Platform Development Hub

A space for the community to help design and build a great community platform.

Background

The DEAL Community Platform was created within the spirit of a healthy living system; that is, to experiment, learn, adapt and evolve. However, existing mechanisms to facilitate community co-creation have mostly been limited to submitting suggestions via the DEAL Contact Form, which does not allow broader community involvement and feedback loops.

What is the essence of this suggestion/idea?

 The development hub would be a space to offer feedback on the DEAL Community Platform, suggest ideas for future features and improvements, and see what changes are currently planned and roughly when they are scheduled to go live.

What are the potential benefits of this suggestion/idea?

 Help members engage in the co-development of the platform to ensure that it meets the community's needs.

Who would benefit from this suggestion/idea?

The hub would be open to all community members who are keen to help improve the DEAL Community Platform, with no technical knowledge or expertise required. (However, those who are interested in the technical side of things may find it of particular interest!)
5 comments
Andrea Collisson almost 3 years ago

Stop trying to perfect the platform before you start making it functional. Just get the community going so that people can share and discuss the real business of doughnut economics. I want to hear about what people are doing in different places with regards to implementing doughnut economics. I am not interested in building a web platform. I dont think you need anything fancy to get it started. You just need people talking and sharing and you can develop what's needed as its needed.

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Simona Rossi about 3 years ago

What will guarantee the LongTerm Survival of the Platform? A lot of platforms stay desert after a while. A lot of them luck of the human element. I propose to give to this platform a human character. This could be done by inserting key figures, as "focalizers" or "input-givers" or even "digital facilitators". They can have different functions such as:
- welcoming the groups into the DEAL environment;
- making sure they have basic access to proper tools and correct understanding of the platform and its basic features,
- check if they need more materials and info on the doughnut systemic orientations,
- they could also introduce them to the active Doughnut projects
- they will have also a supporting role for the groups in their difficult moments (conflicts, luck of members, etc...)
- they will possibly support the local groups in enhancing, strengthening, making more efficient, and solid their operations
- they will be able to propose connections among one or more groups working on similar issues and walking the same paths at the same time but in different areas
- they will be able to make suggestions about good and best practices that could inspire the groups acting on specific challenges
A lot more they could do as "facilitators", they could animate the platform and connect the different points on the map ;D.

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Karn Bianco about 3 years ago

That's a brilliant point and idea - thank you, Simona!

We have previously talked about working with 'Community Stewards' who could fulfil some of the functions you describe, as well as upholding our Code of Conduct and Principles of Practice on the platform.

It might open up a few related questions, though. For example, are these roles voluntary? Are they selected (elected?) by the DEAL Team, or the wider community? How could we train/support such individuals?

I'd like to take a look at working these ideas into an 'Area of Exploration' or a feature proposal in any case. Given that this touches on non-platform aspects of DEAL's work it might take a little longer than other ideas, though.

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Ollie Bream McIntosh about 3 years ago

Fantastic to have a space for this! I just took the Platform Design Toolkit course, and working with a few different next-system-oriented platforms at the moment, so would be delighted to contribute to this hub in any way :)

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Karn Bianco about 3 years ago

Thank you! That's great to hear - we'd certainly appreciate any comments or feedback on the existing feature proposals. And if you have any broader thoughts please do submit your own proposal or pop a comment in here anytime. 🙂

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