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Opinion poll: Groups/subgroups/homes on the site

mbieweng
Posts: 371
 Joined: 2006-10-31
 Dad Points: 1093

Would anyone be interested in being able to have a "subsite" for their dad's group here? Here's (roughly) how this would work:

Your group (a local dad's group, the convention planning guys, or pretty much any other "subgroup" that wanted to self organize, for example) would get a home page within the site, where you could post announcements/articles/information, maintain a calendar, and similar things. You'd also get a discussion board specific to your group, which would possibly also be accessible/readable as an email list. Your group would have one or more administrators who would have control over who joins the groups' site and whether their information is open access. This would all be a point-and-click no-techie-necessary type of thing.

This isn't much different from something like Yahoo groups, but it would be integrated into the site here. So, you have one place to check on all-things-at-home-dad. The benefit to the group is that it gets better visibility by being part of site here, as compared to being an buried among thousands of Yahoo groups.

Please let me know your thoughts. Just looking for a little feedback before I spend the effort on this....

Thanks,

Mike


‹ What's driving all the traffic? Fixing the recent spam ›

Submitted by mbieweng on Tue, 06/05/2007 - 5:42pm.

ticktock
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Posts: 751
 Joined: 2006-11-06
 Dad Points: 1301
Me likey!!!

Hell yes! Thank you!


Tue, 06/05/2007 - 10:47pm

MileHiDad
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Posts: 594
 Joined: 2006-11-06
 Dad Points: 1148
Right On

What do they say? Value added?
I think this would be a super idea for the groups of dads.
One-step towards national accreditation!
I would post a yea vote.


Tue, 06/05/2007 - 11:05pm

Bruce_GB_SAHD
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Posts: 66
 Joined: 2006-11-12
 Dad Points: 194
Starting new local groups on athomedad.org

I think visability is a problem for most new local AHD groups. It is easy to get a Yahoo group going, but the default web page it creates is sorely lacking and really is just a closed front door to the calendar and message base. Long and hard-to-remember web site addresses are a pain to publish correctly and hard to share or search for. If they could just publish athomedad.org/ozdads or athomedad.org/WIDads or something like that would be useful. Our own NE-WI-Dads group has a web page, but we use one shared password to get to the protected part of our site. Some dads would also need to upload HTML pages too.

As far as totally replacing the Yahoo Groups, I think many people will still be stuck in the email world for a very, very long time. All most of the my dads can do is read their email, they don't filter it, they don't have to remember a separate password and don't have to do anything but check the email. Not too many of the people in my group ever logging to the Yahoo Groups site to look at the web pages or to look at the other things. Automatic reminders that push out email before event are a great asset to our group. I think the dads in my group barely have enough time to read the email, let alone login to a seperate web page and look around for what's up. That is not true for me, but I am a techie and have some extra time because my kids are getting
older. The reminders from athomedad.org are useful, but not a complete replacement.

Most of our dads are still in the RFC 822 email world and not up to RSS and blogging. I guess it is the whole push/pull content debate again.


Wed, 06/06/2007 - 9:39am

mbieweng
Posts: 371
 Joined: 2006-10-31
 Dad Points: 1093
Glad to see some interest

Glad to see there's some interest. If I put this together, does anyone want to be the guinea pig/beta tester/person to try it out? Let me know...

Thanks


Wed, 06/06/2007 - 2:24pm

ticktock
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Posts: 751
 Joined: 2006-11-06
 Dad Points: 1301
I'll try it out

It's good timing too because Randy and I are starting up a parents/dads group in Cincy, and the newspaper here is scheduled to interview us for Father's Day. I'd rather have them reference this site rather than meetup.com. The benefit of a sub-forum is that we could utilize both resources and maximize our exposure.

I actually miss the left column links to new posts. I know I argued against them a few months back, but that was before the site looked so spiffy. Can you bring them back or are you making room for the new sub-forum links?


Thu, 06/07/2007 - 6:36am

mbieweng
Posts: 371
 Joined: 2006-10-31
 Dad Points: 1093
Making room

Yes, I'm making room for some new things. The idea is that the new "what's new" column on the right should give you a way to keep up to date on everything. It has all of the new content, including forum posts and anything that has a new comment.

Login and skim the "what's new" and you should be able to keep up with any new posts. What I was trying to do was to consolidate and streamline the "new content", "new comments" and "new forum" sections that were scattered everywhere and.

I'm still experimenting with it a bit and I'm not entirely content with things as-is, so if you have ideas, let me know.

As for the subgroups, I can't promise that I'll have it done by father's day, but I'll see what I can do.


Thu, 06/07/2007 - 10:37am

trophyhusband
Posts: 178
 Joined: 2006-11-27
 Dad Points: 335
Great idea, email list functionality a must

Mike: great idea. I think it would really serve the national AHD community well to have a central location that includes support for individual local groups. I'll bring it up with the other KCDAD organizers...we might be willing to switch from yahoo (as long as there is an old-fashioned yahoo-group like email list functionality...our key tool). This could give you some real world experience with a medium sized group. If nothing else, I'm sure we'd be willing to set ourselves up on your system as a "live-dummy" trial run to see it work at medium sized scale...

- Andy

____________________________________
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/kcdad/


Thu, 06/07/2007 - 9:05pm

smokeymountaindan
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Posts: 17
 Joined: 2007-01-15
 Dad Points: 65
Sub-Groups, URLs, "local chapters," etc.

Hello. Basically, it sounds like we're considering all the functionality of yahoo/google groups, which I think is fantastic. If Cobb County Dads were to have a sub-domain, that would be awesome! Two challenges I see are (a) the fact that so many groups (CCD included) already have their own forum via yahoo/google, and/or website with loads and loads of content. Buy-in might be a struggle. And (b) IT management - somebody is going to have to oversee everything, and make sure we have the server space to host everything. And that can get costly unless we have the in-kind resources that I doubt we have.

Perhaps we might consider baby-steps first; take a more migratory approach. For instance, we might start by getting all the dads groups to provide athomedad.org with their information (contact persons, website, yahoo, etc.) and creating an interactive online directory. Case-in-point: www.mochamoms.org.

After that's up and running smoothly, and there's evident awareness that it exists, then begin working with key stakeholders from the past that have loosly done this on some level to purge all the "old stuff" (eg, slowlane, etc). If you "google" stay at home dad - the first things you get are (a) Slowlane, (b) RebelDad, and (c) Wikipedia. After that, there's a bunch of garbage (sorry) out there that is old, irrelevent, or completely unrelated. We need ATHOMEDAD.ORG/COM to be the first things in the results. We need some clear presence on the net and in the media, which I think we could attract through some creativity and PSAs. The next step might be determining the feasbility of maintaining these subdomains on the athomedad.org site/servers. As I stated earlier, that can get costly.

As an aside... I've long sensed we need to move in this direction (both website, and nationally as a body). I think it's long overdue that we have a National Non-Profit status, and that all these S/W-AHD groups become "local chapters." Moving towards this level of technological functionality would be a huge step in that direction.

Cheers.


Fri, 06/08/2007 - 2:51pm

mbieweng
Posts: 371
 Joined: 2006-10-31
 Dad Points: 1093
Ok, go try it

The basics pieces are being put into place. Can you guys give it some quick testing? Click on "start a new group" to start a new test group or "group directory" to join the existing "test group". These are in the left-side menu.

Please experiment and test. For now, this is work in progress and is all subject to change. So, your posts may be deleted at any time as things evolve. So, don't get too serious or dependent on it quite yet.

Thanks,

Mike


Fri, 06/08/2007 - 6:44pm

ticktock
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Posts: 751
 Joined: 2006-11-06
 Dad Points: 1301
First Group

Cincinnati is the first group. YEAH!

We are using this calendar as a net to catch any area Dads who stray on this site. Hopefully, it will re-direct people to our meetup group.

I really like this feature. Good stuff!


Sat, 06/09/2007 - 5:50am

mbieweng
Posts: 371
 Joined: 2006-10-31
 Dad Points: 1093
Up and running

Things are working well enough to get started. For the official announcement and a few instructions, see the post here:

http://www.athomedad.org/node/396

Thanks everyone for the feedback.


Wed, 06/13/2007 - 12:12am

smokeymountaindan
smokeymountaindan's picture
Posts: 17
 Joined: 2007-01-15
 Dad Points: 65
MIKE = AWESOME

cheers.
- dan


Wed, 06/20/2007 - 11:30pm

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