Hey guys!
I finally have the time to talk about Slack stuff! Basically when I asked Slack about what they wanted it was clear that the most important thing was to have documentation of what we have done, second was training and third is GIS tools or other investigation tools with fourth being helping with Slack's personal projects. That thread is here https://acwpodcast.slack.com/archives/C2MH9NAJU/p1579298151006000
I've been talking in DM's with some trusted guys who offered to help with stuff, about things to do along these lines and we have somewhat of a plan
1. Slack Premium if we can get it. Firstly to get access to the back catalogue of stuff we've talked about over the last how every many years and secondly so we can have user management features. User management would allow for channels for small groups of users to have a midden channel so that they can work on stuff outside of Slack. So if Jeffery wanted to do the CNS Volenteer Corps, then we could have Slack members working in there away from everyone else and if we wanted to work on projects we can have a projects channel where requested projects are worked on. For qualifying groups too, Slack has an 85% discount so we could get Slack really cheaply at a sustainable price! https://slack.com/intl/en-ie/help/articles/204368833
2. Documentation. @bmueller is a wiki user and editor and @Joel runs wiki's (who made the app to be approved) so if we wanted to start documenting stuff we've done in the past we could and with access to the archives we could have people just take some time to go back to a month and go though the channel looking for useful stuff to document and write about. Also going forward @Alex Axthelm offered to write a newsletter type thing so if we did work with CNS technical partners, we could have public available documentation of what we have done previously etc and he would like to base it off this model https://www.writethedocs.org/blog/newsletter-october-2019/
3. Training. I've gotten quite a few requests, especially from people who have joined since I was on the pod looking to learn about how to OSINT good. @cthippo has offered to do a few classes on ships since that's his jam, I can do stuff on planes, @Joel has been self teaching GEOINT and @Tehrani Moghaddam's Head (Dex) is really good at it so maybe I could start organizing something formal and running that as a class to small groups of people where we can. As well as this Melissa had a video that wen't up on the ACW YouTube years ago so having a link to that again would be nice since it's unlisted and that was super helpful for me when I was learning stuff
4. Tooling. I honestly have no idea what the best aproach is for this because there was a big argument about just sticking to GEarth, or making our own QGIS instance, or getting TerraServer or getting ArcGIS... And that's just GIS tools... I guess this is where maybe using tools that CNS has access to, if that's what we do, is the better option because then the excuse can be Jeffery said so will do a better job of quashing passion that I ever will... It might also be worth asking what other tools
5. Working on projects. So this would be a great opportunity to work on some of the projects people have requested over the years but have never been built since I've been keeping a list of them and would allow us to start some effective work on cool things like, I duno, hosting all of the video's Scott has in cold storage since I accidentally might have found a useful way to display them to everyone who is registered to Slack, or who we give guest access to (Premium Slack Feature) or anything else. There's a load of software dev's who would love to work on some cool projects or start their own here. Or if you guys needed something such as a way to auto enroll Patreon Members on Slack or whatever else. Basically freelance programmers or Arms Control Projects!
6. Nice to haves. If we looked into NK Pro for people or a small group or equivalents to that kinda thing would be great for people who are doing OSINT or GEOINT and writing about it for the wiki or Slack would be cool since they would have up to date information as would a place to store and distribute kmz's etc which we might be able to do via the same solution to the video hosting.
Apart from all of that above, the only real issues left are finding a place for all of the above on the internet which is probably going to need a domain name to attach all of it to, costing all of it and the management of all of the above... Since costs and management could be quite a bit of work to keep tabs on all of the above and keep it running without the inmates burning the whole asylum to the ground.
So that somewhat of a plan. If you want to go back and fourth on that over email or Skype or whatever, we can, my schedule is MUCH more forgiving this semester! And that plan is flexible. That's just what's come up in conversation behind the scenes with people who have offered to help when I posted about what Slack wants and what we think is best to achieve the goals Slack set out in that post. And I think Slack buy in is key to doing anything because if effort is put into stuff, we want it to succeed.
Anyway, this email is long enough...
Cheers,
Paddy