I've just read everything on the platform, and I'm keen to be involved in some way. I've established the Transition Town Stafford site and forums, and have been a software engineer and team leader for 25 years covering projects from requirements to commissioning including content management systems and Wikis. I'm currently engaged in a discussion about what on-line facilities would help in a Staffordshire-wide context.
Some random ideas to throw into the pot, focusing on what I've recently seen as problems, and probably from a different perspective than I've read here already:
Regarding keeping people involved with forums so they keep returning and contributing: It's very useful if forums allow users to subscribe to topics and/or allow for posts to be received by email, perhaps as digests. Being able to contribute by email is also useful. As an example (not a suggestion) Yahoo Groups do this, unfortunately the Transition Network forums don't... (how easily could that be added as a parallel project?)
Being able to register with certain forums which are of interest, eg:
- all locally based forums within 10 miles
- all energy sub-groups
And perhaps being able to exclude certain ones
As an example (not a suggestion) phpBB allows the administrator to control which forums are included in the Active Topics List. It would be good if individual users had such control for a personally tailored Active Topics List.
Some sites are easier to use than others. And we need to be particularly aware that we are hoping for a wide cross-section of society to get involved. In my experience this means keeping things very simple since I people can easily produce solutions that non-IT people find far too complex. I'm thinking here of my own recent experience with encouraging people of all ages to use our forums. What might help here is the concept of novice and expert modes, ie. hide the more advanced features until the user turns them on. This may of course be a way of time-boxing the project: start off with the essential features required by novices, and then add more advanced features.
We need something quickly, and that should be part of the requirements, ie. minimising the risk of failing to launch a solution before a certain date. So often software projects get delayed. I think we should be focusing on what makes us unique, ie. transition, rather than too much software development. Would it be possible to review existing 'solutions', assessing how easily each could be modified to accommodate our requirements? I'm sure all of the possible existing 'solutions' have people developing add-ons, I'm particularly aware of this for Zope. Everything in the software world moves very quickly, and for this reason I think that finding our how much free support is available for different 'solutions' would be one way of future-proofing the decision. I strongly suggest use of Open Source 'solutions', and particularly stuff from the Apache Foundation.