some ideas for more offline
I agree with you both, @mishek and @danohu, in that we need as much offline to complement interaction here. I recently presented ER in Paris and someone from Make Sense community said just that. Talking with @Ruxandra in Bucharest we also agreed to keep creating opportunities for people there to meet, somewhat inspired by the OuiShare events in Paris she was part of. But this we do locally, so it’s up to each of us.
If it has to do this platform making it easier for us to find each other, let’s not suppose that someone will build it. We can of course add this as a conceptual to do in the list of things to fix and improve in 2016 (you know where the tech dev group is), but we’ll never agree on a magical feature. E.g. we know people don’t fill in user profiles properly, and we had a conversation before about geo profiles. Why invest resources into a feature that people don’t use? Also, people move around quite a bit, so you never know who’s where unless you give it a shout.
At the level of projects, we are learning that consultancy via online conversations and community building is not enough, so a solution we find when writing proposals for funded projects is to bake in as many events and local exchanges in all the projects, and even set up small teams on the ground to organize them - see Brussels, Kathmandu, Bucharest. So it’s happening, but there’s always someone committed to do it.
Hope this helps, any other ideas?
Also, what do people think about the user policy and terms for moving into the ER organisation as members? It would be great to have some feedback and not have to re-open the discussion on how ER can be used only during wartimes 