Brainstorming Session: New "Categories" on Cultivate.Coop - What would you like to see?
From Cultivate.Coop
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.
- Spammy content: References should ideally have some sort of authentication that a co-op has had a good experience.
- Negative comments: What about vendors/services that have marks against them? It can be just as useful. We maintain listings for vendors that we've had bad experiences with, in order that we don't repeat our mistakes, or know what to expect/watch out for in the future.
- Regional: Categorization in general would be a pain, and should include both resource area as well as geographic area. It does no good to you if I recommend an AC repair company in NYC, but you might be interested in the bag supplier from Oregon.
Aside from these pitfalls, I think it's a great idea.
(Sorry for the delayed reply, we were on vacation for a bit.)
I think this is a very interesting good concept, which could be much easier to implement now that Cultivate.Coop has a WYSIWYG editor. Lippe brings up some good points about potential issues, but I think that could be worked out in discussion spaces and through a beta implementation.
Would using the wiki format be a useful medium for this? We're playing around wtih some drupal components, but those are quite a number of months off. For now, we could start something within a week or two, and it could be housed in the main navigation section at the top of the website (right under educational resources). What would this be called? "Cooperative business connections"?
Let me know about any other thoughts regarding how to organize this concept.
-Brian
In my experience I don't find wikis to very useful for this sort of data exploration. Semantic forms comes to mind as a MediaWiki extension to deal with this, but I think that's pushing the wiki format into something it was never intended to be. Drupal seems ideal for resolving categorization, filtering, and workflow issues.
