About all those Blue Group Notices.

[Rose Springvale]

There have been several questions over my tenure as PIO concerning group notices in CDS. Most of the confusion comes from not having a clear, evenly applied policy. Jamie and I have spent time reviewing the current practices and coming up with this proposal. We will do our best to see that it is used for the benefit of all our citizens.

CDS groups today:

1. All CDS group members have the ability to post in im/group chat. CDS group chat is very quiet compared to other groups.

2. Access to blue group notices has been limited based on tradition as far as I can tell, to members of the government and the PIO team. As people move in and out of positions, their group notice rights have not been updated, so that today we have 20 people with the power to post notices.

3. Only the PIO team, and now a rep from the To Limani group, has access to the CDS calendar. This has been intentional to try to encourage coordination through CDS planners before events are set, so as to keep conflicts from arising. Given the number of events we've had in the past, this makes sense. Now that more and more people are running more and more events, the likelihood is that we WILL have more events that occur at the same time. This is a GOOD thing.

4. We are all volunteers, and asking an already stretched staff to send notices for daily events not only taxes the volunteers, but also the patience of citizens who are interested in only certain facets of the community. The last thing we want is for the CDS group notices to get to the "spam" level, and lose the attention of our citizens, or worse, lose the membership in our group of citizens and friends.

For now, we're proposing the following policies, which will be reviewed and adapted as needed. Your opinions are welcome.

1. Group notice power will remain with the PIO team and government officials. This is important particularly during elections and for communicating CDS business to the citizens.

a) Government officials should use blue group notices within the scope of their service as they see fit.

b) Regular event notices will be handled by the PIO team. These will include weekly notices of calendared events, and usually twice weekly. We will continue to work on methods to access information in world, via signs, subscribe-o-matics, or such other technology that is available. If you have an event that meets the criteria, you should either drop the PIO a notecard with the text you want posted, or chat with us so we know the details.

c) Special event notices for major CDS events, such as a grand opening, festival, or Oktoberfest may be sent more frequently. Unless there is a need to impart information such as venue changes or cancellations, no more than two notices per day for special events will be sent.

d) Blue group notices will be used for CDS events only, specifically, any event located within CDS sims, and any off sim event sponsored by the CDS government (like SL birthday events, burning life, etc.)

2. If you want Calendar access to post your own events, please chat with Jamie or I. We want to make the process as uncomplicated as possible.

3. All group members can and should post event reminders in group im. These notes go to people who are online and thus more likely to attend your events. They do not stay on the screen, requiring click through by someone who logs in infrequently. It's very helpful to include slurls when you do this. If you don't know how to do either of these things, we will teach you. CDS Group IM should not be used to ask for money or advertise goods or services for sale.

4. Because we know CDS people are involved in varied and interesting projects, Group im's may also be used for announcing events involving CDS citizens as performer, host or sponsor. We are trying this on a trial basis; if there are complaints of "spam" or overuse, we may have to revise this

Thank you all for your patience.

[Rose Springvale]

This week there were five blue group notices each in the CDS and AA groups, about one one hour concert in Colonia Nova. When the last one went out, I started getting complaints from people about the "cds spam." Frankly, 10 notices for a non citizens concert seem a bit overreaching.

Especially now that we are in election season, it would be very helpful if the members of the CDS government reviewed and revised this policy as appropriate, so that we don't lose the ability to communicate about government issues because people are tired of getting concert notes.

Al Andalus also has a group notice policy which is more liberal than CDS, but still only allows a maximum of three notices per event. All AA citizens should have a copy of that policy, and CDS citizens who have been granted notice privileges should get a copy and review it too.

[Arria Perreault]

Thank you Rose for reminder this. I apologize if some people felt they were spammed. I apologize also for not having mentionned the concert of Joaquin at 8pm in the notices. Sorry for that, Joaquin!

I would like to add that I have only tried to make some animations in our sims. The concert was great and we had a good venue, mainly people from outside our community.

[Claude Desmoulins]

Hmm. At one point I remember Kaseido recommending 3 notices - 24 hours before,1 hour before and at or five minutes after start time.

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

I think it's a good idea to try to define what is considered "spam", so that people can have a better measure of what is too intrusive or not. In one group I'm a member of, spam is defined as the same ad (mostly for buying cheap clothes and furniture) by the same person, more than once per day. In another group, there are usually just two notices per week (since the group only hosts a weekly event). But on another group I subscribe (a fashion announcement group), spam is more than 70 notices per day!

So there is a trade-off to be met, since for each group the expectations are different, and I believe that it's better to define the rules in advance. Three notices per event (plus some followups in Group Chat) seems more than acceptable: I usually like to know a week or two in advance (to put it on the agenda), a day before (to remind me to look at the agenda!), and some IMs just shortly after the event starts. For some this might be excessive; for others, it might rather fail to attract any attention.

So I agree that we adopt those notices, with just a slight change: the notices are not "blue" any more in the SL 2.0 client so I'd suggest just to call them "group notices" instead, since in a year nobody will know what that means. And I would be fine in putting a limit to, say, up to three group notices for the same event (possible under 1 a). I suggest that we start with three and see if people still complain about "too much spam".

I suppose that this is merely an Executive Act and thus doesn't require any RA legislation, right? It's quite within the powers of the Executive.

[solomon mosely]

it's a little out of the in-world notice issue but, a note about other marketing of cds official and personal events.

can the same group that is trusted with notice and blue note rights, can they have the Facebook info too? and can we set up the website to auto post for us between itself, the calendar, and FB?

[Kaseido_Quandry]

it's a little out of the in-world notice issue but, a note about other marketing of cds official and personal events.

can the same group that is trusted with notice and blue note rights, can they have the Facebook info too? and can we set up the website to auto post for us between itself, the calendar, and FB?

There are tools that will auto-post status updates across social media, but nothing that can put events onto a calendar. It's just time-consuming work.