Since the recurrent instabilities of the Facebook family services, Telegram, has gained increasing popularity. Created by Pavel and Nikolai Durov, Telegram is synonymous with simplicity, security, and collaboration.
Unlike WhatsApp, Telegram strives to maintain an active and healthy volunteer community, aiming to engage users in various areas of collaboration. According to the official Telegram Support Force page, the main goal of these spaces is precisely to harness the power of procrastination in a fun and engaging way.
This world is full of bright-minded, elegant, downright wonderful people who, like you and me, sometimes just can't get started with whatever they were supposed to be doing. And procrastinate instead. This brings countless people in any profession to hours and hours of unnecessary house-cleaning, dog-walking and web-surfing every day. Millions of hours go to waste — procrastination is as ubiquitous in the XXI century as are people who do their work behind computer screens.
Thanks to the support provided by volunteers from around the world, it is possible to get answers quickly and efficiently, ensuring user satisfaction and timely problem resolution. As such, the quality of the answers and service depends on the collaborator himself to the user, encouraging the collaborator to keep his own knowledge of the platform always up to date!
Telegram’s collaboration spaces
Programming, translation, and support, are the three active collaboration spaces maintained by Telegram today. These spaces ensure the renewal and development of the application, a huge differential when compared to its competitors' methods.
This practice of active collaboration in the development of certain projects is standard practice in open source and libre. However, it is something that needs to be adopted in a more common way by large corporations and popular software owners. This problem of community participation reflects a huge mistake in collecting the user's voice and opinion, especially coming from companies that think that everything is about surveys and forms.
When active collaboration spaces are created, it causes users to shape, grow and build this project collaboratively with its developers. Thus, promoting a culture of maintenance of this project.
Furthermore, it is important that the users themselves claim their own collaborative spaces for their own desires and motivations, which makes them want to develop and collaborate with this project. This not only promotes more collaborative spaces in society, in all its aspects but also values the voice and opinion of its users and collaborators.
Projects like Debian, Firefox, GNU Linux-libre, Tor and Veloren, are maintained by dedicated contributors, who gave several hours of their day, in favor of a certain idea they wanted to collaborate with, and thus made the initial project better and more popular. This same line of thought is followed by Telegram, which spares no effort to ensure welcoming communities for its users to collaborate.
This not only represents better development for the company but also avoids the astronomical expense of hiring employees, knowing that the best people to do this are the users themselves.
Many developers wonder how they can get to know their users, and the fact is, the best way to do this is by promoting means of interaction with them. Collaboration spaces allow this, creating proximity between developers and collaborators (since they are your users).
This involves much more than a cost-benefit issue. It involves a global impact, where technology is brought closer and closer to society, eliminating means and passages for procrastination.
So here's an idea for developers, users, laymen, and even long-time collaborators: let's build a more participative Internet together!