Features

It occured to me that our vision for the site (as nebulous as it is) is a little too removed from the current instantiation to easily see a way there. We get a small number of pageviews, we're not terribly *active* on our own projects, and we're neither inviting new members openly nor providing much impetus for existing members (who aren't in the the little social nucleus around which all of the current activity seems to revolve) to stay and contribute.

Which is a fancy way of stating the obvious, I suppose. Here's a possible remedy:

Build the site around individuals' projects. Invite some more people we know to join, and make it as easy as possible for them to do so (either open membership, or trivial effort to create an account). A lot of people who might be interested would lose that interest if it were more involved than idly clicking a link, but might be far more active later if they had an existing account.

The reason I'm initially thinking "people we know" is because we can form, in essence, writer's groups and workshops and such. That's something people will happily join up for, if they're the sort of people who are even likely to join a creative cooperative in the first place. There probably aren't enough such people we know who both can and would participate at the levels we need to sustain interest, so that's why I'd recommend open admissions.

Every user gets a projects page. Every user can specify who's in x group with them, and everyone in a group can read any appropriate content therein.

I'm sure some of this is redundant to what we already have, and other parts may not be possible with the current platform. It's an idea, though...

It occurs to me that our current front page style (the "river of news" view) is pretty lousy. There's no control to prevent non-admin members from posting to the front page. This makes me think we need a different solution.

What if instead of a posting blogs to the front page, we create a content type specifically for front page posts. This way, front page posts would exclusively appear on the front page and staff members would have much better control over what goes to the front page and what doesn't. The downside is that there is some crossover between front page posts and blog posts. Members would have to choose between one or the other.