December 29: New Community Building Tool in 2018: Wiki!
I am excited to announce an exciting new feature coming your way in early 2018. Yay!
How many of you have long dreamed of better storage spaces for important information about our community? Or a more collaborative tool to support and build on existing content and knowledge?
From our mock chat library and listener written topic guides to our threads on community best practices and norms, our community has created a large wealth of shared knowledge. Our collective brain is very smart and has figured a lot out!
Much of this shared knowledge lives in our forums, however a forum is intended to be community building tool, not a place to house and collaborate on communal knowledge and wisdom. In order to better support our efforts moving forward, we are excited to announce a new home for this collective wisdom! We are developing a 7 Cups wiki!
A wiki is a website that allows collaborative editing of its content and structure by its users. One of the most well known wikis is called https://www.wikipedia.org/. Check it out!
We are still in the beginning stages of figuring out how the wiki will be structured, who will have editing abilities and how we will quality control the content. Each sub-community will have the ability to manage its own wiki section, along with project groups and teams. Like all new initiatives, we will need your help, feedback and support in learning how to best integrate this new tool into our community.
We anticipate 2 phases to the release of the new wiki tool:
1. Migration phase - moving lots of existing content over to the wiki
2. Building on the wiki content and encourage the creation of new wiki content
-----> If you would like to be part of this early migration team, please sign up here. We will provide details in the upcoming weeks.
Thank you! Please share any quesitons or comments here!
This is so exciting!! I signed up immediately. Soon we'll be able to compactly and conveniently store information all in one spot! O:
This will be so useful! Finding all the FAQs and useful links in the forum can be difficult at times.
@Laura
count me in also!!!! ❤️ Love this idea! I also signed up to help!
@Laura woww, it sounds so awesome and useful! Sometimes it's hard for us to find the information in the forums so it would be helpful for both, our current users and those who are only joining! Count me in 
@Laura this is wonderful. I hope that someone will consider saving and organizing some of the best of the collective knowledge that the community needs to grow in the initial offering. Rather than just offer everyone tools offer a plan and framework based on the wisdom of many who have contributed to 7cups.
The problem now is finding the wisdom. Some people know some pieces. We need a place that this wisdom can be easily searched for and found so a new search engine for the wiki is needed.
@Laura Will this be Listener-specific/ Listener-accessible only?
@ladylazarus1971 I don't think so, as SCs and projects are mentioned. Would be good to know if the general public vs listener specific stuff will be separated or not.
I feel like many potential growing pains could be avoided with this project if @RarelyCharlie was given a contract to oversee this being made!
Ah, but I would cause different kinds of pain by asking awkward higher-level questions about the strategic goal this serves, how anyone could possibly imagine a wiki to be the right design, and what kind of development process might best achieve quality of outcomes 
@AffyAvo
@RarelyCharlie @Affyavo
To answer your question about the higher purpose, I think one thing is to make a searchable forum with hyperlinks and connections so the forums are not disjointed 1 off articles but truly a web of information. I know being able to search more productively would exponentially increase the value of the forums for me personally.
Maybe achieving that level of interconnectedness may take time, but it could be a step above just the forums as they are now.
I agree. A far more useful approach would be to improve our forums so that people can easily find the information that's already in them, with indexing and links between articles. These are pretty easy things to do, and there would be no particular need for an "early migration team".
And other improvements to the forums never seem to get done, like making the editor inline to get rid of the popup, and restoring support for things like tables and quotes, which were removed long ago for no obvious reason. With support for tables in the forum, people wouldn't have to go offsite to Google spreadsheets. (I'm writing this inline now, and I can use quotes and tables—I simply configure the existing editor differently.)
The existing forum editor can also support forms. We wouldn't have to go offsite to Google for forms either, if this feature was integrated into the forums. If we had forms onsite we could implement stored taglists so people wouldn't have to do them manually. If we had stored taglists we could use them to control access to sections of documents, so projects (like, ironically, the early migration team), wouldn't have to collaborate offsite by asking for e-mail addresses.
In general, I believe that a step-by-step approach to building capability with the collaboration of the community is always going to out-perform the kind of centrally planned project we've seen recently with Noni, and with the...um...animal thing—what's it called? menagerie? zodiac? But communities are scary, I suppose. You never quite know what you're going to end up with. That's why I made the remark, above, about different kinds of pain.
@soulsings
@RarelyCharlie Whaaaat? The capability is already there to use forms on site? And we're not?!
Well, the editor part of it is. And the way a form needs to be stored in the database is "form plus responses", which is pretty similar to a forum thread; "original post plus replies". Making it work nicely would take considerable effort, but it would be easier than starting from scratch.
One big plus would be that when you go to fill in a form, it would already know your screen name, and it could grab data from your profile automatically.
Another plus could be that when you submit a form it could check some criteria and perform some action automatically, for simple things like adding yourself to a taglist, say.
@AffyAvo
@RarelyCharlie - Intriguing to know this is a possibility! Tagging @Krinkthemellowunicorn in case he has thoughts to share on the potential for those features longer term.
I'm pretty sure Krink is aware of the potential. If I remember right it was Krink who first suggested to me the possibility of editing inline in the forums so as to be able to scroll up and down without being trapped in a popup. As a result of his suggestion I'm now writing this inline, and I can scroll up right now to quote you by copying and pasting:
Intriguing to know this is a possibility!
It's the next step that's sometimes appears to be missing, the step after being aware of the potential.
@Anomalia
@RarelyCharlie
Which sorcery is this? How did you at the quote tag? :O
@RarelyCharlie - that's the step of having only two full time developers and many priorities.
kept track of all these suggestions and thoughts and will bring to bear when i can.
better forums will be great, but wiki have evolved for a reason as a complement to bulletin boards and blogs that tend to be very time oriented.
@Laura I would love to be part of this team and have a degree in web design
This is awesome and I volunteered to be on the team. I have a web degree and used to be a web designer.
YAYYYY
