How best to communicate about biogas: To be on facebook or not to be?

 

 

It is hard for me to either contribute to our facebook group Solar CITIES Biogas Innoventors and Practitioners OR contribute here. I'm trying to figure out the best way to do both!

Your thoughts are appreciated.

I'm a both/and postmodernist.

Evolutionary biology suggests that many paths will be tried, a few will succeed, many will fail, some delicate organisms will stay vibrant because of their beauty or because they form a symbiosis with a defender... I won't let either sink if I can help it... just planning my moves too slowly perhaps.

I find our community site to ultimately have more convenience and relevance than facebook, but though I may have convinced  Marcel Lenormand to join facebook so we could have these discussions all the time, and we could have continue to do them on the blog or a website,  we wouldn't have but a handful of folks to bring over to our new community website if we hadn't attracted so many others into the fold on facebook.

They can reinforce each other I hope.

Let us never give up! In time a commercial operation like facebook could go under simply because it wasn't evolved with intent for helping create freedoms and energy independence and healthy food and fertilizer -- we use it that way, but its DNA was different. It can equally talk about what people had for lunch that wasn't cooked on biogas (Remember how in defiance I posted every day from Germany what I had for lunch that was cooked on biogas!?) But when commercial entitites do the way of the big dinosaur, we still will need smart mammals with the capacity for love in their DNA to expand their niches, so we keep the flame going and we keep evolving our platform, which is dedicated to being an open hackspace for connecting community catalysts.

And what I'm learning cross posting from facebook groups for my classes to Blackboard and vice versa, is that we can do both.

When we get things well integrated I will be doing all my writing on Solar CITIES and feeding facebook and twitter for the broadcast potential, but where I do my writing will or should feel seemless. I hope. I know this puts a burden on Nick Chase as developer/guru/designer/wizard, so I'm hoping we don't rush anybody. Just keep the vision strong and help it evolve and support one another. I don't think taking down portals to drive traffic is good -- spending time in Iraq in the 80s when Saddam was in power and he shut down communication to keep everything in house was horrific; being in China two summers ago where they forbid faceebook and Youtube and Google was horrific... those experiences make me want freedom of choice for all... but we need to be aware of why people make the choices they do, and preserve the things that are vulnerable, like our website, which, in the long run, will offer greater choice than facebook... know what I'm saying?

But as I replicate my facebook post (above) here on the forum I notice that I FEEL different.  I'm now going back and editing more and self censoring more than I would on facebook. And I don't feel the same sense of immediacy. The nice thing about facebook is that I can see all of my friends FACES.  I feel connected.  I can rapidly switch between writing my comments and reading theirs... it feels like an active dialog.... like a conversation.  And because the number of people from around the world in our groups is so huge I know that somebody might be observing and reading and might pop in some useful advice or comment.  It is a very active group of users there, and even if they aren't logging on to facebook to communicate about biogas, they may see a flag alerting them that we are talking on the biogas group and jump in and contribute.  Hence the popularity of facebook for many of us -- write once and you might open up a whole world of discussions, involving people you may never have had in mind when you started commenting. It also takes much longer to attach pictures or videos or other support media to a blog or web forum, so we lose the immediacy and ease of facebook.

How do we capture that vitality here?  That is the question that plagues me, as I am seeking tools that give us interactive possibilities with the widest number of possible participants, many of whom might just be stumbling upon or watching from the sidelines. That is good so that while we preach to our choirs we are also making music that can be appreciated outside the church.

Any thoughts?

 

Forums: 

what you write about  is what's in the internet area called "chat". Facebook gives you the feeling of realtime communication like a chat does while storing the data for later revisiting. BUT the data is locke into fb. It is not available to the public.

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