Discussion Tool

Introduction

The so-far unused Discussion Tool would allow us to create conversations, working groups and archive respositories. You are invited to avail yourself of this facility.

The CommunityZero platform has a variety of tools at the disposal of the ELMAR Virtual Community that employs it.  So far, I have used a modest number of tools to create the 2006 Archive (Article tool), the Pre-2006 Archive (Files tool), the CFP Sorter (Database tool) and  User Survey (Survey tool).

There is also a very flexible tool called the Discussion tool, which can easily be configured in a variety of ways.  Any individual or subgroup of ELMAR subscribers who wants to use a Discussion area should just ask me to set it up.  The Discussion tool can be used for

  • Discussion – interactive conversation on particular articles, essays, faculty life, teaching ideas
  • Conferences – followup dialog or pre-conference planning
  • Work Group – task oriented process to produce a particular intellectual output
  • Archive – repository of documents with change history available

As an added benefit, all ELMAR subscribers will receive a notice of Discussion activity as a line item in the Community Updates.  That way the whole group will be apprised of new content, but will not have to wade through it in its entirety.  Interested individuals can subscribe to the Discussion Area in question.  Permissions can be customized in a multitude of  ways.  Thus it is possible to set up moderated areas, unmoderated areas, to require approval for joining, or not, approval for posting or not, approval for commenting on postings or not, and in fact a very large number of combinations of control, of openess or closedness depending on the organizers or participants. 

The reason that this sounds a little open-ended is because it is open-ended!  The tool can be set up in a wide variety of ways.  My imagination can only go so far per unit of time – I suspect that there are individuals in the ELMAR community who might have some great ideas to create discussion areas. 

Please email me at the elmar@ama.org if you wish to start up a discussion area on some aspect of teaching or research in marketing, or just want to chat about  what this thing can do.

— ch