Community Site Concept Wiki

This wiki corresponds to this discussion on website development. Minor changes can be made without need for discussion. If you want to make a major change, go ahead, but please consider either explaining your logic for the change in the text or in a post the the discussion linked above.

Jonathan, Arthur - if you think this is a silly way/place to have this discussion, please change this. I think it could be useful to have this be transparent though, as I would like to get input from some other folks. If you think this is fine, please ok it here, and after you´ve both ok´d, delete this paragraph. -Dave

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Summary:
This is a discussion of a proposed user-experience for the Global Lives Community (working site title). This covers the two key feature sets of the site:

1) creating an intelligent, oral-history style profile of each site user and interacting with other user profiles
2) interacting with Global Lives video content in three areas, Create, Expand, and Experience (or simply translated: shoot, edit, watch)

While other features will be included (give us money), they are secondary to these primary user experiences. I've also got a notional site layout that works around these ideas.

1) "Global Life" profiles (working title).

The need: Social network is dime-a-dozen, but most social networks are self-promoting (who among us posts an unflattering photo?) and a touch commercial (MySpace defines your cultural tastes as a catalog of consumable products: movies, TV shows, bands...). Given how much noise there is on social networks, there's a weird lack of real introspection. How often are people sharing their hopes and dreams, their fears, their triumphs, their real life stories? What would real anthropology of the Internet world look like?

Concept study: Post Secret. When a artist asked people to write their secrets on a post card and mail it anonymously, the answers were frank and touching and oddly accessible. Anonymous disconnection is dehumanizing, but anonymous connection can be different. If you open a space to let people examine their lives, the results may be interesting.

The basic user experience:
Users are challenged to create their own anthropology by creating a 'life' online. They complete sets of interview questions that walk through their life experiences. The result is tied only to a first name -- this is not the same as a facebook profile, as it will not be linked to the user account publicly. They can have a 'public profile' that is publicly tied to their username, site mail etc, but it will be distinct from a 'global life' profile which will be added to over time as users complete interviews.

Sample Interview: Education.
Almost everyone gets some education in their lives, which makes it a nice point of commonality. The questions are made to evoke simple, compact stories. They start positive and light, and get a little more probing. The interview sets will be short and modular, allowing them to be developed over time with input from site users.

Really quick example questions (these are just to give you an idea):
  • "How much education did you receive? Are you still in school now?"
  • "What was you favorite memory from your time in school?"
  • "What subjects were your favorite? Why?"
  • "Tell us about your best teacher."
  • "Did you get to study the things you wanted to? If not, why not?"
  • "Is there anything you wished you knew when you were a student?"
Site Features:
  • Users complete a series of interviews that ask leading questions.
  • Everyone is a contributor. There are no 'lurkers' who only read content. The first user experience is completion of an interview.
  • Users unlock site content in stages by contributing to that content. If you want to read about someone's parents, you have to tell the world about yours.
  • The site presents lives rotating 'randomly' but filters quietly to create a real-world demographic balance. Regardless of actual site statistics, half the 'global lives' displayed will be women, half of them will be in Asia, most of them will be poor, etc. This means that underrepresented profiles will be used again and again, while us too-common first worlders will be used rarely. This will create a social network experience that looks like the world, not like the rest of the internet.
  • Creating and collecting profiles becomes a program area -- users in rural Tanzania who want to contribute to Global Lives can do so by sitting their neighbors, grandmothers etc down in front of a terminal and complete the interviews to tell their story.
  • Text based and low-bandwidth will help get us into Tanzania.
  • Moderation queues knock out spam for new accounts, once account is approved, moderation of additional content is less important since the user is validated.
  • The Global Life profiles create content, which we'll let the users explore (once it's unlocked) it different ways -- this needs some concept development still.
Concept study: Holocaust Museum Guides. Visitors to the national holocaust museum are assigned a profile of a real person affected by the holocaust, which they experience via kiosks through the museum. As they travel through the exhibit, the kiosks reveal more of the person's life story, with the ending uncertain until the completion of the tour. Each museum visitor interacts with a different story, increasing their identification with and personalization of that story. Their triumphs and (usually) tragedies become our own.

Site guides:

As users contribute to their profile, they are able to see the answers as typed by another person, as assigned by the site. This real (but anonymous) person becomes your companion as you navigate the site.

Features:
  • That 'guide' sticks to the user for a 24 hour period, increasing depth. As users answer modules, they'll accumulate several guides.
  • Each time a person answers a module, the guide shares their answers as the user shares theirs, creating a pseudo-dialog. Type an answer, get an answer. Side by side columns, etc.
  • The user is asked to add their own messages to people they guide, through scripted boxes: type a greeting here, etc.
  • Guide content can be moderated by volunteers who approve each set of replies before it gets put in the actual 'guide' rotation.
  • Finally, users can send a thank you site mail to their guide. This will post to a message board viewable to the user.
  • Users can track how many people they have 'guided' on the site (the guides are rotated to match real world demographics as discussed above).


2) Video content

The Video Content will be organized into three experience areas: Create, Expand and Experience (these names may be too opaque). These will hold the features that are already discussed:

Create:
  • propose a shoot
  • discuss upcoming shoots
  • volunteer on a shoot
  • etc.
Expand:
  • Add subtitles
  • Browser based video editor can clip long footage into highlight reels (obviously easier said than done)
  • Time-stamped comments, ala pop-up video let users add narrative layers alongside the video content.
  • Write a commentary on a shoot (encourage this to be more like a critical blog than a Youtube style "LOL DOOD!!!!1!!" thread). One way to do this is to treat it more like an 'article submission' than a 'comment.'
  • Etc.
Experience:
  • Map of GLP subjects around the world
  • Watch raw video.
  • Watch user-generated highlight reels.
  • Etc.
This frame should allow the video features to be organized so that users can explore more easily than if they were in a big list. If a feature doesn't fit in this frame, it may not be important to the site. "Exception" features will be a 'support us' page, lightweight "my account" user profile page (separate from the Global Life profiles), sitemail, and the forum.

3) Site layout concepts

See layout attached, although this was drawn before the "Global Life" create-your-profile idea took off, so that's not emphasized here -- I think it should be.

A few points of style that I think would be good to lock down early:

++ Community Site is separate from Organization site
  • "community" nameplate is in upper left always, links to community home.
  • "global lives" logo is in upper RIGHT always, links to existing business card site.
++ Get people into video early. One-click-to-play from entry page.

++ Global Life profile pages are much less bandwidth intensive, and that GUI should be stripped as clean as we can get to save bandwidth.

++ a "Latest News" ticker up high lets David keep the channel fresh and encourage forum participation (news headlines click through to a forum topic).

++ If it's not mission critical, get rid of it. Simple, clean, etc.