March State of the Forum Address- Focus and Volunteer Groups
Mar 5, 2015 0:08:56 GMT -5
Post by wordsy on Mar 5, 2015 0:08:56 GMT -5
Greetings, everyone. Time for our regularly scheduled update from your admin team. As always, feel free to ask questions, and let us know what you think.
We worked over the last few weeks to gather our volunteers into groups to help us organize and come up with ideas to move the vision forward. Most groups have been established, but the programming group is still in the works. The other volunteer groups have been running for just over a week, and the discussions have been really helpful.
The admins have also established a focus group to help give feedback on the ideas that the groups generate. We have so many little decisions to make that taking them all to a group this large is not practical, so we decided to use a rotating focus group to solve the problem.
We went through a bunch of the posts about the forum that we've made and then lurked various boards to generate a list of people who are outspoken and who post regularly in the community on a variety of boards**. We purposefully limited the group to not double dip into the moderators or other involved to parties too greatly for fear of skewed perspectives.
We wanted to come up with a group of people representative of the community as a whole, and selected posters who wouldn't necessarily agree with us just to agree. We wanted honest opinions from people who seemed to really want to be involved in a dialogue.
We waited to announce the focus group until we had replies from the initial group- all 25 posters we invited accepted the position. We are purposefully are not releasing the names because we want uninfluenced feedback. Our plan is to rotate this group every few months to keep the feedback fresh and gain new perspectives.
As for our next steps, we are currently working on finalizing the content submission policy, determining the website color palette, choosing possible taglines, and working on the forum themes. Also larger scope, we are talking about the processes for editing and reviewing the content once submitted.
**Clarification of "on a variety of boards" from theophania:
Not everyone in the Focus Group posts on multiple boards, but the Focus Group as a whole is encompassed of people from multiple boards. For example, the group as a whole doesn't come from Parenting, some come from Parenting, Special Needs, Loss, GKU, Living Childless, LGBT, Dads, a particular BMB, etc. When we said a variety of boards we mean the group as a whole comes from a variety of boards, not every individual posts on multiple boards. I just wanted to clarify since this is popping up quite a bit as a question.
We worked over the last few weeks to gather our volunteers into groups to help us organize and come up with ideas to move the vision forward. Most groups have been established, but the programming group is still in the works. The other volunteer groups have been running for just over a week, and the discussions have been really helpful.
The admins have also established a focus group to help give feedback on the ideas that the groups generate. We have so many little decisions to make that taking them all to a group this large is not practical, so we decided to use a rotating focus group to solve the problem.
We went through a bunch of the posts about the forum that we've made and then lurked various boards to generate a list of people who are outspoken and who post regularly in the community on a variety of boards**. We purposefully limited the group to not double dip into the moderators or other involved to parties too greatly for fear of skewed perspectives.
We wanted to come up with a group of people representative of the community as a whole, and selected posters who wouldn't necessarily agree with us just to agree. We wanted honest opinions from people who seemed to really want to be involved in a dialogue.
We waited to announce the focus group until we had replies from the initial group- all 25 posters we invited accepted the position. We are purposefully are not releasing the names because we want uninfluenced feedback. Our plan is to rotate this group every few months to keep the feedback fresh and gain new perspectives.
As for our next steps, we are currently working on finalizing the content submission policy, determining the website color palette, choosing possible taglines, and working on the forum themes. Also larger scope, we are talking about the processes for editing and reviewing the content once submitted.
**Clarification of "on a variety of boards" from theophania:
Not everyone in the Focus Group posts on multiple boards, but the Focus Group as a whole is encompassed of people from multiple boards. For example, the group as a whole doesn't come from Parenting, some come from Parenting, Special Needs, Loss, GKU, Living Childless, LGBT, Dads, a particular BMB, etc. When we said a variety of boards we mean the group as a whole comes from a variety of boards, not every individual posts on multiple boards. I just wanted to clarify since this is popping up quite a bit as a question.
