Present:

Gary, Joerg, Jon, Stepen, Jasmine, Sue, Tim

Apologies:

Jane T-J, Nick, Dom, Sally, Geoffrey

1. Introductions all around

2. How would we use the website/project?

• Stephen - information about events, businesses, transport and projects, especially in the villages
• Sue - events, films, busses, bringing people together to help each other when things get difficult
• Tim - events infor, chat room to organise spontaneous events, interesting discussions, quality of local food and when it is available.
• Jon - events, finding out what people want and involving them in it
• Joerg - what's on, personal page but personal info available only to friends
• Jaz - events, making good shops better known
• Gary - info about events, availability of local food,
  
• Stephen - discussion board, blogs on website

3 Notes on elements of the portal

Homepage

• More active content
• Lets get rid of the right column. That should be only used for context information about the object currently looked at (in other sections of the site.
• The currently present content (news, events) of the right column should be moved to the middle, along with more active content in an iht.com style. This could be:
  
  • news
  • events
  • new images
  • listings
  • pages
  • polls?
• Maybe the top of each of these sections could contain an image.
• The homepage could include an 'editors highlight'
• The big image in the middle is drawing to much attention. Maybe images could be put in the right column or left column or the top bar
• The right column could contain key entry points, e.g. links to:
• become a member
• how to create content
  
  There should be a 'welcome' in ebay style towards the top of the page, maybe also moving the login box to a more prominent position.

Members homes

• The navigation in this section on the left side should use member names instead of usernames.
• There should not be much default content, besides a couple of folders that guide content creation:
• news
• events
• images
• listings
• There should be an userimage, some formated description / text and then the content of the users home folder as the default display
• The members home (the house) should be where you get when you click somebodys name
  

Group homes

•  Basically similar to the members home, but no default content, e.g. no folders.  the thought was that we don't want and need to impose a structure on a group, but assume that the creator of a group knows what to do with it
  

Workflow

• There was the idea that only members should be able to see other members content. The idea was dismissed - as every person can create an account anyhow, the 'protection' is too small to justify are more complex workflow
• The workflow should be modified to have three states:
• for the homepage - things that are intended to appear on the homepage
• public - everybody can read the content, but it won't show on the homepage
• private - only the owner of the object can access it
• This means that we are removing the 'submit' - 'accept' - 'retract' cycle currently available.
• We agreed on having certain areas be monitored by members, that will act 'after the fact' of some unwanted content appearing by e.g. talking to the member putting up that content.

Discussion system

• The default discussion system seems to be suitable (jhb: maybe should be enabled on all content types)
• Having some form of instant messages or group chat would be desireable
• Some form of finding comments that have been made on the site, e.g. latest comments
  

Overall Design

• Most people liked the looks of the custom design better than the default design
• The glitches in the custom design are annoying
• It was more or less left to the technical team to decide what to do
• (jhb: lets switch to the default design for now)
• Jon offered limited help on the design work
  

4 Other ideas

•  It would be nice to have automated generation of pdfs that contain 'latest news, images, ....' and some static content about dissconnected. These pdfs could be printed and distributed to notice boards in the community.