Transitioning your group to the new Ecunet

Overview

Helping members of your Ecunet meeting move to a group on the new Ecunet platform is as easy as 1-2-3:

• 1. Create your group over on the new Ecunet Groups system.

  2. Notify your meeting members about the move.

  3. Optionally, archive some of your old meeting notes for reference on the new system.

The Details

• 1. In order to create your group on the new Ecunet you need an Ecunet account on the new platform. Read the instructions on the Ecunet home page (http://bit.ly/newecunet) for tips on claiming or signing up for your Ecunet account.

  2. Click the "Ecunet Login" button on the new Ecunet home page.  After entering your Ecunet account name (without the @ecunet.org) and password, you should end up at the Ecunet Groups page.

  3. Click the "Create a Group" button and fill out the form for your group name; group e-mail address; description (300-character limit); pick the access level. You can change these settings later if you need to. If you want to make it easy for your members who may have put your Ecunet meeting name in their address books, make sure the group you are creating has the same address (e.g. table_talk.topic@ecunet.org). It may take up to 6 hours for your group to show up in the groups directory, but you can begin using it right away.

  4. Invite your current meeting members to join your group on the new Ecunet. Here are sample messages you can edit to send to your members.  The first one is for groups where you won't require an Ecunet address, the second is for groups where an @ecunet.org will be required to participate. It will be the least frustrating for early testers if they don't try to use email to participate in your new group before the switch over on October 1 (remember that notes are still being routed to the old Ecunet).

  5. Your meeting notes will not automatically move with you to the new Ecunet. Before setting out to save old notes, stop to consider whether any of that content is necessary as the group moves forward. A short narrative history about the group would probably be more helpful that large files of meeting notes. Archiving notes from private meetings is strongly discouraged. All that said, you can do a "manual" archive of some or all of your notes by trying these techniques:

     • Log into the Ecunet Web interface (http://www.ecunet.org/conference).  If you can't remember you inbox name or password, use the "Get a reminder" link on the login page.

     • Go to "My Profile" in the upper right of the screen and click "Preferences"

     • Enter the number of notes you'd like to capture off the screen in the "How many items on a page would you like to list?" field. It may be difficult to display more than 200 notes at a time.

     • In the "How would you like to view your notes in the group section of the web interface?" option, pick "View many notes at a time"

     • Go to your meeting and begin reading all notes, and copying and pasting notes off the screen into a Word or text file.  It's also possible to print your notes to a file using Adobe Acrobat (or a free PDF-making program like CutePDF Writer).

     • An alternative method of gathering old notes is to use the "mailrequests" feature to get old notes.  Instructions for using that are on the old Ecunet site: http://www.ecunet.org/mailrequests.html  If you are a user of the Thunderbird e-mail software, there is an extension that allows you to save an entire folder of messages into a single text file.  Read more about the extension. Right-click to download it.

     • Once you have the meeting notes in a file or files, you need to find a way to share them on the new platform.  That could be a link to a Google Docs file or a file using a file-sharing service like http://drop.io 

  6. Consider creating a file or printout of the listing of your group members.  This way you may be able to contact them after the move to the new service is complete. On the old Ecunet Web interface, click the "Members" link in the left-hand navigation to display the list of members.

  7. If you have questions or problems related to moving your meeting to the Ecunet Groups platform, please use one of the help options outlined on the "Need help?" page.