Before becoming an Angel, I wasn’t that active here in the forum, but once I joined for real, I found the number of places where to find information quite confusing. It seemes, there was almost everytime one more place I didn’t see initially (or could quickly find later).
So in principle I would prefer to cut down on the number of places for similar information. And by that avoiding inconsistencies.
I can’t say for sure what direction I would take. The map is quite cool. But personally, I’m even more of a list type of guy. But maybe that’s too old school
If it’s ok for everyone, I would at least update the Hamburg information and add me, @Smojo and @Ophelia.
Maybe we can remove @goody, too? He didn’t reply to a forum PM I sent a while ago. I’ll send an e-mail to the address he listed in the address book and see if he replies, first.
In the landing page that we might have in the future we could simply generate a list from the JSON information that’s already there.
I propose to hide the addressbook and instead make a simple list which points to regional forum topics (Australia could be listed too, although there is no specific contact person). When people in those topics decide to meet up or become fairphoneangels, they will show up in the communitymap (that could be placed unter the list as an incentive. ;)).
This way we can avoid that the addressbook contains many contact persons that don’t respond and the chance to receive an answer is much higher in a public topic.
Sounds good to me. It keeps the (technical) threshold low for new contacts and the list remains up-to-date because it links to locations instead of people.
Ingo and @friek, you can both edit your local topics’ first posts yourself (and your local entries in the address book). I think everyone here agrees that you should serve as the primary contact in each of these – otherwise people interested in joining might try to contact your local group and their message might stay unread.
How about just transforming the existing address book into the list that @Stefan suggested? We could gradually replace the links in the existing “collection of the local Fairphone communities”.
I already replaced the link to the Aachen address book entry by a link to the Aachen topic (just check it out here to see what I did).
I moved all entries to a hidden topic. The first post needs some love (only list existing topics to communities and also refer to the #fairphoneangels).
In order to allow communities or topics outside of Europe greater visibility, I have structured the list into continents. As to avoid potential conflicts, I put Turkey both into Asia and Europe.
I also added a line at the top to remind people that Fairphone and Fairphone Support only serves the European market.
My reasoning here was to go by geography. I think the Fairphone Angels were originally meant to be a local/regional/nearby point of help, and when we follow that logic, I think it makes sense to put it in “Africa”.
When I originally thought about, I actually had a look at the Wikipedia article about Africa and it mentioned La Réunion (as “Reunion” though) as well.
I think it would not be a service for users seeking help to put it only in France/Europe, but it wouldn’t do harm if it appeared in Europe, too.