The board for the last 3 years has defined the problem of how to create a vibrant, valuable and effective community of practice. We've looked at existing solutions and when we map them against our requirements and resources they all come up very short. So let me go from vague to more specific.
We all know the email list is broken for much of the subscribership of the organization. What Jeff has done is GREAT, but it only solves a small portion of the issues we are facing as an organization/global community. Local < > Global: If you read the presentation that Josh presented it is clear that the community is a being forged as a bottom-up grassroots organization, but with strong guidance and facilitation from a central body. The local groups are hungry for that support, especially in the areas of infrastructure and the global organization is hungry to take what the local groups create and spread it far and wide to those who can't experience, and to codify it into something that is retainable, searchable, and useful. Local groups need landing pages where they can present calendars, manage members/subscribers/attendees, and post announcements relevant to that locale. But those same people are also members of the global community. We need a system where people can declare themselves as members of a community, interest group, etc. and global needs a way to gain outreach to people who discover IxDA locally first. One of the things we want to avoid is what I call the BayCHI syndrome where most of the members don't really feel affinity towards the parent org (SIGCHI), and thus their energy, membership, and resource is isolated to just that community. But there are other problems that need to be solved as well, around discussion management, job announcements, event announcements to the global and local communities, aggregating content, allowing for translation spaces/non-English discussions (but w/o cannibalizing the global community), and many others. We want to figure out how to make useful and practical connections to the other social networks we use, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I think this is enough to give you a sense of the scope we are discussing at this point. What I see is a multi-year plan that creates a kernel of functionality that allows a platform to form around and on top of it. I hope that local organization energy can supplement it over time instead of everyone building their own CommunityX, Ning, Basecamp, whatever system which just ends up being wasted bureaucratic energy, as none of those solutions will ever be able to scale to our total needs (even if they look like it, they fall short and then we are stuck waiting for THEM to expand). So what does this first kernel look like? 1st it needs to get us off of mailman. We need to rebuild the list, archive and subscription management system. A 2nd part of the puzzle that should probably be in any first release is the local landing pages with calendars, RSVP systems, and content management. After that, sky is the limit. That 1st bit by itself is pretty big for us to take on. We need solid backend development support including expertise in DB and Middleware and email systems that we current don't have. But before that, we also need a really strong UI system design that projects out the 5 year vision and the road map for how we get there. This last part is where I see the crowdsourcing begin and continues within this community. Hope that clarifies. -- dave On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 2:56 PM, Jared Spool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Oct 31, 2008, at 11:28 AM, Will Evans wrote: > > Could you define the problem space a little better? I am unsure what >> problem >> we face and therefore can't think of what solution we might use. >> > > I think that's the problem we should solve: that we don't know what the > problem we solve is. > > Think of how much better the world would be if we all agreed on what > problems needed solutions? > > Jared > -- David Malouf http://synapticburn.com/ http://ixda.org/ http://motorola.com/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
