@pavel_richter, @nealbastek and I are excited to share with all of you our new community and network updates.
In short - We are going to dedicate the first quarter of 2016 to community and network reboot. We see the Open Knowledge Network as a place for exchanging visions and ideas. We see Open Knowledge International as a central body that creates some of these ideas, but more so as a place that helps make connections between people with similar ideas, and helps promote other ideas and connect people from different parts of the network.
So we decided to start with the basics: updating the network structure and procedures. For this, we are using a process that is known as a “community roadmap”. You can learn about it here.
As usual, we will keep you involved and consult with the community and the network regarding our new guidelines and work.
I think we should document the Community Roadmap, efforts and tools as much as possible for new local chapters, volunteers and advocates. Not a strict guidelines, but to show which opportunities might arise. I’m happy to help think about strategy / actions / goals / etc.
What we missed last year were new ways to setup offline and online community efforts. That’s why we created: GitHub - RealTeamSWAG/swagsite as a sort of Event-template for community gatherings. It can be used for conferences such as http://2016.openbelgium.be/ or hackathons like http://2016.appsforghent.be/. More development is coming up. And we hope it can service other communities to create an own webspace. Another things that is under development is a crowdsourcing tool, similar to a crowdfunding platform we’re creating for social and open innovation projects. Project owners can request money, but also volunteers, coaches or materials. It will also be open source and customisable to your own branding or theme.
Is there already a topic about community engagement tools? Or did I miss it?
In each case, http://www.mattermost.org/ seems like an interesting new comer to the open source community building tools: more user-friendly than IRC and you get to keep your own data.
For a wiki i increasingly think moving to github pages powered sites is a good idea but that is to tbd - we have done this for e.g. OpenSpending http://community.openspending.org/
