Cultivate.Coop talk:Community portal

Thanks, Lippe. This has been taken care of.

Cooperative Research

I started this article on Cooperative research and would love some help finding more resources. Feel free to add thoughts to the talk page!

Mattsenate

Edits by Administrator, Editor, WikiSysop are confusing

I find edits done by these logins to be confusing, and I don't understand the rationale. It's strange because there's no background or context for the content.
A strategy I've used on a few sites is to create logins in the form of <username> - <role> to maintain separate permissions while still providing attribution. It's useful both in recording shared admin work, while still allowing separation of admin/contributor edits.

Brainstorming Session: New "Categories" on Cultivate.Coop - What would you like to see?

Some users have brought up the fact that they would like to add content matter to Cultivate.Coop beyond "articles" and "educational resources." This includes: instructions on how to build a check out counter (for grocers and other co-ops) and more.

So, help us discuss below the type of content you'd like to see on cultivate (case studies, etc.). We'll use this information to help us build a taxonomy for new forms of content that can be added to Cultivate. Ready? Set? Go!

Some of these may fit under the article or educational designation, but I think more granularity will be helpful for creating navigable structure.

DIY facilities tutorials - Power cord management, monitor mount, laptop kiosk, visually appealing fly-paper mounts, roll dispensers, bulk "workstations", checkout counter, bulk liquid systems, sandwich boards.
IT help documents - Mostly pertaining to email, but also specific software or equipment, like Wiki tutorials or Register guides.
Graphics - Icon sets, clip art, signs, sign systems (PDF form tutorial), logos submitted for internal competition but released for use or purchase by other co-ops.
Primers - From basic HVAC principles, to web-hosting considerations.

These are great ideas. We'll go ahead and make them (or you could even do so).

Do you think they should all be listed on the side bar (my thought is that could get too clunky, though maybe not) - or could they fit under a sub-headline or two (like how teaching cooperatives and learning cooperatives is under Educational resources)? Might be best for keeping the ease of navigation down. Though it'd be great to hear your thoughts on this.

I would like to see an area where cooperatives who are currently having to buy raw materials, products, services and supplies from non-cooperative businesses can network and connect with sources that are cooperative. This would also be a great way for people wanting to start a new cooperative to see what kind of services or material production are feasible and needed by the cooperative community and how they can apply their skills to filling that need.

MightySmallFilms

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Templates for better site management and workflow

Here is a list of templates currently being used and developed to improve the workflow and management of Cultivate.Coop. These are all works in progress, please feel free to improve and modify them, as well as add your own or suggest others:

"This article does not cite any references or sources." http://cultivate.coop/wiki/Template:Unreferenced

Some management/workflow issues I think need to be added:

Stub/needs expansion (needs to be improved) - http://cultivate.coop/wiki/Template:Stub
Writing clean-up
Uncategorized

Here's a template for pages that have no information:

No info: (though it could be improved) http://cultivate.coop/wiki/Template:No_info

What do you think about Cultivate.Coop so far?

What do you think Cultivate.Coop is missing? What do you really like about it? What confuses you? I've been using Cultivate.Coop since it launched now and I'm curious what other people think of it.

Jcassano

1. What do you think Cultivate.Coop is missing? (a planning process started from identification problems)

2. What do you really like about it? (I am a cooperative planner for public and private partnerships)

3. What confuses you? (Public Policy vs. Intellectual Property Rights)

4. .....? (the alternative will be new cooperatives)

5. I've been using Cultivate.Coop since it launched now. (controlling stadium)

6. I'm curious what other people think of it. (evaluation stadium)

CHPStar

Missing:

Potentially a partial WYSIWYG editor. I'm aware of the problems with WYSIWYG and wiki grammar parsing, but enabling an editor, and then stripping down the toolbar to only use elements that dependably parse properly might allow for a lower barrier to entry, but preserve quality markup in articles. Then again, this might not be feasible.
More use of categories to organize workflow, ala "needs expansion" reference, cleanup, etc. If not tags, some more developed sense of workflow.
An expanded wish-list, and mechanism for adding items to a wish list. Visitors should be able to easily add/vote for articles they would find useful. My participation is rather fruitless if I'm working on pet interests while people are wanting other information that I'm not helping with because I don't know it's wanted. I realize there's a thread just under here with requests, but in my experience as a site admin, it's just plain hard to get broad-based feedback. Off the top of my head: Editing the search template to include a direct link to the request thread, or a more passive approach - using something like the KeepSearches extension to create a tag cloud of frequently searched phrases.

Really like:

That it exists! I'm glad that someone stepped up and switched on the experiment.

Hey Lippe,

These are really great suggestions. Thanks for bringing them up.

In terms of the WYSIWYG editor, lowering the barrier for entry is definitely critical. I'm not personally aware of any exact WYSIWYG editors for wiki-text. But do you mean something like the newer editing toolbar on wikipedia's pages (see here for example). Obviously this isn't exactly WYSIWYG, but it's toolbar is stripped down, etc. The one thing that I think still scares some people off is, when clicking on the edit button, they see what looks like code. But in general, I/we are unaware of any actual WYSIWYG text editing for wiki-pages.

Workflow- great point as well. We were going to start using the categories function to help organize content (see the portals reference here. And we already have a few templates - such as Template:Learn edit and Template:stub. However, we could add more that are just plain text, or we could try to add something like wikipedia's "refimprove" template, as seen here. Is that what you mean?

Wish-list suggestions' - this is an especially great suggestion, and the idea of voting on needed content is particularly ace. We'll look into what possible extensions would be needed to make that happen right away (it would have to be very easy to use). And we'll try to get cracking on this suggestion - "include a direct link to the request thread, or a more passive approach - using something like the KeepSearches extension to create a tag cloud of frequently searched phrases" - ASAP. Those could be incredibly helpful features. Probably one other thing that is needed would be to make the request thread more instantly visable on the site, i.e. linked to from the home page.

Thanks for your thoughts!

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Known technical issues with Cultivate.Coop - timelines for fixing them

There are a few known technical issues with Cultivate.Coop. These are:

Thumbnails not working
Captcha code when trying to sign up is screwy.

These both have to do with the fact that our current package with our hosting service does not meet our needs. We are looking into potential switching options or choosing a different package with our current host. We hope to have these resolved by February 28th.

Please let us know here of any other technical issues you may run across.

Portals

I've started to categorize pages into various portals and build the "portal" function mentioned on the articles page. (Described as: "These are articles in Cultivate.Coop organized into larger categories. This will allow you to sort through every article that is relevant to a specific category that you are interested in. These may include: Conflict Resolution, Worker Cooperatives, Cooperative Start-Up, Co-op 101, Meeting Facilitation, and more."). I think this is an important feature that'll help people sort through/find content on the site - as well as help people categorize content they are building. This is different than the guided tour because that's a very specific selection of articles - while this will help anyone find all the content Cultivate.Coop has on one specific issue (i.e. everything having to do with worker cooperatives, co-ops 101, starting a co-op, technology, etc.).

This has been a very sputtered process, so I only have two portal categories thus far:

Obviously, there should be a lot more portal categories. What suggestions do you have?

Image thumbnails not working?

I attempted to upload a screenshot to make a tutorial.. and the thumbnails aren't being generated. I could place blind links to full size files, but it would make a much nicer tutorial if I can place thumbs using verbose syntax to create a sized & aligned thumbnail. In general, it's probably something that should be available.

I tried .PNG first, and then .JPG of the same file, thinking maybe it had to do with the format, but no dice. I'd link to the files, but I can't manage to do it without displaying them.

Hi Lippe,

Thanks for bringing this up. This is certainly a problem we know of, but we don't know why it's not working. We've been in touch with the site developer about it, but we haven't received a response about it yet. We'll try to get in touch with them again today and get this resolved within the next few days.

In the mean time, if anyone has any insight into why this might be a problem and what can be done to fix it, please share your thoughts here.

Based on the path that's being reported in the error, settings.php might be configured to look for Imagemagick, but it's either not installed or is in a different location. MediaWiki depends on either Imagemagic or the GD library, but both of them can have various configuration problems, each unique to other installation variables like the hosting OS, so there are a lot of potential causes. (Note: I am not an experienced MediaWiki admin)

Hey Lippe,

We finally determined the issue. The problem is very weird, but it actually has to do with our current package with our hosting service not supporting things like Imaemagick. We'll have it sorted out this week and post here as soon as its fixed. Again, thanks for bring this up.

Good to hear. I don't know what your hosting setup is like, fees/features/support environment, but you should be aware that there are collective and cooperative hosting providers that may be sympathetic or even supportive of the cultivatec.coop mission. Gaiahost (never used), Electric Embers (never used), May First/People Link (used for 2 co-op sites I work on), Riseup (participated in lists, not hosting), Koumbit (never used), Echoditto (never used, but they have an awesome blog). Geesh, this ~~should be~~ is an article: http://cultivate.coop/wiki/Cooperative/Collective_Site_Hosts

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Missing Article Topics?

What article topics do you think need to be on Cultivate.Coop that do not currently exist?

I would like to see an article on conflict resolution in co-operatives. I think this is an important topic that should be covered in every cooperative.

Yeah, I completely agree with this. Could someone who is knowledgeable on this subject start this page?

Hi from the UK

I have recently published a series of booklets for Co-operatives UK (the UK co-op federal) based on a co-operative approach to dealing with conflict, 'from conflict to co-operation' [1].

They were written for a project to support UK community enterprises, but were based on my experience of working with co-ops, there is a range of free resources on my website: [2]

There are 5 booklets, the first one addresses how to deal with the inevitable conflicts that arise, and booklets 2 to 5 deal with how to avoid unecessary conflicts through (2) improving communication skills (3) effective meetings and decision making (4) coping with the changes brought about by growth and development (5) understanding the role of the Committee or Board

I will start a page on dealing with conflict in co-operatives, and link it to the work you already have on here on meetings, consensus etc.

However you will have to endure (or edit) my english spellings!

Congratulations on a fabulous resource - I have dreamed of something like this ever since the www was invented ...!

Kate

Kate whittle

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I'd like to see a page on Time Banks. I think they have significant relevance to cooperative economics, and they're also something I'd like to learn more about.