loomio feature....
When a new user joins (or asks to join) they write an introduction of themselves. This intro is automatically added as a comment, with them tagged, on a "user introductions" thread that exists in every group. This information also then lives on their user page, so people can click on their name and be reminded about who they are.
In the future, this could work differently. For example, instead of going on a thread as a comment, it could be as part of the group activity stream in the redesigned group page that's in the pipeline. And the bit on their profile could be editable as we expand the features around user profiles. But for now, I feel like the above solution would add heaps of value without changing the basic structure of the app.
Sounds good to me. I'd like to be able to look up someone's intro. And it would be good to keep long intros out of specific topic discussions.
It's a great little feature and we should really nail it asap.
Just today in the Enspiral comms working group we resolved to start an introductions thread for new people coming on, similar to how we do it in the Loomio Community. Would be sweet to have it automated! At the same time, I can easily keep doing it manually for now.
Do intro's currently hang out somewhere after a person's been accepted into group? Or disappear after the notification's been read?
@hannahsalmon is working on that problem right now @niclane ! We're trying to make them easier to find again.
Featuring common sense. This idea won’t probably need a proposal in the right column.
I really like the idea of an 'Introduce Yourself' feature that's rolled into the app, rather than done through the hack of creating a discussion for it (although obviously this is much better than nothing). I also really like the suggestion by @alanna that people enter the intro text to be added to the Introduce Yourself area when they request (or accept) membership in a group.
Another approach would be to make a Twitter-style micro-bio a required field, and tell the people when they create accounts that this will be auto-added to an Introduce Yourself space in every group they join. But I like @alanna's suggestion better, as it allows people to give the info most relevant to a particular group when they join.
i think thats a great idea.... i would also like to add to that idea - What if it became obvious that certain people here on loomio belonged to certain idealogical groups or communities within loomio. For example a POLITICS community or a ENVIRONMENTALISM community or a COMPUTER PROGRAMMING community....? My idea is that when you first sign up with loomio - you do as Alanna has suggested - but then after that maybe at the end of the page - it could say "these are some of the communities that already call Loomio home - please feel free to tick the appropriate box - if you would like to be "connected" into that community here on Loomio"....
Does that make sense?
this would be awesome? we were thinking something similar to help geographically distributed people find themselves AFK, by asking a location during sign up :)
Totally agree. People put great content in that box when they request to join a group. If we could provide a little more context about what that information is used for, we'd probably see even richer content.