communities of practice to the base of online groups (30+ local Issues
Forums) hosted by E-Democracy.org. We also have three main public
"Participation 3.0" online working groups. These new groups are all
linked from: http://e-democracy.org/p3
While many of you experience these online groups as simply an e-mail
list and never visit the website, we have a growing number of users
who participate primarily via the web. Our technology approach is to
define a unified space and let the user participate via their
preferred technology or interface. We've even started to attract users
who aren't familiar with the concept of an e-mail list or are at least
surprised that that is the default setting for participation. We see
value in inter-generational exchange where 20 somethings and 60
somethings can be in the same online space on an equal footing.
I've shared an update on upgrades coming down the pipe for each
group's home page here:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/r/topic/5DhQll01vD2T5cyZtkXPxW
One of my goals is to have the dynamic life in these exchanges be far
more visible and accessible to potential members, repeat visitors, and
of course full members. Your input will be quite helpful:
<email obscured>
Also, with our Ford Foundation funding, we are currently considering
some funded feature enhancements that bolster "inclusion." We are
doing extensive funded Issues Forum outreach in two lower income and
high immigrant neighborhoods - http://e-democracy.org/inclusion - and
have a growing number of additional forums in lower income areas. We
are interested in improvements that help us convert our (often
in-person) outreach into membership growth as well as help us ensure
that the diversity recruited is expressed in the content and dialogue
shared. Our sense is that such feature improvements will help everyone
participate. For example, one feature we've had implemented is easier
sharing of posts and topics with Facebook (where local immigrant
communities are quite active peer to peer), on Twitter, etc.
Because a number of you are big supporters of open source projects, I
encourage you to check out the general GroupServer development group
(we are a user, not the owner of this project):
http://groupserver.org/groups/development
If you like to get under-the-hood, download from: http://groupserver.org
Thanks,
Steven Clift
P.S. Now that we've figured out how to feed public groups into
Facebook Pages and Twitter, as area where we could use some volunteer
assistance or advice is on a mobile web interface (or mobile css) and
iPhone and Android apps (something simple that perhaps customizes
group reading by pulling from our web feeds). If you want to help
explore this for us, drop me a note: <email obscured>
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
ย Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
ย Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
ย New Tel: +1.612.234.7072