Fri 13 Feb 2015 11:15AM
Backchannels
Denjello
Public
Seen by 66
Communication in discussions should remain topical and to the point. However, sometimes you need to get in touch with someone you met regarding something else. Perhaps that person has some expertise regarding another topic or you want to ask them to come to the BBQ at the weekend. Both of which are things that have nothing to do with the discussion, but are valid needs.
How can this be integrated in a platform for interpersonal communication like loomio without necessitating back-channels?
Greg Cassel Fri 13 Feb 2015 5:52PM
We had a talk about the lack of Loomio user info options, a couple of months ago. You can vote this up on Trello if you'd like :)
Denjello · Fri 13 Feb 2015 11:18AM
As it stands, in order to talk to someone "OffTheRecord", you need to post some type of contact information in a group discussion as a comment, such as a telephone number, chat handle or email address.
One workaround that just occurred on our system was that a user created a private group and sent an invitation to the user that they wanted to talk to and published their contact information. As soon as I found out about this, I enabled email address display on the profile page of all users with neither opt-in nor opt-out. Not the best solution, however in our organization everyone is already in contact with everyone else and plenty of other backchannels exist. Why make it harder for people to have private conversations?