Haiti Rewired

Hey, I thought I'd just throw this post out to start a conversation about what we should be doing on *this forum*. Want to critique the design? Think we should open a chat room? Do we need to add a space for files, photos, etc? Let's talk about it here.

Views: 624

Reply to This

Replies to This Discussion

I tried a few searches and it seems to be working for me, Arikia -- both with first / last name searches, and when I clicked through to the "advanced" page and did some searches by areas of expertise.

Maybe it was a temporary problem? Let me know if it continues, though, and we'll get Ning to look into it.
I've seen similar results, but not consistently. We can ask Ning to see if they know of any issues. It's not entirely intuitive, but try Advanced Search as Dylan suggests.
Hi guys, I just tried it again after clearing my cache, and tried the Advanced Search and it is still not returning any results. For example, I tried searching for "Emma Jacobs" the other new hire who presumably has an account, and got nothing. There's too many members to scroll through them all! (Which is also awesome)
Nevermind! It turns out I was searching for someone who doesn't have an account yet. Seems to be working fine now, heh.
In order to make it easier to find colleagues in similar fields of interest, I've added a dropdown menu to the Members tab. The admin tool only allows me to add 10 subtab options, so I had to pick 9 plus a link to see all.
Niiiiiice!

I was also thinking, friending people and observing the recent activity on their profiles is a great alternate way to navigate this site. Would it make sense to feature the most active members in that box on the left sidebar of the main page, as opposed to the newest members, to help new people get oriented?
Unfortunately, there isn't an option to display most active. There is a setting called 'most popular', but I'm not sure how that is determined. I'll try to get some clarification from Ning on Monday.
@Jason @Alexis - Thanks, this is great feedback. Regarding organization & navigation - I can help out. Yes, we can easily organize the content by topic making it more easy to navigate. Currently, within blogs, each post can be tagged with topics by the author. These topics are displayed in a list format along the right side of of the main blog page, yet this list cannot be displayed on each blog post. Options on placement and format are a little limited due to the current tool. For example, I don't think that I can format the list of topics in a tag cloud, or add that same dynamic list to a single post. Also a dynamic list like this can get a bit unwieldy for some puroposes. However I can hardcode a few things, using a set of selected topics.

I'm thinking of adding some key topics in the main navigation. Depending on how many topics we chose to highlight, a dropdown list may be the best option. As Alexis mentioned, he & I can discuss which topics should be surfaced. If you guys want to send me a list over the weekend, I can try it out earlier. Of course, the list can morph over time - so no need to get it perfect in the first round.
@ Jason - regarding your 2nd point: I turned on the ability for members to suggest groups. I thought this was already turned on, but just realized that it was not. This should make it easier for members to team up around similar interests and/or form projects.

A big topic in some other social media is crowd funding, as a way of raising money for worthwhile projects, which include aid to Haiti.  I shared a ton of links about this with Virtual Brain Trust (#VBT) on Google Plus.  This is an effort to use networking to help individual people with their individual projects, such as finding a better job, or any job, or starting a new business, or supplying some solution to some crisis or disaster.

@Jason: Those are great ideas... I think you are right on in terms of what we were thinking this site could be. I have been thinking about how to organize by area, too. Energy, water, transportation, etc. I'll talk with Dennis on Monday about what our options are there.

Right now, we've been pretty focused on just getting the house in order — and most recently, getting an earthquake-resistant construction booklet translated into Kreyol and French by crowdsourcing the translation, design, etc. (That's mostly because the project dropped into our laps and seemed to match the skillset of the group.)

The booklet is a good test case, I think, for the ability of the group to turn from collective intelligence to collective actor. So far, the signs are very good that we can do it. A couple of star contributors have really taken ownership of the management of the project and are pushing it along at breakneck pace. We still have a ways to go, but I'm astonished at people's willingness to collaborate.

The key is: how do we find and define manageable tasks, as Chris Englund noted in a blog post. If you have any ideas, I'm all ears.
I added a few core topics to the tab navigation. Rollover 'Blogs' to see. We can try others later. This will be an iterative process based on feedback from members like yourself.

RSS

Translate

Get Started

New to Haiti Rewired? Check out these ways to use the site:

3 Easy Ways to Get Involved on Haiti Rewired

Want to give us feedback on the features of this site? Join our planning discussion


About

Haiti Rewired is a collaborative community focused on tech and infrastructure solutions for Haiti. We welcome your contributions!
Haiti Rewired's Mission Statement

The contents of this site are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. That means you're free to republish, repurpose or reuse anything here for any noncommercial purpose, as long as you credit the author or creator who posted it here.

If you have questions about the site or contributing to Haiti Rewired, please contact Arikia Millikan.

Help Haiti Recover

Join Reddit’s Haiti relief fundraising drive with Direct Relief International.

For other options, visit the Fundraising for Haiti Discussion.

© 2013   Created by Wired Admin.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service
http://haitirewired.wired.com/forum/topics/haiti-rewired-planning?id=4920407%3ATopic%3A66&page=4
haitirewired.wired.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2013-48
70273
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:B4T3CBGWDY4YSRZWIIT6VQE7IUIK3Y2S
<urn:uuid:75c78efd-50cd-450d-82e7-36bed07a0cc6>
2013-12-13T14:49:12Z
208.82.16.68
sha1:WHEKTD2ESJGG2CCMV7YOV3Y3CBSZKBDZ
<urn:uuid:36ae756f-9769-4d5e-97cc-3d0d757bea8b>
http://haitirewired.wired.com/forum/topics/haiti-rewired-planning?id=4920407%3ATopic%3A66&page=4
length
response
<urn:uuid:b976f3ff-7860-426a-a04a-971319bed0fe>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-33-133-15.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2013-48
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for Winter 2013
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf