Not sure if this is duplicating but I've added info on the rootwasher to the tools section of this site if people are interested in a link to a video and contacting the builder.
Mihaela's student David brought up that the "What is Farm Hack?" section being all the way at the bottom makes it hard to figure out what Farm Hack is when you land on it. My theory about landing pages is that you have no more than five seconds to 1) explain what the user can do on the site, 2) prove that they can be successful in doing those things, and 3) show why they would want to do that.
Hi everyone, I'm sitting on a bus on my way up to Burlington, VT and I've been trying to imagine the future when we start getting folks talking in the Tool forums and building documentation in the wikis. This coming weekend at the RISD event folks will be asking what these Tool Wikis and Tool Forums are for and I'm having a hard time imagining my explanation without a 15 slide PowerPoint presentation :P. So, I think it would make everyone's lives a lot easier if we simplified the categories for Tool Forum Topics.
We currently have:
Anyone reading this who has tried to understand how subscriptions work exactly on this site is most likely confused. The current subscription options are just very complicated because there are some many types of subscriptions! For example, you can be subscribed to comments on single thread, edits on a single thread, edits on all threads, edits on all wikis, edits on a specific wiki, comments in a forum, comments in the entire forum, and on and on and on.
Now that we have a working site. It's time to make sure we're all on the same page when it comes to rules before we launch. I'm proposing a set of rules that are VERY VERY relaxed. Even if you don't agree with me that Bazaar is better than Cathedral, I think this more relaxed model still holds water because we have so few users. In other words, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, in this case, don't confuse people with complicated rules.
I think we've all been struggling with the question of, "Where do we put this information?" If we have a new Tool we're building, then that's and easy answer, "The Tool section!" but if we are thinking about how to discuss Urban Agriculture vs. Urban Gardening (which has been taking place on an email thread) or we're kind of stumped. So, I'm going to propose a structure that I think both vastly simplifies the issues we're grappling with and also uses existing concepts/functionality that we're using on this new Farm Hack beta site.
Hello hackrarians, A flood of conversations at the MOSES conference has started the ball rolling for a Farm Hack event IN IOWA THIS SUMMER (2012). Location and exact date is TBD, but likely end of June. Respond to this thread to GET ON THE NOTIFICATION LIST!! New Belgium brewery and the National Young Farmers Coalition are on board as sponsors, with many more to come.
Hack on!
The Public Labs community is in the middle of dropping the Creative Commons Share-alike license in favor of the CERN Open Hardware License 1.1" This is something we should consider. Jeffrey Warren sums up the reasons why we should care on the Public Labs site:
I think the biggest flaw with the current layout of the Tool pages is that on any Tool page the discussion happens aaaaaall the way at the bottom. But, it's a layout challenge because how on earth are we can't just put it at the top and the Wiki at the bottom? That also doesn't make sense to me (but I might be convinced otherwise if anyone has any good ideas on why that should be done). One option might be a "Table of contents" block that has links to jump to "Tool profile", "Tool Wiki", and "Tool Forum" and perhaps the block follows the user as they scroll up and down on a tool page.
At a bare minimum, showing how many edit the wiki has had over the past 12 weeks and how many forum posts/comments there has been in the past 12 weeks for a Tool will give users a good idea of how healthy the community is around that tool. Usage stats are HUGE for giving folks credit and at the same time it provides information for an efficient allocation of user effort (depending on their motivations and intentions).