[theforum] rethink w.e.o.

Erika ekm at seastorm.com
Sun Nov 30 13:28:52 CST 2008


It's become increasingly clear to me, based on feedback to attempts to 
redesign front-end, that people want our site to be something 
significantly different from what it is right now.

The "oldschool" comments on design attempts were confusing to me, but I 
think it could easily refer to the whole concept behind our site, not 
just the look of the site.

What would you do if there were no w.e.o. today?  If you could build 
evolt.org from the bottom up, from nothing... and create: "a world 
community for web developers, promoting the mutual free exchange of 
ideas, skills and experiences."

(keeping in mind we are trying to extend "web developers" to all 
internet/interanet professionals) --

How would you do it, and specifically in regards to w.e.o.?

I say: dump ideas anywhere: forum/#evolt/wiki... but would be nice if we 
could collect them ultimately on the wiki.

-------------------------------------

A few thoughts: I spent almost all of 2006 and much of 2007 in other 
social sites, especially, mySpace.  I started with mySpace because of 
the music networking capabilities, but I became really fascinated by my 
ability to connect to lots of related networks through nodes on my own 
network. I met my best friend on mySpace, and lots of musicians who I 
played shows with, reconnected with very old friends, and made new 
friends who I know would let me crash on their couch if I were passing 
through their part of the world.

In the article on groups that David referenced, the author talks about 
issues of "scale."  And how the old model of the web was to grow, grow, 
grow.  That's what we did at evolt.org.  But you get to a point where 
meaningful *social* interactions are not happening anymore, because it's 
too big, too many people to contend with.

So how do you deal with that?  One way might to be to go back to our old 
"centers" concept?  And really divide ourselves up more into separate 
communities?  How would we make that work?  Or are there other ways?

Web community/networking has come a long way since we started evolt.org, 
and though we are behind now, we are positioned such that we could step 
back, re-align, jump ahead and lead again in certain areas 
(internationalization?) *if* we are smart and creative about it.

Erika






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