Three Rings

For a while now we’ve been batting around an idea about how we might be able to provide better support, idea-sharing and networking opportunities to the local administrators (and interested geeky-types) of the organisations that use Three Rings.

Especially right now, as we’re rolling out Three Rings to more and more Samaritans branches, we’re discovering that we keep meeting people to whom it could be really beneficial to be linked-up with another person in a similar position at a different organisation. For example, if we set Sometown Samaritans up, and they want some ideas about how their particular quirks and irregularities can be best-supported by Three Rings, and we happen to know that Otherplace Samaritans work in a very similar way, we’d always try to get them in touch with one another. That’s great, because it means that they can get a helping hand from another organisation that’s been through the same process and can go hand-in-hand with them, supporting them.

Often, when a new feature request comes in, we’ll see the same request come in a couple more times from different people, because nobody knows what anybody else is suggesting. And perhaps, a little, people don’t think to ask for features because they think that somebody else must have already asked (and often, this turns out not to be true).

Also, we’d like to foster a sense of community within the technically-minded folks who use Three Rings – or, at least, those who are passionate about what Three Rings can do for them.

That’s why we’re talking about setting up an e-mail discussion list. Any representative of any current or bona fide prospective organisation would be entitled to join, and would be free to discuss the things that were important to them about Three Rings, what they’d like to see, how they make use of particular features, or how their way of working can (and cannot) be represented within the system. The development team would be members of the list, too (although this not be a substitute for the official channels for obtaining technical support – our existing system of technical support, and it’s guaranteed response time, would remain in place), and would be able to answer questions of interest to “the group”.

There’d need to be rules in place, of course – the volunteers at some of the organisations that use Three Rings are anonymous, and we’d need people to agree to principles to protect that anonymity if we wanted to attract these volunteers into the discussion, but there’s no reason that it can’t work.

There are other ways that this could be facilitated, of course – a forum, or a wiki, for example – but I feel that an e-mail list probably provides the best combination of accessibilty and availability, and just the right amount of in-your-face-ness; right there in your Inbox. But I’d be interested to hear what you think: drop us a message or leave a comment, below.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 6:30 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.