Chatting with folks here at the Share & Repair Gathering, it’s becoming clear that making things private isn’t the best idea. I had what I thought were good reasons at the time, but I’m rethinking that…
Does anyone have a problem with me making everything visible to the internet at large? I’m particularly thinking the calendar is one of the big wins, but it is empty to the world right now because the individual events are private…
To be clear, signups stay invite-only, this is about read-access
Oh, should add, obviously we have private areas for staff/admins/mods, that stays private 
I have no problem with that.
I’m not sure what would be gained by that.
People use Facebook more than anything else.
Opening up seems ok. I think I’d hold off on that until enough people are participating and helping it develop.
We’ve tried twice to get a communication channel going and I think the primary objective here is to appeal to the needs of repairers themselves and less so to the wider sector. So to me it’s more about how to encourage all of our team to join in and benefit.
I say, give it time to mature first. The network has a members map with links to groups so a customer would look there to know what’s on where.
It’s not already? 
I’d argue that the value being hidden will reduce people’s desire to join and be able to be apart of the conversations. I know I’m increasingly unlikely to give even my email address to some site without understanding what value I’m likely to get in return and unlikely to revisit a site that requires me to sign up to see anything.
Some of it is 
I’m not sure what you mean by this. It’s not an either/or situation
Let me turn it around - what do you think we gain by being private? I think defaulting to open is worthwhile, especially for the calendar.
100% agree with this being volunteer-centred, and I think that means keeping invite-based signup for now. I do want the public to be able to sign up one day, but not until we have a healthy core of volunteers & organisers driving the main needs of the forum. I think the next step for that is to allow existing members to invite more people themselves (instead of having to go through staff members like me). We’ll get to that shortly, I think.
However, to even get them to be involved it has to seem like a good idea - and right now (for example) if you view the calendar while not logged in, it appears empty (because the events are private). That’s not a good look for trying to encourage more groups to use this, hence I’d like to give them a way to see what’s going on. (This also relates to stuff I discussed in person yesterday but I’ll do a trip report for that in a bit).
So far, I’m seeing 3 +1s (4 if you include me) and one -1 on this (perhaps I should have done a poll), so I’ll get that sorted over the weekend.
Not against being open, just at initial stages the content needs to appeal to new people to join.
Of repairers are giving advice on a platform that others in the wider Internet can see might require their approval. What if I posted something that wasn’t safe and someone else copied it and had a bad outcome as a result. Liability needs considered too.
So for that I say, wait, let people onboard to a decent level, then have a debate about the pros and cons of being open.
But if I’m in the minority, ignore me. Just make it clear that anyone can see your answers.
I assume emails remain private.
Short on time this week, so I’ve updated the groups with events in - now Repair Forum actually has events in for people to see.
100% agree, but to me that’s an argument for being able to read the site ahead of signup. It’s a try-before-you-buy situation, we are asking people to sign up for yet-another thing, so it needs to look useful to them.
Not going to ignore valid discussion, that’s not how we get things done - but I will update the category descriptions, sure.
Email addresses, you mean? Yes, only admins can see those, and even then they have to click a special button (which is logged).