Share your feedback regarding the Network’s community discussions forum!

[martaalmela]

Dear friends,

Today Thursday 19 March we hosted a community call to receive feedback regarding the Network’s community discussion forum, since we are looking into ways to optimize it.

Here we share the key takeaways from the call and also encourage those of you who couldn’t attend the call to share your thoughts and inputs . Please do so before Friday 27 March.

What is the Forum most useful for?

• Follow-up to an in-person activity to sustain momentum, continue nourishing an already established connection, share updates after the event, maintain group cohesion. Example: Legal Empowerment Leadership Course Cohort - What have participants being doing after the course, how are they sharing the knowledge from the course with their teams and the communities that they work with? (See LELC 2019 Summary Post).

• Sharing online and in-person events, activities, opportunities, webinars, courses, etc. Specifically for events, it helps raising awareness about what activities are happening in your country or region, how you can engage with them, notify that you will attend and then report back and share with those that couldn’t attend.

• Repository of knowledge: a place where people can refer to in order to find resources, knowledge, articles, information, experiences, etc.

How do we structure the community discussions in a way that refects the previous answers and makes it easier and more intuitive for members?

Some examples of other ways to structure and present a community discussions forum that could serve as inspiration…

Asana

View Asana community discussions forum here.

Similar interface as ours. Block of text at the top with guidelines, latest announcements, etc. Cleaner layout: categories & latest.

Le Peuplier

View Le Peuplier community discussions forum here.

Aesthetically nicer, with a banner image at the top. Then they use categories (such as Général) and subcategories (such as Présentez-vous).

Feverbee

View Feverbee community discussions forum here.

Aesthetically nicer, with a banner image at the top as well and the options to sign up, get help, help others. Two boxes with “Top challenges” and ·Recommended readings", which we assume are automatically populated. Then further down they have a popular topics sections (using tags, categories and subcategories) and a “Can you help these people?” section.

Optimizing the Global Legal Empowerment Network Community Discussions Forum

• Provide better guidance on how to customize the forum to receive notifications about those categories or tags that you are most interested in, etc.

• Landing page - Tension between:

  • Dividing the categories according to thematic justice issues (example: environmental justice, women’s rights, etc.) so that people can quickly identify those categories that they are interested in.

  • Dividing the categories according to use (events, funding opportunities, resources, reports & research, etc.) and using tags for the thematic issues. This way, a post can have multiple thematic issues (which is the case most of the time in our work, where we have multiple thematic areas working together).

    For example, a post about a conference on “Women’s land rights in India” would have 3 tags: “land rights”, “women’s rights”, “India”, and would be included in the events category. This would require some gardenind of the tagging system and we would have to figure out how to make sure that you can display the tags in the landing page, besides being able to filter them through the advance search function.

What do you wish that the forum could offer?

• That there was a mobile version or an app for the Global Legal Empowerment Network community discussions forum
• AI - that it would recommend topics or posts according to your searches on other platforms

As Network members and users of the community discussions forum we would love to hear your thoughts on this. Share your inputs with us before Friday 27 March.

Please comment below by clicking on reply with your thoughts on:

• Based on your experience, what is the forum most useful for?
• How would you optimize its interface based on the given examples and the above discussion
• What do you wish that the forum could do that we currently don’t offer?
• Any other feedback regarding the forum that you would like to share

Best,

Abby, Michael, Tobias, Marlon, Marta and the rest of the Global Legal Empowerment Network team

[martaalmela]

Hi @moderators, hope you are doing well. We would love to hear your ideas and inputs regarding the Network’s discussions forum and ways to optimize it . In particular, of those of you who couldn’t make it to the community call.

We would appreciate if you could take some minutes to go over the post and share your thoughts regarding the forum, in particular following the questions at the end of the post.

Please do so before Friday 27 March, since we want to move ahead with changes as soon as possible.

[johnmasuwa]

Hi moderators, am among those who didn’t make it for a call. The plaform is educative with exposure of experiences. I am the only man in our organization, founder/director. We are all HIV+ and a CBO, legally registered based in grassroots community. Through this platform we would like to reguest for support whether in-kind, financial, technical etc. to enhance capacity of our organization. John Masuwa

[martaalmela]

Hi @johnmasuwa, thanks for joining the conversation. We are glad to hear that you find the platform educative. Do you have any specific insights regarding any of the following questions?

• Based on your experience, what is the forum most useful for?
• How would you optimize its interface based on the given examples and the above discussion
• What do you wish that the forum could do that we currently don’t offer?

As for support, you can refer to the #opportunities category and the Recurring fundraising & grant opportunities for legal empowerment topic.

[johnmasuwa]

1. The forum is educative and very useful for us grassroots organizations and is a learning platform. Sharing experiences and practices of each other is co-learning. This occurs all of us in the forum believe we have something to share to each other that can increase the capacity of all involved in the forum. It is not a training program, but an exchange of ideas and experiences. This will make us grassroots organizatioms to effectively develop skills approaches and process for effecting change and create development in our communities.
2. The interaction under this forum will go a long way in building and enhancing effectively our programs and implementation of our projects. This means that, the interface of the forum has created a source of developing capacity of our organization, the interactive discussions articulates what is important to the organizations and the participants. For instance, one common value of participants in this forum is co-learning. That means participants will learn and share experiences and responsibility of teaching others. The experiences shared by participants are the building blocks of learning. 3. As a new participant to the forum, the forum has touched every corner of my wishes because it covered from grassroots level to higher levels, but i would like the forum to run concurrently.

[martaalmela]

Thanks for sharing your input regarding the community discussions forum @johnmasuwa!