Ryan Sholin did a review of Aardvark, Hunch, and Quora today on IdeaLab. I like his points at the bottom so much that I want to record them in perpetuity:
- From Aardvark, we learn the value of reaching people wherever they are, however they consume and communicate information. Push notification on my iPhone during my commute home? Sure, I consume information that way.
- From Hunch, we learn that if we hand a person a multiple choice quiz, we can record the results and let our algorithm learn something about them to bring to the table when they ask their next question.
- From Quora, we learn the value of frictionless real-time interfaces. Don’t assume your application has to follow patterns generated by its predecessors. You’re building next year’s tools, not last year’s.
All three together? Mmm… delicious.
After Daniel outlined the basic models that will be used in the profile pages for the Connection Engine I drew up some rough wireframes. The first is a basic user profile page for an individual. The aim is to mesh contact information and the challenges the individual is putting into the system.
The second is a profile view for a news organization. Similar to the user view this would bring together contact information as well as support history for the news organization as a whole.
Any feedback, critiques, or ideas are completely welcome.
As I mentioned yesterday, the first set of models I’m working on are for the People and Organization applications. I’m going to outline them here so that Andrew can put together basic wireframes for how the information will be structured on the view. We’re going for a basic profile view where the contact information is one part and the activity stream is the other part.
I’m adding the type of field the data is for the edit view. Users will be able to edit their own profiles and the organization profiles they are the administrator for. CoPress admins will be able to edit any profile and any organization profile.
People – Profile model extends the Django User model and includes:
- First name (text field)
- Last name (text field)
- Date created
- Position (text field)
- Organization (foreign key to an existing organization within the system)
- Phone (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Email (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- IM (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Websites (dropdown with multiple options and ability to add multiple phone numbers)
- Address/Location (multiple text fields)
- Photo (uploaded file
- Bio (multi-line text field)
Organization model includes:
- Name
- Date created
- Slug (unique)
- Summary (multi-line text field
- Websites (same as People profile
- Email (ditto)
- Phone (ditto)
- Address
- Photo
The organization view will also have a list of staff depending on which users in the system have the organization in their profile. The user’s position and photo in the staff view will be pulled from their personal profile. Lastly, every object in the system will have the ability to be tagged with various topics. Clicking on fields like Location and Position will produce a filter view where you can see all of the People or Organizations with that piece of metadata.
We’ve let our advisory board lapse somewhat and I think it’s wise to put that together again with the hope of actually getting their feedback on big milestones (most notably the re-relaunch of the hosting and support program).
I did a bit of research last week on what startups normally do with their advisory boards. Fortunately, OnStartups Answers has a few really valuable threads on this topic. Basically, there are two directions we can go. One is to recruit a board of advisers that is volunteer, not necessarily required to respond to queries, and that we talk to occasionally. Two is to recruit a board of advisers that we compensate in some form and have a more formal relationship with. After talking this through a bit, it makes more sense to go with the former with where we are currently. Albert made a good point that if we are depending on the advice and input of any one person heavily, it would probably just make more sense to hire them as a consultant.
I see the steps as:
- Email the people we want to have as our advisers and see if they’re interested
- Put together a Google Group or some sort of mailing list for conversations
- Encourage them to subscribe to this blog and send the bigger things we want input on to the list serv
Related, there’s a really good interview with Giacomo Guilizzoni, founder of Balsamiq, that a couple of threads pointed to:
We don’t have any formal agreement nor do we meet regularly. Mostly I email them whenever I have a question I know they’ll be able to the answer, to or we meet on Skype once in a while (we try to shoot for once a month but somehow haven’t been able to keep a regular schedule with anyone. Things get in the way.) We all got together for a big crab-dinner feast in San Francisco in May, something I hope to turn into a yearly tradition.
It’s pretty informal, but every time I have some sort of contact with one of my advisers, I learn something. Or they say something that gives me an idea, or gets me unstuck. That’s what talking to smart people will do. I always say that one could do a lot worse than trying to be excellent, because “excellence attracts excellence”, and when you’re in that circle, even once in a while, magic happens.
He’s got an example letter for when we want to put together an advisory board page. I’m also very interested in his approach to transparency on the company blog, and want to reopen the discussion on how transparency applies to us in the form of a blog post when I have the time to put it together.
So… I think we need to have stronger branding for the new hosting program when we roll it out in a couple of weeks. Internally, we’ve been calling the first two versions Hosting v1 and Managed Hosting, but I don’t think that CoPress Basic vs. CoPress Standard is much better. Basic and Standard don’t communicate the services very well. Unlike Basecamp, we need to have our names communicate the services, or at least be more distinct, because they aren’t necessarily different tiers of one product. They’re different tiers of multiple services tied together. Does that make sense? Any ideas?
Asked a couple of days ago. This is exactly the type of bridges we want to be making because we are hosting campus magazines too that probably have really valuable advice. One big question is how you make these bridges more intuitive; right now it requires one of us knowing the right person to connect the asker to and shooting them an email. Related to this, I think it might be wise to start thinking about a good taxonomy for Highrise. It will be a system we have to maintain but we can quickly find the right person by topic.
We now have at least one school transitioning to new web staff and it’s something that we’re going to run into frequently in the future. As part of our efforts to keep knowledge from vanishing into the ether we’ll need a process of getting the new staff up to speed.
While simply having the incoming staff members fill out a survey is certainly the easy way to get a sense of their abilities I have a couple ideas as to how to make it a more engaging and active process.
- Have the outgoing staff member write a blog post about their experience – This would cover what they learned, what they wished they had known going in, and perhaps get into the technical side of things as well. It’d provide a resource for not only that school’s incoming web staff but would be a model for others as well.
- Talk with new web staff – This would not even have to be an orientation to Wordpress. I’m thinking it could almost be a good idea to treat it like an interview that they would go through as part of working for the news organization. We’d just talk over what they know, their past experience and projects and then discuss what they hope to learn in the next semester/year.
Those are just two ideas that I have right now. Basically I’m looking to find a way to transition new staff so that the information remains somewhere that is public and searchable (i.e. more than just a survey submitted to us). Thoughts?
Who would you like to hear from on TWIC?? Please add on…
–Craig Kanalley (Breaking Tweets)
–Kim Sommers (EIC of the Whitman Pioneer)
–Michael Poppel (Breaking News Online)
–Alex Klein (Duke Chronicle)
–Adam Klawonn and Aleksandra Chojnacka (2009 Knight Foundation News Challenge Winners)
We are digging for new topics especially for this week’s show!
–HTML v. CMS
–Twitter/Breaking Tweets
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