Creating an Open Knowledge Community Directory

My two cents is that we need a multilingual feature for local groups and chapters for which English is not the first language.

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Thanks for flagging this! I’ve re-added the countries which mysteriously vanished. :confused:

Can you try updating your profile now?

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This topic is no longer a banner. It will no longer appear at the top of every page.

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A directory is a nice idea, although it will take some gardening to maintain it as up to date.

If the idea is to build off of the discuss.okfn.org profiles, it might be good to make sure that the process to get set up as a new forum user works well and gives a good starting point. I’ve just created this account and hit several issues, not to mention struggling to give info which would be useful for a directory entry.

Firstly, the ‘sign up’ form doesn’t consistently use asterisks to indicate required fields. As well as country, sector and city, which are required and marked as such, full name, username and password are also needed but not marked as such. It’s nice for this to be clear so people can get the for filled in quickly and get on the forum with minimal friction, or, if lots of info for a profile is really needed, to make it clear what’s essential.

The error mode when you haven’t completed all the compulsory fields is a little subtle too - just a faintly greyed out “create new account” button and no indication of what you’ve done wrong or not completed.

“Sector” gives 4 options which are pretty limiting, especially for a compulsory field. They assume everyone has a professional sector (which someone who is studying, or unemployed, or retired, may not have), and they also only allow one sector to be selected, so folks who cut across organisational types won’t be represented. (true example: I am currently working for a university, for a nonprofit, and for a for-profit organisation at present). I’d suggest if this is an important bit of info, that it’s possible to select ‘none’ or ‘prefer not to say’, and ideally to allow people to select multiple sectors. I imagine in the Open Knowledge area there will be lots of people who cut across organisations, paid and voluntary work, and so on, who may not fit comfortably into boxes.

(this is important for most profile fields if this becomes the directory system - allowing folks to select ‘none’ or several for fields is helpful, especially in areas like open knowledge where there’s a great deal of cross sector work.)

(also, github account creation doesn’t seem to work…)

Apologies for polluting this nice thread with bug report - but as there’s no ‘new topic’ button i couldn’t see how else to raise this.

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@danfowler I’ve successfully added Australia to my profile - thanks

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Thanks so much for the excellent feedback: :bug: reports are welcome! You’re right about the problems with highlighting which data is mandatory and which is optional. It’s a symptom of trying to work within Discourse’s feature set which doesn’t actually indicate which of its own fields are mandatory, but does for our custom fields. I’m sure there’s a workaround though as it’s pretty flexible.

Maybe we can change “Sector” to “Primary Sector” and add the additional options you suggested. Unfortunately, Discourse dropdown fields only support choosing one option. Then again, the Discourse feature set changes every week, so I expect more flexibility in the future.

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Can I ask if you know about http://directory.open-steps.org/ ? It is Open Source and does a lot of what is asked for in the thread and OK Network could maybe just improve on that code? It is already used a lot.

Means a lot less work and connecting with more “open” people.

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Hi @mattias,

We’re aware of the Open Steps directory and fully support the work there. While we realize we’re duplicating efforts a bit, we at Open Knowledge have decided that system isn’t the best solution for us.

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There is some discussion about this at okfn-discuss mailing list, we can dig something from there.

I’ve created a subcategory for Open Knowledge Brazil bellow the local groups category for discussions in Portuguese.

I did the same for Australia, as you must have noticed.

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Great to hear. Can I hear what the reasons are?

It seems to me that it would be most economically sustainable for OK Central to build upon that solution. As I experience it, the only downside with open-steps is the JavaScript that loads slowly and can be optimized along with the multiple remote sources that data loads from.

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I think it is fine for people to create profiles in both :smile:

From an Open Knowledge Australia perspective I like that this forum is OK branded and will clearly be able to represent the total network over time. The benefit this will have for OK Australia is we’ll be able to reference a location where community consultation surrounding specific subjects can be raised and some consensus developed. This transparency will support us in efforts to engage with Government, industry, other chapters and the general public over time.

Collaboration between OK Australia and some of these entities may even be formed under contracts which support initiatives that align with the principles of open knowledge. Gaining sponsorships or grants will be greatly assisted by a clear demonstration of network size and activity, which I think this forum has a lot of potential to provide.

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@mattias et al. We choose to use Discourse primarily because the profiles are tied directly to important network activities and the discussions happening here. We need a place too, that is clearly identifiable and branded as Open Knowledge as opposed to the broader open knowledge network. Also, we have fairly limited technical capacity to support, develop and maintain these sorts of systems and Discourse offers us decent range of functionality and can integrate well with WordPress and other tech platforms that we’re using without too much custom development.

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OK I did not understand that this new directory would be Discourse-specific. That sounds like ok reasons. Can you please encourage people to add themselves to http://www.open-steps.org/ directory as well on main website since it has a wider reach than this Discourse-forum? OK is even shown as a supporter there anyway. @Starl3n I really hope people do double posting!

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Great idea. We are also considering switching our list to Discourse. We should discuss this at our next general assembly @pzwsk.

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@samgta and to flag, local groups are very welcome - in fact encouraged - to use this forum instance if they wish.

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2 posts were split to a new topic: Duplicate usernames

2 posts were split to a new topic: Create Scotland Group

The banner still appears for me on every page and has no UI for dismissal.

I’ve visited this thread a few times over the years and each time can’t figure out what this is supposed to be about or how to contribute.

I see that the banner could be removed at https://discuss.okfn.org/admin/site_settings/category/uncategorized … I’d be glad to do that if nobody else does it first or objects. :slight_smile:

oh, please do that!

This banner is not relevant anymore.

Thanks!

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@Mor OK, done. I reset the “global notice”.

If a banner with dismissal is desired for something in the future, I think that can be obtained by pinning a topic (one of the topic admin actions) and choosing to make it a “banner topic”.