Submitted by Corey deVos on Mon, 04/30/2012 - 23:49
Hello fellow Lifers,
I wanted to take a brief moment to update you all about some of the new community features that will be coming online with the new website, and to invite some general creative feedback from you all. We are essentially trying to create community technology that will be much more dynamic and structurally useful for you all, and will hopefully allow for a much better signal-to-noise ratio than we are currently seeing on the existing site.
So, here's what will be happening:
- All of your blogs from recent years will be migrated over. However, there will no longer be a "blog" section on the site as we currently have it. Instead, all of your blogs can be accessed through each of your member profiles.
- As a replacement for blogs, we will be returning to a forum-based community model. We are trying to create better containers for your various discussions and explorations, as it is our belief that the wide-open, context-free nature of our current system does not adequately support in-depth conversation, and invites an awful lot of psycho-spiritual graffiti which can end up diminishing everyone's experience of the community.
We basically want to create a series of spaces where conversations can continue for years to come--as opposed to our current system, when discussions dry up almost immediately after the blog post is bumped from the front page. Furthermore, since we obviously have a lack of human resources to properly moderate the community, getting this overall LR structure right is extremely important. (Little known fact: Integral Life currently consists of four full-time employees and one part-time employee--and we are all very busy getting the new website busy, while also taking care of all our ongoing business--so we are more than a little spread thin these days…!)
- Most of these forums will be for premium members only, although there will be at least one forum available for non-members as well (probably two). I will offer more information on what kinds of forums we are creating below.
- In addition to forums, we are also allowing comments on all of our actual content pages (a la YouTube). This will help create more focused discussion around specific content pieces, rather than forcing all content-related discussions to exist in a separate area of the site.
- Only premium members can comment on premium content. However, all Integral Post content can be commented on by anyone.
Okay, back to forums: I currently have the following forums in mind (though this formulation is likely to change before launch):
GENERAL FORUMS:
- Welcome Wagon (FREE): A place to introduce yourself to the rest of the community, and to find basic information about Integral Life, the integral approach, and the larger integral community.
- Integral Living: How does the integral vision inform your personal, professional, and spiritual life?
- Practice Support: Struggling with your practice? Here you can find a community of practitioners from around the world who can help you with your ongoing growth and development….
- The Integral Movement: How can we support the emerging wave of integral consciousness as a force of beauty, goodness, and truth in the world? What is your own unique role in this Integral Movement?
- Theory Au Naturel: Explore the deeper questions and issues of Integral theory and practice….
- Nunc Fluens: "The Moving Present"--our current events forum. Discuss the major events of our time that are shaping the world around us….
- The Frothy Edge: Discuss how the Integral Vision is actively shaping our arts, culture, and entertainment….
- Interplay (FREE): Rap, spiel, and gab about EVERYTHING to your heart's content!
- Nugget Box: Ask questions and give us your feedback about IntegralLife.com, or any of our other products, offerings, and services….
In addition to these general forums, we are also thinking of eventually creating some more specifically topic-based forums. We may create a process by which these topic forums are created only when enough people request them. Here are some examples of possible topic forums:
- Integral Christianity
- Integral Parenting
- Integral Leadership
- etc.
So, some questions for you all: do you think these will more or less cover the depth and span of your community experience? Do these all feel like they would be useful to you? Are there any other community containers that you would like to see for the new website? Of course we don't want to create too many options right out of the gate, as providing too many forums might throw a wet blanket on any one of them achieving a critical mass of participation--in fact, I am sort of wondering if the nine I listed above might be too much. But at the same time, I want to make sure we cover as much as we can, and that our forum speaks to as many facets of this big, beautiful vision as possible.
So… let me know your thoughts!
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The new website is just around the corner. It's the culmination of several years of very hard work, and I really cannot wait until you see it. I continue to describe the new IntegralLife.com as "the most beautiful website I have ever seen"--and I totally believe it. Stay tuned my friends, things are about to get very exciting.
