The greatest strength of open source software is the community of users and developers, with fast, two-way lateral communication that enables quick learning and rapid feedback cycles. Communication between users is improved when they know each other’s backgrounds better.
To help users to better know each other, a Madagascar group was created on the LinkedIn professional networking site. Those of you who are members of LinkedIn, or are interested in becoming members, are welcome to join and to invite other Madagascar users. To keep away the ubiquitous spammers, admission to the group is subject to approval, but this will be granted as soon as possible to anybody who looks like a “real person”.
LinkedIn offers forum capabilities as well, but please note that this is not an attempt to shift communication from existing channels (mailing lists, wiki, Sourceforge bug/feature request trackers/etc). On the contrary, since social networking sites generally try to “lock-in” users, and are not open to non-users, I would strongly recommend _not_ using their discussion forums, but just using LinkedIn’s connection features to get to know each other better.
Please note that this is not an endorsement of either social networking sites in general or LinkedIn in particular. It’s just something entirely voluntary that some people find useful. For those of you who are not familiar with what LinkedIn is, a description can be found on Wikipedia.