Rethinking weo
From Evolt.org
Contents |
This page is currently a feedback dump for brainstorming stage
1. Publish Columns Instead of One-Off Articles
"What would you do if there were no w.e.o. today? If you could build evolt.org from the bottom up, from nothing... and create: "a world community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of ideas, skills and experiences.""
I think we need more of a "column" type structure. Not a blog, really, but something that promotes a string of articles rather than one-offs. I want someone to click on my user link and either see my list of articles (not title links, but my actual articles) or I want to see "User has not written any articles *YET*". The assumption is you will offer content. If you don't, your page is blank and you don't feel a part of what we're doing here. And it develops personalities. X is the SQL guy. Y is the CMS guy. etc. This happened somewhat anyway, but only for the strongest members.
How would I even have a column with the current structure? If I wanted to do my "SQL question of the week" idea, I'd have to mess around with pre-pending my titles with something in an attempt to show some continuity.
What if I had my own little content space and checked a box for individual posts to be considered for the front page? Could we integrate this somehow with leo? I don't have a specific thought on implementation there, but it has always been the case that leo was a breeding ground for good article ideas. With an offlist message to the high contributors, I tried to promote this with the recent discussion on "full time to freelance", and got a couple bites (who knows if it will actually become an article, but we in admin used to do this all the time). Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow represent the workflow of leo post to article in a more fluid fashion, directly within weo?
2. Deal with Issues of Scale By Dividing into Specialty Areas
In the The Group is it's Own Worst Enemy [1] the author talks about issues of "scale." And how the old model of the web was to grow, grow, grow. That's what we did at evolt.org. But you get to a point where meaningful social interactions are not happening anymore, because it's too big, too many people to contend with.
So how do you deal with that? One way might to be to go back to our old "centers" concept? And really divide ourselves up more into separate communities? How would we make that work? Or are there other ways?
Web community/networking has come a long way since we started evolt.org, and though we are behind now, we are positioned such that we could step back, re-align, jump ahead and lead again in certain areas (internationalization?) if we are smart and creative about it.
3. Improve User Accounts and Experience
"The world's best reputation management system is right here, in the brain. And actually, it's right here, in the back, in the emotional part of the brain. Almost all the work being done on reputation systems today is either trivial or useless or both, because reputations aren't linearizable, and they're not portable...If you were going to build a piece of social software to support large and long-lived groups, what would you design for? The first thing you would design for is handles the user can invest in..." [2]
It seems like by "handle" what he means is "everything that a person associates with a user." IOW, your personality, which will be associated with your name.
Here are the things that evolt.org could do better for ME as a user, make me want to publish more on the site, and visit the site more often.
- A better user account. User image: The proportions of the user image are simply ridiculous. Too small, and stupid proportions, which were developed to fit in with the (old) SITE, not with users' needs. I understand why they may have been done that way in 2003 or whenever, but it's been 5 years. Better way to track authors/users: I want to click on "more articles by erika" and see MORE ARTICLES BY ERIKA. Because I'm damn proud of my articles. But that doesn't happen right now! You click on "more articles by erika" and come to my user account with my teeny landscape photo, and bio. THEN you click on "track" and you get not just articles but comments and shit from the past 100 years, and it's just a confusing mess: [3]
- Make me pretty. I used to love publishing on evolt.org because my articles came out formatted nicely and easy to read.
- Navigation/usability The best way to improve MY reputation as a user is to make evolt.org worth my time. I should be proud to be part of evolt.org. Making evolt.org a site that walks its talk is a big deal.
4. RonL's Pâtisserie
>> ... in a way that doesn't simply replicate an existing social networking site
Okay. Here is a kind of (surprise!) half-baked idea that may end up with more of a /. vibe than we really want, I dunno. Here goes.
Consider several components:
[1] A thelist-style world-wide collaborative help desk as we have today.
[2] A changed-up evolt homepage that (cuz I dunno Jack about proper 'Design' and all) has a bunch of tabs; (articles and other stuff we may want to keep), (special topics of interest - I would prefer more general 'Design', 'Database', 'i18n', etc ... but if we want to call out PHP, MySQL, Drupal, or whatever I guess I'm okay with that too - multi-level anyone?), and [my fav] a bigass "RANDOM" tab that would select items (at random) from threads *not* in your profile. {This lets us actually use article/comment 'tags' to actually do something other than make searches easier, eh?}
[3] Each evolterooni sets up a 'profile' to subscribe or display only the topics close to their pancreas.
[4] The "people with enough positive karma points" would have the power/authority/responsibility to pull interesting ideas from thelist (or anywhere else that doesn't require a flashlight for access) and offer them up /. style for more general discussion under the tab at hand. Kind of like a meta-discussion-topic/article/link/watusii/moo/hamstah_dance.
[x] I'd like a 'wall of fame' to highlight things like Bri being on the top 25 list Erika found the other day, Matt's new book, Joel's old book (I finally finished it!), and other junk.
[y] more cool stuff goes here ...
Downers:
- We don't really have the volume to support splitting hairs too terribly finely ... So maybe we start with two categories 'make pretty' and 'make work' and let natural selection (and theforum) create separate 'CSS' tabs or whatever when the volume grows "too big" for one category. Oooo! Another possibility would be to create a hierarchy table for the 'tags' and use the higher level categories for the tabs and/or grabbing recent things from the db to show in the tabs. [Yeah - what could go wrong? some things could multi-appear ... So?]
Obviously this cookie is in desparate need of more chocolate chips!
Pâtisserie-ily, RonL.
Other ideas
- per John H on #evolt the idea of rethinking/revamping w.e.o with some of the features available on Pinax. example http://cloud27.com/projects/project/pinax/
- new ways to get fresh content on w.e.o front page, feeds from list or other places?
