BreakOutOfYourCircle

Break Out of Your Circle

Online forums can be good places for stimulating social interaction, but they tend to become single issue silos. This project would introduce one new feature across a variety of forum packages. This is the introduction of a "What else are people talking about in my area" button. This feature would only be used by those installations of forum software which have a specifically local remit, such as this one.

This button would link to other forums on other topics which are geographically near by. It has an explicit purpose - to create bridging social capital.

Requirements:

• An open schema so that people can write or modify their own forum applications to use the system.

• A DNS-style server supplied by mySociety.org which would point a query to the appropriate local forums.

• A powerful web-based lobbying effort to get the major forum developers to use the feature.

Questions:

• Do forum makers have incentives to use this?

• Can there be any continuity of online identity between forums?

• What else might it do?

• What downsides might it have?

Workshop Comments:

• "Might not be much incentive to use it"

• "Lots of forums have no geographic basis at all"

• "Needs to work internationally"

• "Terrible idea" - Tom Coates

• "The main downside is that this limits participating forums to forums which are geographically relevant. It may be better for the system to work two ways. Create forums for certain societies or communities and link those to external sites with some type of directory index. This way, instead of having disparately located persons connecting to a local forum, you also have local persons connecting to disparate forums. This method would also enable any 'society' - whether geographical, demographical, or sociological - to participate, not just forums that are based on location. - Alex L"

• "This would work well if it was RSS-enabled, and/or accepted RSS feeds for certain sytems. Most blog/web journal applications are RSS capable."