The conference call was useful to get the efforts and direction of the people working on the Discourse evaluation in line with the desired outcomes of the Board. All agreed that we needed to get more people involved in using Discourse to get better feedback as to what works well and what needs further attention.
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the efforts to simplify the site have been successful and it now looks like it will be easy enough to navigate. Any further simplifications are welcome. (author’s note - we can add categories, groups, etc. once people are use to navigating the site)
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efforts don’t need to be directed toward writing up an evaluation - people can base their conclusions on their use of the site
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for “email mode” users, it is reasonable to expect that people who receive a single post or digest mode email would use the reply button for their response (that takes them to the site and allows them to scroll through the topic)
Some of Jon’s assumptions based on this call
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it would be worth the effort to expand on the How To Use topics to make things as easy as possible for new users
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as a default, we should encourage users to visit the site, or opt for daily digest mode rather than getting a new email for each posting (mailing list mode)
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we should clean up the site - eliminate some of the evaluation topics and most of the back and forth postings as adding bulk but not value. We should add Nonsuch related topics from the Google group so people can see how it will work as a forum site.
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where possible, we should encourage other people to join and form their own opinions about Discourse
Questions
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should we continue to try to get a few people to use the site to work on a dyneema article, to get feedback on Discourse’s wiki capabilities?
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should we experiment with having a regional group join and set up their own category and notification group (email list). It could be self-moderated (save it for later?)