Freshwater Fish Taxonomist Group

Comment

Comment by Kris Jett on February 22, 2011 at 2:50pm

Dear Freshwater Fish Taxonomist Group, 

I’m Kris—I work on web and print outreach for the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL), and have the honor of acting as one of the community hosts for Connect, the DNA Barcoding network. As you may have noticed, Connect has exploded in size and activity over the last year, going from a handful of members at its launch to over 500 users and 45 groups! This is quite an achievement, but it also highlights the fact that some aspects of Connect weren’t quite as scalable as we’d hoped. Particularly, the large number of Groups makes it hard for users to keep track of all the relevant information available, and makes it especially easy to miss key questions and important discussions. With this in mind, we’re encouraging a shift in purpose—Groups will become the primary tool for project management and communication within organized initiatives and campaigns, while the Discussion categories will continue to be the key location for protocol questions, troubleshooting, taxonomic advice, etc. 

In light of this, we’re meeting with groups and their moderators to discuss which groups would benefit most from group or discussion status. This group seems like it’s based off an actual initiative or campaign, and therefore could very clearly benefit from the inherent project management tools. 

If, instead, this group was created as a placeholder for general discussion on the topic of quarantine barcoding, might I suggest considering closing this group and moving all the attention and talk to the Taxon-based Barcoding board? This would allow more Connect members to find and participate in discussions, encouraging engagement and activity. This would be especially helpful as Discussions offer the ‘Follow Me’ feature, where users can be alerted to new threads or replies through e-mail or their preferred RSS feed.

If any members have any questions or concerns, I’d be happy to address them. 

Eagerly awaiting your thoughts,
Kris