I’ve been having a bit of info overload, in part because I am trying to keep up with American politics. I want to document what is happening for me to reference later, but it is becoming harder and harder to figure out how to make it a discussion starter.
After some thinking I made the following changes to talkgroup:
- Changed the front page to show categories and recent posts, so new visitors can see what everything is about, not just the latest posts from me (I tend to spam in bulk).
- Created a new Politics category; I tried to hold off, but we just need a bucket to dump links and discussion in.
- Made Suffrage a sub-category of Politics; I still think we should have a dedicated space for discussing legislation and voting meta, separate from the current political climate. Indeed, with active campaigns to suppress voter rights, we only get to have Politics if we stay informed and act when needed.
- Created a new Digital Safety category; we’ve been posting some useful guides on here, but my own personal focus for 2017 is to create a lot of content and guides to protect as many folks as possible, and this can be a first step in meaningful discussion about security and privacy.
- Actively encouraging link-sharing; the latest release of Discourse, which this site runs, has a feature (video below, taking from the announcement post) where one can put a link in the title box and it pulls in some info and embeds the link at the beginning of the post. talkgroup is essentially a discussion based social network, and link-sharing is a cornerstone of web discussion, so we are gonna see how that pans out. I hope it leads to deep discussion and knowledge sharing.
My next steps are to setup more mailing list functionality, and put up some guides for using Discourse. I’d love to tap into the group features, and empower more collaboration from the folks around me. Let me know if there is something you’d like to see!