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 | Proposal for a self identifying community directory of civicrm users, and functionality to help promote CiviCRM at a national level, and to organise local meet ups |
local groups
groups.civicrm.org to help organise meetups. Start with beta.civicrm.org with OG (Kurund check on feasability)
Organic Groups can be used as a framework for this: the group node would have some basic content and perhaps RON view to show latest news but there should also be views of other content types such as meetups (standard group post), consultants (standard group post), discussions (wiki group post). Probably only admins can post meetups but any grp member can comment 
only admins can post/edit consultants, any grp member can start or edit discussions.
I would think anyone can become member, group owner can assign group admins to help out.
Directory
2 directories - Civi consultants and Civi community (inlcuding consultants) with world map using profiles and mapping
potential to link with pingback.
might be easier to do this initially with a content type as above
Fields
Global
- Location
- checkboxes of how I use CiviCRM (user, trainer, consultant)
- i want to be on map
- contact details (with email obscufucator)
- forum username
- irc handle
Gate keeping
Need to agree open transparent proceedure for allowing and (when necessary) removing people from the directory
- Need references to be in the consultant directory
- Community vetted / veto by core team
Work plan
v. simple beta using out of the box civi/drupal functionality.
See also
http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/CiviCRM+European-International+Teleconference
3 Comments
Hide/Show CommentsFeb 15, 2010
Winston
Hi, I'm from the NYC community. I very much like a groups (OG) based solution.
However, I don't really understand what is the point of making it into a consultant directory? As soon as you start trying to have the "community" decide who has a right to be listed as a consultant I think you are asking for trouble.
In the groups on groups.drupal.org for example there is a content type specified (or perhaps it's just a tag) to allow people to post job postings, but it is really up to the group admin to define how that gets listed on the page. So for example if you take a look at http://groups.drupal.org/new-york-city you'll see that the home page has a "jobs" section to collect/display those types of posts, but they are not given prominence on the page. First spots are given over to meetups and discussions.
If you do decide to have some sort of "consultant directory" baked in to your groups interface, please allow group admins to easily turn that off for their group.
Feb 16, 2010
Michael McAndrew
Hey Winston,
The idea of a consultants directory is to try and make it easier for end users to find people to work with. Trying to improve on what we have here: http://civicrm.org/professional
Agree with you that you are asking for trouble by allowing some members of the community to vet others and I think we are moving away from what is written under gatekeeping - i don't think you would offend anyone by removing that.
But it would be nice to be able to improve on what is in http://civicrm.org/professional, don't you think? I think at some point a single static page is going to become unweildy. Sorting buy locality i.e. integrating it with OG sounds sensible to me.
The jobs content type sounds interesting. I think we should investigate that further.
Of course, feel free to edit this page and make any improvements to it that you want.
Feb 17, 2010
Winston
Well, it doesn't sound like a bad thing. I'm probably not best placed to comment though. At the moment I neither sell nor consume professional services being a civi user who uses it for an organization I started and maintain myself.
So sure, done right it would be great.
I'm just very excited to see a group interface getting started. I suspect our local NYC group would be happy to be beta testers and I'd be happy volunteer as a beta test admin.
For me most critical features:
- Place to post or advertise meetups
- Place to start discussions of local relevance or interest
- Place to post wikis (or discussions) as a planning tool for local barcamp style events
- Place to put job postings/consulting offerings (not for me personally, but i'm sure the folks making their living with civi would say this is important)