View source for Michael's Summarized July 27th Notes

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There have been many excellent ideas shared over the last few weeks.   Below I've made a first attempt at capturing some of this dialogue into simple groupings below.  I concur with several of you who have suggested that we step back and look at the bigger picture and discuss a bit more, the types of activities we need to support, and also keeping in mind that we may not want to solve everything at once, but ensure that the core activities can be supported well through a flexible online environment that can grow iteratively.   New activities will emerge and so too will new technology that may in future be better able to support those activities.

So going back to the first part of  (a) " identify the types of activities which need to be supported by technology ...",   I suggest we try to spend  ** 1 more week (July 28th - until August 4th) ** defining the essential activities this community need supported by technology for it to continue to grow as a vibrant community?

Then building on that discussion, we can then move towards identifying the types of technology that could support those activities (August 5th - August 11th), leading to the final discussion on specific platforms (August 12th - August 18th) .   In this regard, we might find the diverse group that makes up TAG will each be able to find a voice (or two) in the discussion.

Looking at the 'what' from (a) above, I've roughly tried to group the ideas to date.  Comments are welcome and of course new and continuing thoughts.  (note sometimes comments are repeated where appropriate)


The Conversation - Exchange of ideas/comments/thoughts -
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-  "we need a communication mechanism for exchange of experiences. This is a big part of who we are, this back and forth, those discussions/exchanges." - Lucie Lamoureux
- "km4dev'ers need support for ad-hoc working groups, whose proceedings are not automatically distributed to the entire community, but which are accessible to those who wish to see them.  These sub-groups may have different working methods from the main community - in particular they will need to reach conclusions from their discussions." Mark Hammersley
- private spaces (at least for this type of discussion) that is not public and indexed by search engines so people feel more compelled to share their opinions - Atanu Garai
- Online Discussion-dgroups - Shikha Shrestha
- to network with fellow KM4Dev-ers (personal and organisational profile) - Atanu Garai
- to learn what km4dev-ers are doing - Atanu Garai
- Experience and feelings - blogs - Shikha Shrestha
- to be able to ask for help / solutions for ones own problems - Atanu Garai
- a key orientation is ongoing conversations, which to date have been supported by an email list (DGroups) - Nancy White
- Ongoing conversations (as already noted by Nancy) - Mark Hammersley

(Non-collaborative) Sharing content/expertise/documents/photos/audio/video/
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- "(portal) should have space for communities and teams" - Giora Hadar
- Content Sharing (- Events, Articles, Publications, Report, Photo, Audio, Visuals, etc- facebooks, youtube, podcast, calendar, delicious) - Shikha Shrestha
- to be able to contribute  - Atanu Garai
- Content: KM4D journal  - Mark Hammersley

(Collaborative) Content Development
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- Collaborative Content Development -wiki - Shikha Shrestha
- to be able to contribute  - Atanu Garai
- Content: wiki  - Mark Hammersley

Who's Who?  Profiles/Access to expertise/contact info
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- Membership Management- profile updates, mapping members - Shikha Shrestha
- to network with fellow KM4Dev-ers (personal and organisational profile) - Atanu Garai
- Access to expertise - Mark Hammersley
- Individual participation  - Mark Hammersley

To Learn from the kmdev community
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- education and career development in this area -  Atanu Garai
- learning from the knowledge base -  Atanu Garai

Meetings
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- Meetings (e.g. Portugal) - Mark Hammersley

Showcare technology?
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- km4dev to become a showcase for KM technologies, and for the talents of technology developers? (a question for TAG) Mark Hammersley

Other
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- Serving a context (International Development) - Mark Hammersley




BANKING FOR THE NEXT ROUND
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Suggested technologies to date: - (August 5th - August 11th)
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Karel Novotny
- Tagging functionality
- Visually display in a way of some sort of map) different networks we are connected to

Luca Servo
- Facebook style approach, where members can follow each others daily activities

Mark Hammersley
- Need to support a different modes of engagement by those who struggle with email connectivity through to those who prefer to engage via a website to those whose mobile phones are their preferred online device

Satish Vangal 

- Let our individual communities decide what works for them and give them the appropriate tools

Matthew Slater
- A group blog with RSS and email notification (for sub groups like TAG)

Lucie Lamoureux
- Email - in part because of low bandwidth considerations of km4dev southern partners, and "push" versus "pull" -
       - or not to use email - too many messages and its difficult to know which ones are important - Giora Hadar
       - worth doing a careful analysis of the benefite and costs of plain-text vs. nicely formatted messages - Satish Vangal

Giora Hadar
- "Open-source portal where members could subscribe to feeds that will give them what they want on - say weekly basis"
       - "members could fill out their profile and list their areas of expertise"
       - "Documents should be associated with a tag cloud, like del.icio.us, to enable search by author or by tag, it should have a wike - like MediaWiki"
       - "and a blog - like Wordpress"
       -  "it should have space for communities and teams"
       - To Do List - "along with the capability to create to dos with an associated timelines and who is the party assigned to each to do"

Shikha Shrestha - supported by Luca Servo
- Online Discussion-dgroups
- Collaborative Content Development -wiki
- Experience and feelings - blogs


Possible platforms suggested: (August 12th - August 18th)
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Ning (note - option to pay to have ads removed if need be)- Giora Hadar
Drupal CMS - Shikha Shrestha
Sakai? http://sakaiproject.org Mark Hurst - offer to setup a test site for comparison with other platforms such as Drupal
Joomla - Luca Servo