How to make Places more suitable for conversations?

On the last Roadmap meeting we went through a number of open issues and saw one in particular that requires further discussion. It’s about the broader question of how to make Places better suited to conversations.

I’ll take an example from my own group in Gothenburg. Some places are used almost exclusively for more focused discussions, like one for the board meetings/discussions and another for the onboarding group. We even tried a “off-topic” place for random discussions, but that didn’t work very well.

We would like to know from others if you use Places that way or if you ever considered doing it. And would it be useful if their wall was made more accessible somehow (because right now you need to click on the place and then on the wall, and you only get notified about new messages at a place if you marked it as favorite or enabled its wall notifications).

I’m particularly interested in hearing from @Katie_Berns, if that would be useful for Foodsharing Stockholm, which has different working groups organizing things and probably discussing things elsewhere. Also from @danveg, since you also use Mattermost in Luxembourg, right? Is it mostly because of MM’s channels feature?

Thanks for raising this topic!

Yes, Foodsharing Luxembourg uses Mattermost for communication mainly.

The channel feature is one thing we could use places on Karrot for, but we have not tried to do so yet. Personally, I have been taking places for what the word really mean. :smiley: We also have working groups that are usually using open channels to make it easy for everybody to join. However, we also have a few closed channels, such as one for the admins of the association, which could not be directly reproduced on Karrot I guess.

The most important reason why we have kept on using Mattermost is our onboarding procedure; New members are invited to Mattermost first as it has not been possible for us to organise the trial pickups on Karrot in an easy way (if they want to become a foodsaver). This topic may be history soon; See https://community.karrot.world/t/applicant-trial-pickup-proposal/575.

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