SUBSCRIBE (bottom left -> ‘Watching’) to this topic to receive notifications for updates on thethingsnetwork.org.
Hi guys,
As you may or may not (yet) know, I’m working on the community website, which helps communities launch their local campaigns, and will fulfil a more important role in the near future in helping us scale as a community, and local communities find each other and keep track of what’s happening.
I though it would be nice to keep everyone updated on general progress here. Feel free to comment as well, but keep feature requests til a minimum and use other channels (preferably via @Tom or me turiphro [at] gmail [.] com) to keep this topic short and to-the-point.
I think it is great communities setup their own way to organise and communicate. The landing pages on http://thethingsnetwork.org can link to other systems (‘Resources’) and act as a central hub for people to discover local communities, and use some specialised functionality involving gateways, etc. It would be great to have more developers involved in building shared resources that all of us can use - after all, everything that’s on the main website can be used by all communities -, so if you want to help out (and know Django or frontend / UI / UX), please get in touch!
Your live gateway missing?
Let me @turiphro or @tom know and we’ll update!
Your community missing?
If you want to start a community, head here: http://thethingsnetwork.org/start-a-community/ Chance are there already is a community being formed and a landing page exists already.
Less than 20 hours to go to convince your fellow city members to pledge!
On the amsterdam map the existing gateways are coloured green I assume. The groningen map has no green on it while there are two active gateways. What do we need to do to colour them green as well? (Or get them included?)
Also all the gateways pledged for places in the province of Groningen are not on the map. See the map on http://thethingsnetwork-groningen.org/ of some weeks ago.
Maybe a volunteer could make a live map based on a table of pledged devices and the known existing devices.
Edited my previous post with instructions answering all questions so far.
@kersing: if you have live gateways, let me or global community manager @Tom know which ones are live. Next step is to implement live monitoring, but with a few devices and shaky monitoring we did it by hand so far.
@pz1: that’s exactly what this is: an overview of all known pledged and live gateways. It’s using all data provided by users on the kickstarter page http://thethingsnetwork.org/landing/impact. Kickstarter doesn’t ask for shipping address so everyone will have to fill it in themselves; about half of pledgers did so far. As said above, let me or @tom know which few ones are live already and we’ll update the status. I imported an XML with Groningen pledges a while back, if some are missing please add them
If you keep having problems, PM me and I’ll have a look. It should place the gateway on the location you’ve searched for just before you ‘commit to place a gateway’. The gateway will appear on community pages close to the gateway (<15km).
Let’s keep this topic clean for news and move longer discussions (or error reporting) elsewhere.
You’ll be able to explain what you you want to contribute. The initiator will receive an email, and can approve memberships from the landing page:
The original requesting user will be added to the community and receive an email once approved! The user will appear in the ‘Contributors’ list. We’re now working on announcements to community contributors etc.
In the Zurich community, we already have a “Join community” that points to a slack-in thingy to auto-invite yourself to our Slack.
Not sure if any other community has the thing, but if possible, I’d like to be able to configure the target URL of this new “Join community” button on Settings so that I can point it to your slack-in and remove the hacky button we added.
how would you place a non-kickstarter Gateway? I’ve just received my two Kerlink’s…
the ‘start a community page’ suggests creating email addresses such as TTN@gmail.com. I see that the Groningen community has registered their own .org domain. Wouldn’t it be nice if communities would be able to have a delegated subdomain under thethingsnetwork.org, at least for email? This would allow them to create addresses as @groningen.thethings.network.org. It will create a very uniform look in the way all communities speak towards the outside world. Of course this requires a community to be able to run an (hosted) MX host…
Providing two separate pages as they did in Groningen was not a very smart thing to do. It confuses users. And moreover both pages are not being updated. I does give me the feeling of a hit and run start-up. Neglect of the community is the major threat to this project
Agreed, therefor a more integrated solution would be welcome. I think one of the problems currently is the limited publishing capabilities a local community has on the thethingsnetwork.org site. Therefor a subdomain delegation would be nice. Communities should then be able to choose wether they first want to continue the standard community page or alternatively have their subdomain setup and pointed to their own web server. However, it the is important to keep a homogeneous look and feel of all those separate pages.
I agree it would be much preferred to have a uniform look and feel. I’m not sure subdomains (CNAMEs) to random servers would work well in practise though, it will look fragmented anyway and is kind of tricky to setup and maintain. It would be much better to give communities enough freedom to work with this landing page, and incidentally link to other systems when needed (slack, twitter, other specific systems). Groningen setup their own landing page because they were in a hurry, but using the TTN site would work as well now.
Custom uniform email addresses is something we’ve been thinking about, but haven’t had the time to dig into yet. I prefer not to setup our own email server, but don’t know any free/cheap service with API that would allow easy setup (receiving + sending emails, maybe even webinterface). If anyone has experience here, PM me!
@Arjan: for now, add via the Impact page and let me know which names you gave; I’ll set them manually (non-kickstarter, name, active/planned). Will add an interface soon similar to what’s on the /settings page for the community right now.
@gonzalocasas: would it work to allow customisation of the email being sent out on joining? You could include links to other resources and instructions to get started. That way, initiators still have a say on who’s joining and it would work well with the existing landing page (adding users, coupling with auto-email addresses later on, permissions for posting, etc).
@turiphro: allowing a customized email might work, but I personally would still prefer just being able to redirect the “Join” button to something other than the default behavior, because I can just slap a URL there and be done with it. I do not want to be in control of who joins: everyone that wants to join should be able to sign up and immediately get in the conversation. Instant gratification. If you need to wait for a moderator, the excitement might be lost.
@Arjan: for us, what is working really well is a twitter account + Slack instance (adding slack-in to allow people to invite themselves). I personally haven’t had the need for a “corporate email address” of sorts.
@gonzalocasas: I’m fine with various forms of community organisation, but would still like to have coherent behaviour on the website (e.g. join community -> being listed on the landing page, getting notifications, permissions for various things). I think an “auto-accept requests” + email template with instructions should work well here, pointing to other systems when desired. We’re trying to satisfy many different communities here, but it’s important to keep some common functionality.
