This document outlines ideas and progress toward our Future Salon Network portal. We'll use the ideas here to help us build our online community. We are working with the cool, talented folks at Polycot.com on this. We hope to get their help in creating a portal after they've made some collective blogging software for our community.
The ASF volunteer community should feel free to add to and selectively edit this document. Post your questions or comments at the bottom. When adding new material (versus style edits) please attribute your input by including your initials in parentheses at the end of your entry. Please be concise. ASF staff may edit commentary.
| Editors | Initials |
| Tim Moenk | TM |
| John Smart | JS |
New editors, please add your name and unique initials below:
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We want something easy to use and administer over the web. We'd like RSS feeds and the ability to subscribe to email feedback by forum.
1. Forum for FutureSalon.org/forums
vBulletin, $160 (http://www.vbulletin.com)
Advantages: vBulletin still looks like the leading community forum software. The new v3.5 handles RSS feeds well, apparently. It also has a lot more graphical customization than the version I played with last year. New version shows detail on forum posts in mouseover (nice).
Sitepoint (http://www.sitepoint.com) is an impressive community website. They use vBulletin for their forum. If it is good enough for this leading community it seems good enough for us, and is quite affordable. It has a great looking layout http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/ and is smoothly integrated into the rest of their site. Sitepoint features I like that we might work toward in 2006:
1. Great integration of their four tabs: Articles, Books, Blogs, and Forums (vBulletin).
2. Search is super fast and includes all categories, well demarcated.
3. Several HTML newsletters to choose from, with slick subscription system.
4. They sell things (books), and have those things as 1/4 of their site layout (subtle).
Sitepoint sells Editize, http://www.editize.com, a basic CMS for $150 that we might start using when we are ready to add a CMS on top of our forum. Looks like a great way to get our team to submit content without their having to learn HTML tags. They have a higher end CMS product as well, called Gazelle. Perpetual licences for Gazelle run anywhere between $3K and $7K depending on config. Pretty rich for us but it might be a smart choice, I don't know.
Disadvantages/Issues: We'll still have a learning curve with vBulletin. There will be lots of little customization issues. I don't know how flexible the templates are, though I like SitePoint's user interface for their forums (information rich). Working on a forum first will keep us from thinking about other aspects of our community, like blogs. But a forum may be the natural place to start. See Forum Structure later in this document for proposed starter forum topics.
2. Add-Ons to Accelerating.org (and FutureSalon.org?)
Dreamweaver MX and Extensions
Advantages: We are currently using Dreamweaver to manage Accelerating.org, so adding CMS features to it for Accelerating.org and FutureSalon.org by using Dreamweaver extensions might be a smart move (or not??). We might be able to find an affordable and dependable tech wizard for this (my cousin employs programmers in India for $15/hour). A small firm of web developers might also be able to give us tips on using Dreamweaver ourselves (Jerry and I are pretty basic users). Because Dreamweaver is the leading website development tool, there is a large community around it, and excellent tutorials and documentation.
Cost/Complexity: Companies like Interakt offer extensions that allow you to do community features for dynamic content management. These are reasonably priced ($50 to $300). http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/
We can use an open source database (mySQL or equivalent) on Linux, hosted at GoDaddy (our current hosting site). This approach also seems like something a team of one or two people can manage.
See their case studies and testimonials at: http://www.interaktonline.com/Products/Bundles/MXKollection/Case-studies/. InterAKT's forums look well populated (http://www.interaktonline.com/Support/Forums/) and they have a number of online tutorials. Finally, Dreamweaver is very well suited for graphical, flash, and CSS customization. (InterAKT's collection comes with CSS Skins). Our graphics wizard, Marlon Rojas, is familiar with Dreamweaver and could handle our graphics on this platform without retraining.
Disadvantages/Issues: This isn't an out of the box solution, but requires a lot of low level crafting. I have no good idea how complex or limiting this approach would be, or whether a group like Polycot could work with it.
Would it be smarter to buy a customized CMS solution to integrate with the forum? Maybe we don't have to make a decision on this yet? But it would be good to know where we are going.
1. Blog-as-CMS (MovableType/TypePad, WordPress)
Advantages: Easy to set up.
Disadvanges: Too simple? Blogs are best as a channel for journalists, not a community space. We are going to need forum software as well, I think.
2. CivicSpace or another Drupal CMS.
Advantages: Mark Finnern likes these guys. Drupal has strong support in the CMS community. They are trying to create a platform optimized for bottom up group activism (blog creation and integration, etc.)
Disadvantages/Questions: It looks like they aren't ready for prime time. They haven't reached version 1.0 after over a year of development. They have taken down the site examples they used to have on their homepage, and the old ones weren't that impressive, as I recall, had bugs with their calendars, etc. Don't know of any other good Drupal CMS solutions for us.
2. A Zope CMS
Advantages: Like Drupal, Zope is a highly regarded platform in the CMS community, and it is aiming itself at enterprise sites. One Friend of ASF, Norm Gilmore, is becoming an expert in it.
Disadvantages/Questions: Not well documented or tutorialized yet, as it is so new. May be too complex for us at this stage. Norm is not available to help us develop our site at present.
3. OpenCMS.
Advantages: A full blown CMS. Now in version 6.0 so pretty stable as well.
Disadvantages: Looks way too complex and underdocumented for us. Seems like it would need lots of people working on it. Might be ideal only once we have large teams of content developers.
Like Sitepoint.com, we envision our Community Tabs running across the top, like:
1. Email Lists
A. ASF Newsletters (Accelerating Times)
B. Future Salon Announcement Lists
2. Social Networks
A. Future Salon Networks
a. Linked In (Future Salon group is where our members will put their photos and data)
b. Omidyar Network (Foresight Development group for ASF project work).
B. Affiliate Groups
a. Early Adopters
b. Tinkerers (Make, etc.)
c. Inventors
d. Tech Investors
e. Global Developers (Engineers for a Sustainable World, Engineers Without Borders)
f. Forecasters and Futurists (APF, ASP, etc.)
3. Forums (vBulletin)
Topic Forums: We want topics that map to our elevator pitch objectives ("Making a rapidly changing world fascinating, manageable, and profitable for you."). Working off Clement Chang's foresight curriculum structure at Tamkang University (predicting, adapting to, and creating the future) and adding the profit topic gives four topic forums. This is a small enough number that they should be well populated with active moderators for each. Subforums can be added in coming quarters as needed.
Topics:
Predicting: Foresight Resources
Adapting: Management Tools and Strategies
Creating: Innovation, R&D, and Entrepreneurship
Profiting: Investing (Social Responsibility/Emerging Markets, Fundamentals, Tech)
Salon Forums: If we start with our two largest communities these should be well populated in 2006. We should have a commitment hoop (three co-moderators, Yahoo Group size, month of operation) new salons need to jump through before we give them a forum.
Salons
SF Bay Area
LA
Other Forums:
New Member Intros
The Lounge (the place for open conversation, including small talk)
Controversy Corner (where we move contentious threads, reactionary posts, etc.).
Rules: Small talk will be moved to the Lounge. Contentious and reactionary posts will be moved to Controversy Corner. Discourteous posts will be deleted by the moderators.
4. Blogs
ATimes Community Bloggers. We are working with the smart folks at Polycot on this. Jeff Kramer, Maida Barbour, Matt Sanders, and Jon Lebkowsky. We'd like a system with the search features of Worldchanging.org, which they developed.
We've recently noticed the excellent blogs at Sitepoint.com. They definitely look like something for us to work towards for the future. For now, we'll do the Worldchanging approach.
5. Resources
A. FutureConversations.com
B. Other Media
C. Databases
Public Wiki
Internal Wiki
Online Databases
ASF Community Directory
Change Leaders Directories
Change footer to: Outreach/Education/Research/Advocacy
Add pages for:
A. Outreach (Future Salon Network)
B. Education (Foresight Development)
C. Research (Metaverse)
D. Advocacy (FutureConversations.com)
We would like to have pages featuring profiles for all the Future Salon Network Leaders and speakers. For reference, look to these two pages: http://accelerating.org/ac2005/attendees.html http://accelerating.org/ac2005/speakers.html
For the FSN Leader profiles, a format similar to the conference attendee 'Participant Statements' might be used.
Page Last Updated: Jul 8 2:41pm by John Smart