Regional forums?

Help & feedback
1

Just a thought - would it be useful to others to have a set of regional forums?

So maybe 8-12 or so to cover England?

We would like to network more intensively with local groups, and a set of foriums might be an asset?

What do others think?

2 Likes
2

Yes a great idea and it might highlight dead spots or areas that need encouraging. Steve. Market Harborough Fixers C.I.C

3

Yes, this could create a good mutual support network for advice , ideas and encouragement.

Stephen. Repair Cafe Purbeck

4

My tuppence: Remember that you can use ‘Small Talk’ and things like that do create a new topic with your area to ask others to connect. I think connecting it great, and regional is good, but as Restarters Covers the world, that could to a lot of groups, so wonder if logistically it’s an efficient use of time?

5

Ok thanks for your replies, it seems to me we have modest support for the idea but not overwhelming enthusiasm!!

Do the mods have an opinion on the idea or how best to implement it?

I’d like to be able to subscribe to a topic / forum etc and get notifications on new posts, but only in my area. Not bothered how it’s implemented and appreciate we can’t be creating thousands of these things!

G

6

Hi all, thanks Gareth for starting this thread!

I had a chat with @James about this and here’s our thoughts.

Regional networking is a great idea and we’d love to try to help facilitate it on Restarters best we can.

  • Things we’d love: people meeting people from their area; groups helping groups in their region; groups banding together into a network…
  • Things we’d like to avoid: an empty regional space on the forum giving the false impression that there’s nothing happening in a region; discussion specific to one region being unhelpful noise for people not in that region; too much extra moderation effort for ourselves!

There’s a few ways we could go about it, in increasing order of complexity:

  • (a) Start a topic related to your region in e.g. Small Talk (as @Clare_Seek suggested).
  • (b) Tags for regions: We set up tags for a region, then any topic in any category can be tagged with that region. You can subscribe to get notification about topics tagged with a particular region you’re interested in.
  • (c) Categories for regions: Pros: would keep discussions for particular region from rest of forum. Scope for subforums, etc. Cons: Setting up categories and subcategories and all the associated membership and permissions etc takes a bit of time, so to do it that way proactively for multiple regions is probably a bit much to do on spec. There’s the possibility of regional forums having noone in them, giving the false impression of tumbleweeds in an area.
  • (d) Formal networks. Overkill here, but I’ll mention as not everyone may know this, we already do have some formalised networks of groups using Restarters as a paid package to coordinate the groups in their area. It’s a package of network coordination features, data reporting across the network, private discussion areas, API to pull out data for display on public facing website for the network, etc.

Our suggestion is: let’s try this out with tags. It’s very low effort / low risk way to try it out. If a particular region was really active, we could then think about setting up full blown space with subcategories etc for that region.

I can set up a Yorkshire and the Humber tag @Gareth_Coleman . And an East Midlands tag @steve.cousens and a South West England one @Stephen_Rawlins @Clare_Seek . Then a good place to start would be Clare’s idea - you create a topic in Small Talk for that region shouting out for other groups in that region - and explain how to use the tag for new topics for people in that region.

How’s that all sound?

1 Like
7

Sounds good to me. Great work. Thanks.

8

Thanks for such a detailed consideration and I agree with all your points, especially it would be bad to have empty topics that give a false impression of low activity in a region. I’m happy with a low key trial, and tags seem a good mechanism that we can use.

I will make a shout out post here, and also encourage the half dozen or so local groups we’ve made contact with who aren’t currently on here to register and we can all use this to network.

9

Yes, let’s give it a go.