The Confusatory
Description: Imagine a world in which I update this blog regularly.
About a decade ago I migrated into community work [1] from a non-community background. This is the guide I wish I had read back then.
[1] When I say community work, I am talking about stuff like Wikipedia: large distributed groups of people doing something together, usually online, often unpaid. Usually international, often nerdy, often (but not always) FLOSS or FLOSS-adjacent.
You are going to be doing a lot of writing. Do it well. Phone calls and Hangouts don’t scale. Face-to-face is expensive for distributed groups and therefore rare. Real-time tools like IRC and Slack disadvantage people in minority timezones. And so, in an online community, your main way to communicate is likely going to be email. Which means you need to be good at it. Take the time to write carefully, fully and precisely. And since text is going to do so much of your communicative heavy lifting, consider bei
The Confusatory