Tag Archives for wordpress

Participation & Community Interactivity

Recent Comments

Why are people participating?

  • This is a “community of interest” — like a class, a set of organizers has pre-existing buy-in to the project.

Barriers to entry: know-how [can be solved pedagogically] and willingness to participate [community status can be leveraged]

  • How-to and friendly reminders shared with team regularly
  • Participation of others increases willingness for participation of the reluctant

Interactivity as part of the process

  • Making many people participate in blogging by asking each committee to blog once a month
  • Some people love it, and were in there commenting imediately, other people had to be put on a schedule to post on the blog

 

Accessibility: Process and Outcomes

How was this development accessible?

Pushback on designer/web-creator’s role as a corrective to gatekeeping of former web developer and as a site of power for the input of individuals and committees:

  • Admin Logins shared with many [some security measures in place]
  • Author/user logins shared with all – ability to post to wp blog universal
  • Insistence that committees create their own content for web pages via shared google docs means that many people can input into the content and easily add and edit to it — more voices in the process of developing.

Why is building in wordpress accessible for this project? Because so many people are able to use WP and feel comfortable in it already or quickly after beginning to use it:

  • WP is accessible to many people at various states of comfort with technology due to its WYSIWYG interface, semi-obvious taxonomies, and [relative] build-out simplicity.

 

Agility in Site Development

THEORY: When design is agile, we’ve produced “less than” and not taken too many ideas into the mix, stayed within or below scope, waited for users to respond to product, not overdeveloped before getting user information.

For example, the previous website was a Joomla! build from former developer, heavy and not accessible by anyone who didn’t know the Joomla! CMS [not that the designer was willing to share a login, but anyway].

How was this development agile?

  1. The first web presence implementation was just one HTML page [no screenshot available] — just getting the Save The Date and conference theme “out there” [and collecting SEO on the URL]
  2. Second was Twenty10 WP theme [the default theme] with a header and a few pages — just getting the Call for Submissions forms up and public without any major design work
  3. Third implementation of WP Page Lines framework theme with more design, bells n whistles — adding in pages that were requested, more attractive design, and integrating social media presence.

Non-agile ideas that were researched and discarded: