Headline: Chris Croome and I will be streamlining our Discourse categories on Tuesday 16th December so there may be some disruptions to the forum. We will be taking a backup in case anything goes wrong.
Background
As you many know, I have been working on a project with funding from Cooperatives UK to improve CoTech’s digital presence. Ultimately we hope to get more work and enable more collaboration with like-minded folks . You can read the initial proposal here: Seeking Approval for Coops UK £5k Proposal – Input Needed + Circle Discussion.
To do this I have been working on improving our website, lead triaging system via our email (contact@cotech.coop), and now I’ve been exploring how to improve this forum.
My main aims are to:
- Make Discourse more user friendly for members of the public and/or potential clients to engage with us. Our updated website will have more prominent links to Discourse and our new lead triaging system directs many queries to Discourse so we want the journey to feel easier for new people.
- Make it easier and clearer for CoTech members to start and sustain members only conversations. I think it’s important that we have clear private discussion threads - that’s part of the value of the network!
Solution
To achieve this we will be streamlining our categories into two main sections - Public and Members Only - that will be clearly marked in the sidebar navigation.
Public
- Introduce yourself (existing, rename Introductions)
- General (new)
- Technology (existing)
- Events (existing)
- Job board (existing jobs, rename)
- CoTech Meetings (existing, Cotech > Calls rename)
Members only
- General - members only (new)
- Work opportunities (existing, rename BizDev)
- Help requests (rename skill sharing)
- Internal tech & processes (new)
All threads in categories not mentioned above will be reshuffled into one of the above categories but with tags of their old categories.
If you have any concerns or questions, let me know and I can provide more information.
Thank you!