Design is what saves us from a total melt-down. What do we want this site to do?
The overiding purpose of the site is to provide a collaborative environment to create useful how-to knowledge. Breaking that down, we need tools for collaboration and tools for capturing and sharing knowledge. Background requirements are the same as those that any site needs: an attractive, easy-to-use design, with clear information that invites and keeps a community.
In the old days, a lot of Q&A of potential users would occur to make sure that we design exactly what the users want, the equivalent of laying out the sidewalks in advance. In these, *ahem*, modern times, we're going to plant grass. Then we'll wait to see where users walk, and then, instead of putting in the sidewalks, we're going to hand them a pile of bricks and tell them to build their own sidewalks. Then we give them concrete, and flagstones, too.
If that metaphor confused you, here's what I mean. As long as we give our users tools that are easy to use for collaborating and for building knowledge structures, and possibly some help with using the tools, they should be able to build what they need organically. As long as they don't say, "Who wants to walk there anyway?" You have to give them enough value to stay and build the sidewalks, and the stairs, and the walls, and the ... you get the idea.
What tools are we talking about? Going back to the list we used to select tikiwiki, they're the following:
and Tikiwiki has some others that we'll explore as we go along.
As you explore a new piece of software, it's a good idea to break it down to pieces of activities you can do piecewise, rather than try everything at once. One reason is because it makes it easier for you to learn, and it helps you isolate problems when things don't work the way you think they should. We'll tackle the task in the following way:
- User security model
- General attractiveness
- Wiki pages
- Forums
- Blogging
- Social networking
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