When studying yourhistoryhere we started questioning our use of a wiki platform to develop a community. We started wondering if theirwork’s interface should be based on comment entries rather than wiki entries. This led us to imagining an interface that presented the user with both types of entries. You could have comment sections available for each wiki entry. Envisaging this scenario, we realised this wouldn’t work because as the wiki entry got updated and so refined, the comment section would get out of sync.

We also decided, that as we start out with the community, we should align ourselves to the wiki way of creating a community, and that this philosophy should still drive the project forward. And that the forum, for the moment, was theirwork’s place for chat.

However, so as not to discount the power of comment writing in creating openness and chat, we our adding the possibility of a comment section to a list we’re making called Reserve of ideas.

We made a rule for ourselves. When we’re not sure about any idea, from software to look and feel we don’t put it in. If it caused interesting discussion and could be of use later in the project or if other ideas aren’t working or need strengthening, then we’ll consider bringing it to the forefront and testing it.

Reserve of ideas:

Adding comments to interface - leave to forum for the moment
Tags to navigate - think carefully about why we bring them in. We’re using a bunch of trendy tools already. We
should be careful not to chuck everything together just because it’s all ‘of the moment’.
GIS data - some is collected ready for testing, but we need to ask the community about what they think of this type of data. If we use it, we also need to reveal it slowly because there’s a large amount of it and it’s very specialised.

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