New Community Page

Announcements
6

This doesn’t answer the question. What in the world is a “network” and why should someone join one or more of them? (Edit: The previous probably comes across more harshly than intended. Not trying to pile on here. Just genuinely still confused.)

Is a network another forum? A mailing list? A chat service? An organized collection of notebooks? A job/recruiting board? A source for free or paid training materials? A site for organizing remote meetups? …

Currently Observable has:

  • this forum (the primary center of community activity, by far the most active)
  • chat via a channel on the D3 slack server (relatively low volume but consistent chatter)
  • a github user for open-source parts of the platform (not much public discussion happening here)
  • a Reddit community (few subscribers, almost unused)
  • occasional meetups (virtual since the pandemic) announced/organized at this forum
  • a youtube channel (occasional useful videos, a few hundred views per video; I haven’t followed too closely)
  • a twitter handle (16k followers, does lots of retweets, sparks occasional small conversations)
  • an Instagram photo feed (regular posts, 50–200 views per posts, few if any comments)
  • a facebook business page (regular posts but minimal community engagement as far as I can see)
  • employees with personal social media accounts, regular notebook authors with personal accounts, etc. (substantially more reach than the company accounts)

… plus built-in features for collections, paid “teams”, the lists of recent/trending notebooks, and comments on public notebooks.

This new “Community” page has been promoted above all of those listed things on the Observable site, and is clearly considered to be very important. Apparently it involves “networks”, “ambassadors”, and a new “newsletter”. But beyond the names and a brief blurb there is almost no communication/explanation I can find about what these are, leaving me (and presumably other people too) very confused about the intent of these, why they are being promoted at the expense of existing features, and what we are supposed to do with them.

(P.S. far and away the most discussion I have ever seen about any individual notebook is when one happens to get linked from Hacker News. I haven’t seen any especially effective way to solicit feedback or conversation about individual notebooks from Observable-specific forums.)

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