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The structure of our containers, forums and topics

Submitted by George Por on January 26, 2006 - 00:25.

Several people mentioned that the forum structure is confusing. Halim and Ria offered to think about how to improve it. I contributed to improving by eliminating forums which had no content, and adding 1-line descriptors in the list of forums. Fernanda is working on a visual map that will too help in navigating our various spaces.

I hope all that will help a little bit but the truth is that ANY structure will have difficulty to stay current with the (rapidly) emerging nature of our connected conversations. Our best bet is to make the structure a target of our ongoing, collaborative, site-improvement efforts, and to share our current mental models and assumptions about the forum structure.

Let's use this topic for that purpose, and for recommendations about how to keep the static structure of containers, forums and topics aligned with the dynamic nature of our emergent conversations and their continuous branching into many issues.

Structure and Software

Submitted by Halim Dunsky on January 27, 2006 - 07:24.

George, I appreciate your initiative to remedy this situation. I have been trying to organize my thoughts about the site, do a sort of end-to-end review, and have been getting completely overwhelmed in trying to follow the fragmented conversations already underway.

Partly I see this as an organization-of-information problem. Like a lot of other users so far, I have posted things in unlikely places, so I know I have contributed to the difficulty. A good system, though, as you suggest, George -- technical capabilities, information architecture, plus ongoing stewardship from admins and other helpers -- should be robust enough to keep such problems down to a workable level.

Partly I think the difficulty has to do with usability problems of the drupal interface and/or the way it's been set up on the evo site -- permissions issues, defaults, features that are on or off or not available, bugs, opaque or awkward terminology. I have worked with a number of systems of this general kind, including Catalyst, WebCrossing, and phpBB, and this drupal installation is among the most difficult I have encountered.

I'm very glad the technical community is getting together to address the future of the system. (See http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/179 and http://www.evolutionarynexus.org/node/156#comment-115.)

Visual Adjunct

Submitted by Nancy White on January 27, 2006 - 01:41.

See the lovely pictures on Flickr tagged with evolutionarysalon tag

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/evolutionarysalon