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Behaviour and Good Practice

General responsibilities of Group Admins

  • Group Admins have a responsibility to make sure that the Hub and communcation platforms are being used correctly and responsibly by members of their Hub Group. This document describes some 'best practices' that you may find helpful.

The Hub

  • You should use the Hub to invite new people to your group. This is because an invite to the Hub sets people up correctly on all the new services.
  • Your Hub Group Internal Coordinator should confirm the invitation before it is sent. This ensures that the new member is known to the Group and is, therefore, qualified to be invited.
  • You can also invite people to individual services, but you have to do all the work the Hub would have done yourself (inviting people to the right Teams, Channels and Forums, for example), so it is much easier just to invite people via the Hub.

Mattermost

  • Remind users to adjust their Notification Settings so that they receive appropriate warning of posts addressed to them personally, or the channels they belong to.
  • Advise users when and when not to use @all and @channel
  • Consider mild warnings against duplicating the same post in multiple channels. Set up Broadcast Only channels for users to avoid this practice.
  • Prompt users to make full use of the Reply function to link answers to specific posts.
  • Recommend switching to Forums for longer-form conversations and remind users to link from the channel to any associated Forum Topic.

UK Forums

  • Refer to the Rebel Toolkit User Guide on Forum use for those users who are unfamiliar with this type of platform.
  • Encourage use of Forums by using them yourself and linking to Topics that will generate user interaction.
  • Be supportive of Forum use by adding replies and likes to your user's posts. This will encourage them to contribute more to topics and feel more comfortable with the platform.

Maintaining good behaviour falls to all of us

If you find any post that strays from the accepted guidelines, above, it's up to you to feed back your concerns directly with the originator of the post. If you do, then you should be sensitive with any language, but, as our regenerative statement says:" [we have] cultures of respect and listening, in which people deal with conflicts when they arise, feeding back quickly and talking about disagreements and issues without blaming and shaming." If you find a post that needs moderation, reply directly to it and explain why you find it unacceptable and suggest, to the poster, a potentially more acceptable way of making their point, if that is possible. If the post requires removal, then remove it but you are strongly advised to leave an explanation of why you felt removal was necessary.

UK Cloud

  • Although it's not in your mandate to manage your Hub Group's files and folders, maintain oversight of what is being saved on the Cloud. You may recommend how files are to be named - for ease of comprehension - and how folders are to be organised. This should lead to improved efficiency of storage and ease of retrieval for your Hub Group's users.
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