Warp Speed Resources
- Thanks to SFFANZ, we have access to GSuites for Non-Profits. This is a set of Google tools with a wide reach and capabilities.
- As part of your being on the Crew, we can give you a GSuite account in the CoNZealand domain, conzealand.nz
- This will give you CoNZealand specific email capabilities.
- It also acts as your permissions for access to Google Drive, Team Drive, Sites, Groups and many other areas.
- We know that having yet another email address can be annoying but we genuinely believe that this account and these tools are incredibly useful.
- There are ways of making this extra account easier to deal with. Have a look at our IT Information for Crew document for information on how you can streamline your account.
- Depending on your technical knowledge, this may or may not be easy. But if you have problems, please contact crew-support@conzealand.nz
- Note that in some cases we may have your personal address and/or your CoNZealand account loaded against mailing lists. This is just so we can make sure we are communicating with you.
- Once your CoNZealand address is working for you, you will probably want to remove your personal address from the mailing list. Depending on your email provider, you may not be able to do this yourself. In which case, please contact us at Support to get your personal address removed.
- You will also probably want to change your email address on this Crew site to your CoNZealand address. This will enable you to take advantage of the unified Google login process. You can change your email address in your Profile on the top right.
- Mailing lists are created and used on Google Groups. This is because Google Groups allows for a lot of flexibility for the types of lists we can create.
- We encourage you to create your own lists so you can communicate in your own groups. However, please check if an existing list works for what you need, before you spin another one off.
- The CoNZealand mailing lists can be found here. http://lists.conzealand.nz/
- You can find more information in the mailing list section of our Wiki.
- Please document any mailing lists / collaborative mail boxes you set up on the wiki page.
- We are using Google Sites as a Wiki tool. This is because we have access to Google Suites so it becomes easy to set access to the sites.
- A Wiki is a website that can be changed and added to by any authorized people in an easy way.
- This is in contrast to many websites that need changes to be made by a small group of people.
- A Wiki allows anyone with write access (in our case, everyone) to make easy changes. This allows you to take charge of the information that you capture and keep.
- But remember, with great power comes great responsibility.
- We are using the “old” version of Google Sites because it has capabilities that the “new” one does not.
- Google Sites allows you to embed all sorts of information into the sites, like mailing lists, Google docs and folders. Along with images and so on. It’s very flexible.
- You can find our sites at : http://sites.conzealand.nz
- Note that you have to be logged into a Google account that has access to the sites to see them. In general, this will be your CoNZealand account, but in some situations could be another of your Google accounts.
- Google Drive is an incredibly powerful tool for creating and sharing documents.
- Each of our accounts has a personal Google Drive of 30GB of data. You can use this for anything. For instance, for working on documents that you are not ready to show yet.
- Google Suites comes with Team Drive, which gives us the ability to broadly share files across our entire group. You can create your own Team Drive if you need to keep some information private.
- Please see our IT Information for Crew for more information
- You should be added for at least view permissions. Division/ Area Heads and Deputy Heads have write access. You may have or get notifications about permissions as we add groups to the Drive. If you don’t have, or lose, the correct permissions, then please contact Support.
- You will see your personal drive, and the Team Drives you have access to when you go to https://drive.conzealand.nz
- NOTE: You may need to change which Google account you are using at the top right of the window.
- There’s a Support section on the left that you can put support requests into.
- You can mail crew-support@conzealand.nz
- The ticketing system is called WS Desk.
- We can assign tickets to our crew. Tickets can come from a web form or from email.
- Then there is a continuous trail of information available to anyone who needs it. Tickets can be checked if they are being dealt with. And if someone is unavailable, then tickets can be picked up by other people.
- These can be IT support requests, but also requests for design or website or anything really. Cross department requests? So we keep track of what’s being asked for…
Impulse Speed Resources
- A Worldcon is a maze of interconnected mini-projects and we have to keep track of them.
- There’s currently a WordPress plugin installed called Project Panorama that allows simple project management.
- The status of projects can be shown in a side bar and people who are part of that project can click through.
- See the Tools / Software section for links to documentation.
- Our appearances and events we go to can be treated as individual events, and people can sign up to help out at them.
- Why Events on a Crew site? My thought is we can create convention events that Ambassadors may be able to go to. Then people can sign up for them. And then its easy to keep track of those people.
- Anyone want to have a go at getting the current Event plugin working as well as possible?
- See the Tools / Software section for links to documentation.
- The main search box is dynamic and should allow easy and quick search of pages and groups etc through the site.
- Your profile has an activity stream, somewhat Facebook-adjacent. Updates here will show up in your Friends activity streams.
- We can create our own profiles, and add information to them as we need.
- We can create Friend links.
- Our Profile information can be restricted to who we want.
- Adding a picture and short bio is one way of helping long distance communication.
- You can send private messages to anyone on the site via the Messaging tool. (The envelope top right)
- Using Groups, we can have email go out to all those people in a group. We have a plugin activated that allows people to reply to those emails, and the replies appear back in the stream.
- It’s VERY easy to add people to Groups. And then they can control how they get their email. Immediately? Daily? Read it on the web?
- All Members can create groups by going to their Profile menu>Groups>Create Group.
- A Group lets you have an area for conversations in a social style thread.
- You can also use Forums and Documents to keep track of information.
- Members can set their own mail preferences.
- Group admins can mail out to ALL the members of a group regardless of their email settings.
- This is deprecated in favour of Google Docs and Sites.
- WordPress already has user friendly methods for creating pages and assigning them to menus. So a lot of information can be kept that way.
- There is also a Documents module that allows users to create documents with extensive formatting. It not as good as Google Docs. But for most purposes would be an excellent starting, and maybe finishing, point.
- You can create simple documents in the main page, or in Groups. You can restrict which Groups or members can see them.
- The documents page will show all the documents you are allowed to see.
- This is wiki like behaviour.
- It’s not as good a Google Docs. Image handling is clunky.
- But sufficient for making notes and instructions that could be turned into actual site pages.
- We need to work out a best practices.
- Forums appear in each group and are restricted to that Group.
- Forums have topics created inside them, and then conversations can happen there. In this way, Forums are more like a mailing list in that you are creating different subjects and having a conversation about that subject.
- Forums can also be created outside Groups for general consumption.
- If you are receiving email notifications, then you can reply to postings directly from your email.
- You can also create topics by sending an email to a very specific mail address. You will have to create a contact in your address book for that email address.
- The forums keep a record of all these conversations.
- Having conversations in Groups or Forums means the information sticks around. We can find it. And new people can find it.
- It also means that you don’t necessarily need to know someone’s email address. Communications can still happen in here.
- You can of course still use any other forms of communication that are helpful.
Warp Speed indicates that these are solid and well tested tools and are part of our standard tool set.
Impulse speed indicates that we are either getting up to speed on these tools, or they are not as useful as Warp Speed tools.