outreach
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Outreach describes efforts (past, ongoing, or potential) to spread the indieweb message to a wider audience.
Suggestions
- Try to get an interview on Redecentralize.org. Suggested by User:Robin.millette.info in IRC[1]
- Anecdotally, I found redecentralize.org before indiewebcamp.com — when I asked around about the state of FOSS social networks, lots of people pointed me there. Kylewm.com 11:21, 2 February 2015 (PST)
- Podcasts
- Articles
Brainstorming
Best Practices
In order to avoid the feeling of harassment or other negative feelings that can be experienced on social media when you get singled out by a person or group of people, we should avoid certain behaviors when doing outreach for the IndieWeb.
- If you try to engage someone about IndieWeb once and they don’t respond or engage back positively, interpret that as they aren’t interested and don’t continue to reach out to them until they initiate back to you.
- If a tweet is seen in an IndieWeb chat room, check its responses before responding yourself. If someone else said something similar to what you want to say or if 2-3 people have already responded, know that they have been engaged and don’t respond yourself. While we all have good intentions, receiving a dozen unsolicited tweets unexpectedly can come off very overwhelming for most people. (Please avoid accidentally brigading people.)
- Spend a moment to check the surrounding context (and avoid context collapse) by doing a quick search of a person's platform username and the word "IndieWeb" (or related words) or a broader search engine query of their name and an associated word. Search for their name on the IndieWeb wiki.
- Perhaps they're already aware of the broader idea of IndieWeb and have:
- discarded it;
- are actively against it;
- might appreciate a link to a more direct/accomplishable building block instead;
- (other possibilities here)
- If the person in question is well-known in tech (or other) circles already, ask in chat if anyone knows them personally and let them reach out instead.
- Many social platforms will show you who you know who follows someone as well, use this to your advantage to find someone who more regularly directly interacts with those people and may be seen as more friendly to them rather than a new/unknown voice.
- Keep in mind that sometimes people may be using social media to yell into the void about their frustrations with technology, and they aren't expecting the void to suggest back answers (even good ones).
- Similar to the above, people may ask indirect or "poll-like" questions, be sure that you're answering their question as directly as possible to avoid the appearance of mansplaining.
- Perhaps they're already aware of the broader idea of IndieWeb and have:
- IndieWeb can be a complex, complicated, and overwhelming idea. Quite often it is better to "sell" the smaller, more easily consumed answer to someone's direct question by pointing to something specific you've personally done on your own website with an explanation of how/why with a link to a wiki page that has additional possible examples and discussion about how a specific thing might be done.
- If it's worth spending the time to help answer one person's question/issue, it might also be worthwhile to spend some time gardening a wiki page to improve it before linking to it. This will not only help to answer the one question but potentially those of hundreds more who follow.