Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Accessibility of Community Records

[Tom Smyth (tom]

At Touchstone we recently did an information architecture review and
decided to move towards a two-tier approach:

   - Wiki (soon to be integrated into Gather <http://info.gather.coop/>)
   - Front line, first place to look for stuff
      - Briefer, more popular content, needs quick access and browseability
      - Collections of links to key content in Google Drive and elsewhere
   - Google Drive
   - Documents that need the collaborative editing features of GDocs
      - Spreadsheets, drawings, presentations, surveys, etc.
      - Everything else

IMO, Google Drive is indispensable as a tool for collaborative editing of
documents and spreadsheets. There really isn't anything that can compete
with it as far as I've seen.

But Google Drive is primarily organized as a hierarchy. This is good for
organization but not for easy discoverability. If you know where something
is, it's easy enough to get to it, but if you don't, it can be painful.
Search yields a lot of false negatives and there is no excerpting or other
contextual markers for easy disambiguation. There is no "front page" of
Google Drive. *It's not designed as a browsable resource. *

Sure, you can do hyperlinks inside Google Docs, but loading a Google Doc is
a cumbersome process. It takes about 5 seconds for a Doc to be completely
loaded, and clicking a hyperlink to another Doc opens it in a new window.
Anchor links (to the interior of a Doc) are possible, but a pain. Again,
not meant for browsing.

What we decided was needed is a quickly and easily accessible
*hyperlinked* resource
for holding frontline information, which can then link into Google Drive as
a secondary resource. That's where the wiki comes in. It will hold things
like:

   - Links to important stuff like
      - Google Drive root folder
      - Book of Agreements and a list of all consented agreements with links
      - Minutes
      - Budget
      - CH construction time lapse video
      - Facebook page
      - Web page
      - Floor plans
      - Reimbursement request form
      - CH guidelines
      - Recycling info
      - Decision making process — how things happen at TS
      - Maintenance checklist
      - Photo archive
      - Job assignments sheet
   - List of committees
      - Brief descriptions
      - Links to D&R
      - Links to stack
      - Links to minutes folder
      - Lists of members
   - List of email lists
      - Links to subscription pages
      - Instructions on how to get to archives
   - Email etiquette
   - Logo
   - Map
   - Meeting ground rules
   - Touchstone 101 (Guide for new members)

The wiki will also be searchable with excerpting (think regular Google
search) so finding what you need would be ideally easier than with Drive.

The biggest advantage of having a wiki on Gather is that people *already
know how to get there. *We're learning that this is worth its weight in
gold. People already know how to get to the site and how to authenticate.
They are comfortable getting to Gather on their phone without having to
install an app.

I hope these learnings might be helpful to other communities!


-- 
Tom Smyth

Worker-Owner, Sassafras Tech Collective
Specializing in innovative, usable tech for social change
sassafras.coop · @sassafrastech