OpenGeofiction
Another extra entry: about OGF social networking also.
Posted by Alejandro24 on 27 August 2016 in English.I’ve not editing so much since… uhmm… I really don’t know. I updated JOSM, and proably that fixed some problems with OGF editing. Sincerelly I don’t like Potlatch2 (where is the scale rule in that app?). And also I edited the OGF Wiki.
I’ve been updating the coastline of Aŭstrasuno Tero, principally in Malvarma Rokoj, were I created a strange and weird geography. I like it too much: islands, islands, islets… and more islands with a sharp and broken coastlines.
By the way, is OGF in social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Reditt or Tumblr?
Discussion
Comment from eklas on 27 August 2016 at 04:32
Twitter: No, although occassionaly someone tweets about it. If OGF were to have a twitter account I’d gladly take care of it as I’m mildly addicted to Twitter
Comment from Yuanls on 27 August 2016 at 05:52
I searched OGF on instagram a while ago and 2 posts came up. I wouldn’t think social media holds much for geofiction as there is little interest from the wider internet community as far as I have found. All my friends think it’s interesting but it’s not worth spending time on.
Comment from Alejandro24 on 27 August 2016 at 16:20
I was thinking in OGF in social media, principally in Twitter, in order to keep informed about the status of OGF servers (and maybe sometimes showing things about the OGF world). Sometimes OGF doesn’t load so well as it should and there is no place to ask about.
At least we should have a chat in Telegram or IRC. I guess it would be cool.
Comment from deltanz on 27 August 2016 at 18:30
I believe that social networks could attract a lot of new and curious users to OGF. Not sure how engaged they would be, though,
Comment from niels20020 on 27 August 2016 at 19:31
@Alejandro24 I think we should have a chat too. Would be very cool indeed.
@deltanz I also think it would attract new users, but it could also attract some vandals
Comment from deltanz on 27 August 2016 at 19:54
@Alejandro24 @niels20020 YES! A chat is everything we need! Sometimes I want to message the same thing to 3 or 4 users and it is so demanding! I always feel like it’s hard to reach other people in the community and I get a feeling that no one is doing anything.
My alternative is to add everyone as a friend so that I get a huge list of users on my profile, and if I want to se if someone is online, I search for the ones who edited more recently. But I got so many users there, that I almost get lost. There’re some people working a lot and I’d love to see their work more often, but I don’t really remember their user names. I think a chat or something to show who are online at a given time would be awesome!
Comment from Alejandro24 on 27 August 2016 at 20:09
A chat is a good start. Because as deltanz say: “I get a feeling that no one is doing anything.”
To keep it simple, we could set up a chat in a service like Telegram, which is prepared with all the utilities and tools for chatting and can be used directly from the computer.
Comment from oscar2002 on 27 August 2016 at 20:27
A mi me parece una idea genial genial, y creo que Google Spaces puede ser la solución perfecta: (Os dejo en enlace a continuación: https://get.google.com/spaces/)
Solo se necesita una cuenta de Gmail (algo que creo que tiene todo el mundo) y permite la creación de”grupos” en los que compartir rápidamente enlaces, imágenes, iniciar conversaciones y compartir vídeos de YouTube…
¿Que os parece la idea)
Comment from Alejandro24 on 27 August 2016 at 21:00
Google Spaces is interesting, it looks simple. But it says it is for “small groups”, how much is a small group? I don’t know, I didn’t found the answer.
Comment from isleño on 27 August 2016 at 21:38
As far as I know, there’s no official OGF presence on social media right now, but I think we’d definitely encourage anyone to share about OGF on whatever platforms they’re comfortable with. Even just tweeting about OGF, posting on Facebook, etc. Your friends and family might be interested to see what you’re up to.
Of course there’s not a huge number of people interested in geofiction, but I think the really high quality work (and we have quite a bit of that!) would be at least mildly interesting to a wider audience. For example a post with some amazing geofiction maps got a few thousand upvotes on Reddit a while back. So if you share something really impressive, a larger number of people might enjoy it.
I know there was an IRC channel for OGF in the past (irc://freenode/#opengeofiction) but if anyone wants to resurrect or replace it, I think you’d be welcome to do so.
Comment from Alejandro24 on 28 August 2016 at 00:39
I think we need something more versatile than IRC now. Spaces and Telegram are two good options.
Comment from Thunderbird on 28 August 2016 at 02:32
Maybe create a private Facebook group?
Comment from Alejandro24 on 28 August 2016 at 02:57
Maybe OGF could own a page and a private group in Facebook. Is an option.
Comment from niels20020 on 28 August 2016 at 07:02
I don’t think everyone here has a Facebook account.
Comment from Pawl on 28 August 2016 at 08:28
I don’t suppose there is any platform where everyone here has an account at the moment.
Personally, Facebook is where I do nearly all my social networking, so that would be my first choice for an OGF presence. But I’m happy to join others!
Comment from niels20020 on 28 August 2016 at 09:03
I have an account on a lot of social platforms, but I’m not very active.
Comment from Alejandro24 on 28 August 2016 at 19:23
Well, we could start a Google+ group and a space. Probably most of us have an account of gmail.
Comment from isleño on 28 August 2016 at 22:53
As I recall, I think the last admin consensus on this issue was that the main forum for primary OGF discussions should remain here on the OGF website. It’s not ideal, but at least everyone has easy access to it, and no one needs to sign up for anything else.
The role of social media platforms, then, would be to allow OGF users to connect with each other outside OGF, to pursue side discussions, to share OGF with others beyond the community, and to host functions that we can’t host here, like chatting or tweeting.
That said, it’s possible that Thilo or other admins have a different understanding. If that’s the case I imagine they would share their thoughts here.