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?
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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).
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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.
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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
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Provide better guidance on how to customize the forum to receive notifications about those categories or tags that you are most interested in, etc.
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Landing page - Tension between:
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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.
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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.
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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