A quick intro to groups
If you head over to https://talk.lansingmakersnetwork.org/groups you should see a list of groups that exist in our community. Each Area Manager at LMN has a group that they can manage to distribute the workload of responding to issues and problems in an area. So, if you’re in the #issues-and-requests category you can mention @TEAM_Woodshop to let the woodshop volunteers know that something needs attention.
Each of the team groups are also setup to allow anyone to request membership in the team. If you click the link on the group page, you can tell the AM you want to help out.
Quick notes:
- Group members are those volunteers who are willing to jump up and help someone when they need help, think of the group members as the “help desk” for the area.
- You don’t need to be a member of the
@TEAM to volunteer and help out, discuss things about the area, etc. Use the area category page for that (#makerspace-areas:woodshop, for example).
- Area Managers, you have control over your group. Make the most of it, recruit members and distribute the load.
There area also groups for Members and Board Members. These groups and what they are should be obvious. 
@brian.adams, I’m not sure the /groups page has any viability outside of this post. Melody described the purpose of that page and I tried to find what she was talking about without any results or leads. Ultimately, she had to remember enough of the name of this post for me to search for the post and then see the link. I suspect that isn’t intentional.
Groups in Discourse can be “mentioned” in posts by using @groupname in the post. This triggers Discourse to send notification emails to the users in the groups so (hopefully) they’ll pay attention and reply to the post in question. It’s mainly useful in the #issues-and-requests category to notify those that usually help solve the problem.
The topic template for #issues-and-requests spells out how to use them there, so while it may be lurking in obscurity generally, it’s front and center in the places it’s most useful.
Most of the area managers haven’t expanded their groups in Discourse (or really done much to foster a group of helpers/fixers outside of themselves yet), but area managers are pretty new to us, so we’ll continue to see how it all shakes out. Area managers should all be owners of their respective @TEAM_ group, so they can add/remove/accept join requests, etc.
(Also as an aside, when one wants to talk about the groups concept generally without actually notifying a group, surround the mention in backquotes so that Discourse interprets as a code block. )
Just in case anyone else stumbles upon this later, it’s worth mentioning that the @Members group can only be mentioned by admins. (To avoid abuse).
@BoardMembers however can be mentioned by anyone.
OK, I think that way have gone a slightly different direction that I was meaning (maybe). I’m glad to have the info though a it’s still useful. My understanding is that the purpose of being a member is to volunteer to be an active helper/answer finder within a group. (Perhaps I’m misunderstanding or just missing something.) What I may not have done a good job trying to say was that I’m not sure members know about or, in the future, will be aware that they can request/volunteer to do this and the page linked is where/how to do so. Since the linked page does not seem to show up on it’s own and the (as I understand it) purpose of the linked page are separated; it seems destined to be lost in obscurity. I suppose that could be as intended though. 
