Over the coming months we hope to engage designers in an effort to vastly improve the look and feel of E-Democracy.Org starting with our forums.
We have a small grant that we using to add new features to GroupServer, the open source platform we use for our Issues Forums and some of that budget will be used to implement a new look and feel that will then spread across our site. However, the more we engage our supporters and volunteers to articulate a design vision, create some story boards and actual art/design templates the more we can do with our limited resources (like make it easy to embed YouTube videos in GroupServer!).
To this end, we propose a design sprint (in-person and virtual) sometime in the next few months to see what kind of talent we can bring to bear. Indicate you interest, RSVP via our wiki and drop us an e-mail: team@e-democracy.org
http://pages.e-democracy.org/design_sprint
We won’t consider a meeting until at least five people agree to get involved.
To assist, or perhaps confuse 🙂 the process, I’ve created two video screencasts that share some of my hopes and dreams for the new site. One of my main goals is to ensure that our forums remain competitive in the “minds eye” with citizen media and blog sites in terms of first impressions without losing the barebone usability that people really need. The screencasts are available from:
http://pages.e-democracy.org/design_sprint
As a “virtual” participant, you can feel free to see what you can whip up anytime or ask us questions now to guide your contribution.
Feel free to leave comments on the E-Democracy.Org blog about the site redesign.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org