Announcing the new forums
By Ed Mitchell 8th July 2010
Ta da! We are proud to announce the (gentle) opening of our new forums.
We have had these up our sleeves for a while now, but things being what they are, bugs being bugs, conferences happening, houses moving, and other excitements, we’ve had to wait a while to get these out into the light.
Our all new forums are now ready to use and generally enjoy. We have not set up one forum for every single theme and topic under the sun as this doesn’t work, so we’ve set up a couple up and have our ears open for requests for new forums.
They are a big leap form our old forums in a number of ways including:
- Integrated into the Transition site with the newsletter etc.
- Linked to your personal profile
This means that you can:
- Receive email alerts when people respond to your posts (weyhey!)
- Find out more about other posters by clicking on their profile links and contact them directly
- Follow other posters so you can see all their posts
- Be a forum moderator/facilitator if you want to
- … and more
Because there are all sorts of ways you can structure forums, and none of them ever make everyone happy (the internet doesn’t quite mirror our experience of the world yet), we’ve been scratching our heads about how to get it as right as possible. In our context we identified a basic difference between ‘theme’ discussions (about food, energy, transport etc.) and ‘process’ discussions (for things like core team formation, unleashings, conflict resolution).
So at the top level, we have have set up two ‘Containers’ – one for ‘themes’ and one for ‘process’. The forums are within these containers. This will all be clear when you see them!
There are bound to be a few issues here and there so please let us know via the contact form so we can sort them out, but they’re looking pretty cool right now.
Please come and have a look, see what you think, identify any new forums you would like to see open, and all that jazz. We’ve honed the forums to as simple as we can and can’t find any more bugs, but there’s always bugs… Also we have only opened a few so there aren’t loads of echoing halls of empty forums, so to make requests for new forums, please use the feedback one.
You can comment anonymously, but that’s a bit pointless in our opinion and we encourage people to use their real names as this is a real community. So if you want your comments to have your name on them and follow others, and get email alerts to new posts etc. etc. please register on the site.
A few forums to start with:
- Test forum: make some mistakes and work out how it works. For trials and things you don’t mind losing
- Feedback forum: for issues and requests for new forums
- General forum: for threads which don’t have a need for a whole forum
- Food forum: for food theme discussion
- … there are others..
Hope you enjoy them, and don’t forget our no nonsense moderation policy, and to make sure you meet people locally, not just on the internet