At the last Open Knowledge Australia board meeting Markus mentioned a point about providing more information on how people can support each other. What activities are people interested in? What knowledge or skills do people hold? How can we support each other?
There are a few easy ways for people to publish a simple profile that can be found for others and therefore help to answer these questions and join the dots between people, organisations, topics of interest and projects.
Join the online discussion board
Open Knowledge central have been working through a number of improvements to an online discussion space. You can connect with people around the world on topics of interest or start a new thread on something you are particularly interested in. Importantly, once you sign up you can share some details via your profile and this will help others find and connect with you. Take a look now and setup a profile at https://discuss.okfn.org/
Create an entry in the open-steps Directory
Help people find you via your organisation, location or skills. The open steps directory doesn’t yet have a large number of entries, but that doesn’t stop you from jumping in and creating an open profile.
Ask for help via the mailing list or twitter
You can sign up to the Australian chapter mail list at: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-au
And, you’ll always find a range of things shared over our twitter account at @okfnau. A number of people manage the account so mention it and you’ll likely get a response pretty soon.
Where to start…
The first step in finding help is always to seek it out. Simply asking a question to the email list for Open Knowledge Australia is a great way to share something in a not-entirely-public manner. However, if you are sharing things that are useful to the whole Open Knowledge network both now and into the future then the public discussion forum would be the place to be. The forum helps us organically develop both our shared ideas, knowledge and network of interests. With the content there indexed via search engines the more we share the more we’ll attract great people into our network over time.
Where else are people discussing Open Knowledge?
Depending on how you organise your digital life you will likely have a strong preference for one or more methods of communication and team collaboration. Let us know in the comments how you’d like to connect with people more within the Open Knowledge network. What about Slack, GitHub, Hangouts and meetup groups? Where would you like to find more people?