A few years ago, we created public WhatsApp Groups for our Telecom Community (telecomHall). Since then they have grown into hundreds with members from all over the world. There are groups for 5G NR, LTE, IoT, OpenRAN, and more. The goal was to put all telecomHall forum members “in touch”, with instant access to each other to ask questions and get answers.
This approach has not been without its challenges.
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WhatsApp has a limitation of 513 members - therefore, for each topic, we have several sub-groups (i.e. 5G NR #1, 5G NR #2, 5G NR #3… and so on). This is not easy to manage.
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A number of participants do not participate.
This means, people often join a group, and never say anything. We call them “Watchers”. -
WhatsApp (the same as Linkedin) does not allow messages to be searched, so a lot of amazing conversations got lost easily.
Despite the above challenges, we have continued as we believe the benefits outway the cost.
We have also noticed that some groups have a few members that are really committed to the TelecomHall goal - that is to be a healthy place for telecom discussions without the sharing of illegal material (such as books, docs, paid software, etc…) and proprietary docs.
So, we went ahead to create a special group, with some of the top telecom experts from all over the world; a “selection” from all the telecomHall groups. And we invited each one to be part of this “family” of experts. This is a sort of bonus group for our top contributors.
Rules to be added to the Private Group
To be added to the group, you need to:
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Understand the purpose of telecomHall Community - be a free and healthy place to discuss telecom, and help each other.
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Never ask for or share anything illegal or proprietary.. This is very important for us.
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Have a username on the web forum and Participate. Ask or answer. It doesn’t have to be every day, of course, but don’t be an eternal watcher. (Active participation can be shown via any telecomHall group if you are already a member or the web forum).
3.1 Have at least 5 topics created (answer and/or replies) in Forum. -
Allow group conversations to be eventually be copied to the web forum. This way, good conversations can help a lot of people. Only good conversations may be copied.
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Important: if a user do not participate, he will be removed. Of course he can stay in all the other groups. But this is one is special, and was created for active webforum users. If he’s not active, makes no sense to stay there. (You need to understand this rule).
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Update your username with a photo - preferable - or at least an avatar or image (a cat, a car, a boat, wahtever). Or you can use for example avatarmaker, to create your avatar:
https://avatarmaker.com/
If you think you can abide by the above rules, then you are welcome to join our selected group! 
What if you can not publish, for any reason
Perhaps you like the idea, but can not publish your opinion?
If privacy and anonymity is important to you but you still want to participate, you can create an account with a pseudo name/random word/nickname. What is important to us is that you follow the rules we have outlined above. The forum gives you the controls to change your topics and how you participate.
If you choose to join us, you will be part of the Top Telecom Experts in the World and will be helping in our efforts to build a great and healthy community for all professionals.
Follow the Whatsapp group link above to join the group. Say hello!
