The ELGL Members-Only Facebook Group is a great resource – daily, members are sharing information about their projects, programs, and communities.
But, we know that people are leaving Facebook in droves and we don’t want this to mean that you miss out on a helpful discussion forum about all things local government (plus some things unrelated but totally entertaining and fun).
So, we’ve started an ELGL Members-Only Slack Channel for your continued engagement with ELGL. If you’re still on Facebook, you can be in both the Facebook group and the Slack channel.
The ELGL management team has been using Slack for a few years and it is a great collaboration tool – a very transparent way to share information and find prior conversations and topics. This new channel is open to any current ELGL member.
What’s Slack?
Slack is a collaboration hub where you can have conversations (threaded into channels using “#”), share documents, and search for information. ELGL may enable some applications within the channel when it makes sense.
Slack has a robust help section that you can use to learn more about it.
To get started and join the channel:
- Click on this invitation link to join the channel.
- If you don’t yet have a Slack account, you’ll be prompted to create one.
- You’ll be automatically added to two channels – #general and #random. You’ll have the ability to engage in these channels fully.
- You’ll also have the option to engage on other topics as channels are created and you join them.
Some Slack basics:
- To talk “to” someone, use the “@” and type their name and they’ll get a ping that you mentioned them.
- To reference a channel, use the channel hashtag “#” to flag that channel.
- You have the ability to type “@everyone” or “@channel” to ping the entire network (everyone) or channel. Please do not use this feature unless there’s a critical reason to do so. Ask yourself, “if I asked five people if using @everyone or @channel was necessary, what would they say?”
- Download the app so you can follow along. If Slack isn’t part of your app rotation yet, you might have to get in the habit of checking it regularly if you’d like to engage in the conversations.
Here’s some information about how we’ll maintain the Slack channel:
- ELGL staff will maintain both groups equally, meaning if information is posted on Facebook by ELGL, it will also be posted in Slack and vice versa.
- Discussions will occur organically in both forums – so if you’re looking for feedback on an item, you’ll have the best luck if post to both Facebook and Slack. If you’re only in one forum or the other, that’s fine (but just know that your post isn’t being cross-posted on your behalf).
- When a topic is really taking off, we might ping the other forum to participate but this isn’t a hard and fast practice.
- We’re using this code of conduct as a starting point and expect all members of the channel to adhere to it. After we see how people are interacting and using the channel, we’ll find tune and write our own code. Basically, treat people with kindness and be considerate of their time when you’re using the channel to request information.
Don’t know much about Slack? Here’s a quick FAQ:
- What is Slack? Slack is a $3 billion startup ? in San Francisco that has created one of the best chat products in the world.
- How many people use Slack? Over 2.3 million people are talking in Slack chats every day.
- How much capital has Slack raised from investors? ? $340 million.
- Why is Slack awesome? You can share basically anything: ? emojis, ? links, ? videos, ? files, ? photos, gifs, etc. You can also easily set up notifications from Twitter, and other services, that get posted directly into the chat.