Hey coworking friends!
Earlier this month I announced that the Coworking Google Group is being migrated to a new platform to help us make the archives more accessible, improve discussion quality, and ensure this community and resource can continue growing for many years to come.
Today, I’m writing to tell you that things are well underway (more than 25% of the historical archive has been categorized thanks to a team of volunteers) and as of today, our new platform is OPEN for registration!
You can check it out here and get signed up: https://forum.coworking.org
The rest of this email includes some useful details about the most important things for you to know right now, and what’s coming next:
1 - you can now go to https://forum.coworking.org and sign up. No invite required!
Registration is open, just like the current google group. Anyone can browse and search the site without a login, but to post/comment/other interactive features, an account is required.
You can sign up with an email address and password, but you can also sign up in just a couple of clicks using a valid Google account or Twitter account.
And just like Google Groups, once you have an account, you’ll be able to get email notifications about new topics, (much friendlier) digests if you don’t want emails about every single thread, and even the ability to reply from your inbox. Basically, everything Google Groups lets you do, we can do better!
UNLIKE Google Groups, you’ll gain the ability to tweak your notification settings for specific categories & subcategories (aka just get emails about the topics you care about) and even mute categories you don’t care about as much. I’ll share much more about the more "advanced features soon, but these ones are BIG benefits to the switch so I wanted to mention them here!
***Coming soon: merge your account history into your new account. ***
Any posts you make with your new account will obviously be associated with your account, and in the near future, we’ll have an easy way for you to request merging your post history into the new account as well. It’ll even show your “join date” on the new forum as the original join date on the google group. Cool way to preserve history!
I’ve already done this for our early contributors, but it’s a fairly manual process so for everyone else it will be done by-request. Stay tuned for more on that.
If you do NOT sign up for an account on the new platform during the next few weeks, you’ll be part of an automatic migration in the future (which will respect your existing notification settings on the google group).
**2 - In the very near future, the plan is to “freeze” this google group to new posts and replies and direct everyone to the new forum as we complete the content and member migration. **
To be clear, the reason for this decision is technical! The importer scripts that allow me to migrate discussions from Google Groups to the new forum are powerful, but have a few limitations that I’ve learned along the way, and it’s increasingly difficult to be sure that I’ll be able to move new posts made to the Google Group seamlessly. For now, I’m doing this “sync” roughly once a week, and capturing as many new posts as possible, but want to avoid accumulating many more valuable posts on the Google Group that I can’t easily move to the new platform.
I’m still working on the exact process/procedure/communication for the last stages of the migration, and promise to do my best to do this with clear communication and as much advance notice as I reasonably can. My goal is for the migration to be relatively seamless for most people, and create more improvements than drawbacks.
Questions? Comments? Concerns?
So far, all of the feedback I’ve gotten from the folks who joined the site early have been positive and enthusiastic. Most of the ideas people have for making this discussion platform better are possible, and in many cases, either easy or already built in!
**My biggest priority is making sure that folks know what to expect and how to get set up on the new platform, and get the most out of this new and much-improved experience. **
I’m here to bring as much clarity to this shift as possible, and avoid unnecessary surprises. I WILL be following this post up with more details about things like categories & a more robust, transparent moderation process going forward!
In the mean time - get yourself signed up, browse around, and start getting familiar! If you get stuck on anything or have questions, drop me an email directly ([email protected]) and we’ll get you going again. 
-Alex