This page is a collaborative document used for Communications Committee strategy planning. Add your own strategic objective in bold and/or discussion below in plaintext.

OK, so we can and should present comms guidelines on a tool-by-tool basis BUT for planning's sake and user friendliness, let's try to outline all the various "whens" as situations our various user groups would encounter. For instance, User A wants to get support for Problem X so they could a) mail the list, b) ping for help on IRC, etc.

So we want to develop guidelines for their situation (e.g., "How to get help") as well as specific guidelines for each channel (e.g., point #4 on the Mailing List guidelines is a recommendation for the "proper" way to report a tech prob and request assistance). (As always, we're going to want to develop a good *process* where none exists and accommodate existing processes and technologies where they do.)

We are currently working on a "mini-audit" of communications scenarios that take place within the community. Once we've been able to enumerate the scenarios, we can discuss policies, processes, and technology that can support these communication scenarios.

This process is under way.

We have a recently-revised introductory guide to the wiki explaining how it is used from a big-picture perspective as well as specific details for new wiki contributors. We're also developing plans for how to share that information with new and existing members of the community.

Earlier this year, we collected examples of privacy, usage, intellectual property, and other related policies from a variety of online sources. Members of the Communications Committee are currently tasked with creating versions of these policies applicable to the Evergreen community.

Recommendations:

Implement a Website Planning Team chairperson or co-chairpeople to provide leadership and support for ongoing Website Planning Team maintenance and improvement efforts.

Have the Website Planning Team, in conjunction with the Governance Committee, greater Communications Committee, developers, and the general community, take responsibility for the website and all proposed changes and enhancements. There is significant benefit in having a centralized planning and management authority for the website since it is such a crucial centerpiece of an online collaborative community.

Communcations Committee should take on the role of Outreach & Awareness and adopt some marketing-related strategic objectives. This doesn't have to be corporate drone type marketing stuff but just getting the messages from the EG Community out to the non-EG community. What messages? A good approach is storytelling, so we can tell the story of how EG is affordable, flexible and versatile, well-supported, the backbone of a thriving and successful and growing community. We can tell the participation stories of organizations developing new features together and tell the success stories of major implementations and migrations. We can tell the stories of the few K-12 folks and get more K-12 folks interested. And any other stories the community has to share.

1) Engage in a regular campaign to increase community participation on the wiki. This could take the form of a quarterly reminder to the mailing list (and maybe associated blog posts on various community blogs) extolling the virtues and ease of wiki participation, and linking to these guidelines.

2) Implement the "adopt-a-page/section" plan we discussed in recent Web Team conversations. On a related note, it might make sense for one or more people from the Web Team to "adopt-the-wiki" and be the wiki cheerleaders/community leaders.

3) Offer in-person and online-coordinated wiki improvement process analogues of "hackfests" so that non-developers can actively contribute to the EG knowledge base. This could be managed by the wiki leaders mentioned in #2.

4) Coordinate with DIG so that there is coordination between related content updating and maintenance on the Docs site and the wiki.