[Paul Cereghino]

hi paul

[Paul Cereghino]

Could we move this as a reply to the “Updates on formation of a guild” Discussion?

[Paul Cereghino]

I’ve been digging in trying to make sense of the categorization pattern. I think I am slowly understanding the relationship between forums, groups, sub-groups, and group types. Also been researching various plug-ins and tools for creating custom group content, either to modify the existing “group pages”, or to construct new “group dashboards” using WP pages and displaying group elements (discussions, feeds, etc). It seems like short codes are pretty lacking in buddy press.

I am now wrestling with trying to make sense of a “founding metaphor”. Cyberspace is disorienting. The possibilities are endless and multidimensional. I think it helps to have some kind of terrestrial metaphor to help make the flow of the site feel human and legible. I am thinking of this website as “an inn at the crossroads”. I’ve played with that narrative in the past, and it sticks for me. The core group are the innkeepers. However, it’s a magical inn that always add another hallway, or another room, or a new facility. It’s very Harry Potter. The problem is is the inn needs to be organized so it’s easy to find your way around. This has to do with clear entrances, and good signage and where the identity ad purpose of each room is legible and helps you know where you are. How do you know if you are in a room, or a private room, or a restaurant or a hallway, or in the basement?

I want to create a map of the inn.

However, because we are using BuddyPress as our platform, all we really have is this single group layout. Most of the rooms are the same. The group-subgroup relationship seems to barely register in the visual cues (subgroups are buried, the breadcrumbs are partial). The group type classification also provides limited control. Therefore, you are in a large complex building where every room looks almost the same. You can have pages, but they don’t have good buddy press content on them (such as customizable feeds of activity and discussions and subgroups) And you can have Buddy press group, but every group looks and feels the same and it’s hard to see the relationships among all the groups.

I think the initial impulse was to use the group-subgroup approach to create coherence, except that coherence is not visible enough to provide all of the signage and differentiation of the rooms.

This is the problem I think I am experiencing.

I just wanted to try and name this and see if it resonates, and I’ll keep looking for ways to organize custom group materials on pages in order to try to create a new room type that helps organize all the rooms.

[Paul Cereghino]

ooooo!!! It just came to me. Without getting into CSS (some other opportuities there…) the strongest visual control we have over each room is in the hue, tone, texture, and content of the images… the banners tell us what part of the inn we are located… oh… i am in the red wing…

Setting up a standard pattern to the banners, and then having those colors and symbols repeated on maps located throughout the inn… if you are in a green room you know you are talking about a place, lighter green means larger scale, darker green means smaller scale… (just for concept).

Group photo and group banner gives us a huge tool for altering the décor in the inn so we know where we are…

[Paul Cereghino]

Here’s the latest version of the map…. I think I am done for now until I get my GIS back up and running…. but here is a stop gap. You can lump and split as you please, but this is a stab at thinking about clusters of places. Working on an essay about bioregional places.

An example of this reframing… the Portland is the central feature of the Willamette confluence which is in the lower Columbia. At Portland, the Willamette is tidally influenced, and expresses the oceanic pulsing of the Columbia River. Portland as a city is just a dead patch of industrial land, that cannot possibly produce enough food to support it populations. Portland is also just a legal artifice, with the sprawling Beaverton, Hillsdale, Gresham, Vancouver, etc… a industrialized landscape at the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers only defined by arbitrary jurisdictional boundaries.

However, Portland is legible to modern industrial humans, who think that Portland is better than Gresham because it has more “culture” and so it is also a hotspot of people who say they want to think bioregionally. But to make the thing called Portland into a viable bioregion requires some careful consideration of the surrounding farmland, rapidly shrinking. The valleys of the Sandy, Clackamas, Tualatin all converge. My ancestors were Italian war refugees that fed Portland it vegetables grown on Columbia River Silt.

It is quite a bit upstream before you are in what I would call the Willamette Valley… near Salem, Albany, Corvallis…. where the Santiam enters, and farther still to the Upper Valley where the forks converge around Eugene.

[Paul Cereghino]

Update… starting to show ease of connection among places.

[Paul Cereghino]

Reorder the buddyboss menu so that discussion tab is #2 right after feed within a given forum.. Being able to look over the discussions is the most important thing… perhaps even have the discussion tab as the landing page, and show discussions in order of most recent reply. You can use your personal feed to track feed if desired.

[Paul Cereghino]

Have buddy boss sidebar default to where the text is showing (if possible). The icons are too cryptic for startup.

[Paul Cereghino]

Here’s some sketches… I must really be procrastinating other stuff to find time to do this.

This is suggesting three levels of organization, by city state (by polygon), by region (color coded) and by landscape with orange lines. @juliewolf @cascadiabrandon

I think that city state blobs could be further subdivided… for example nooksack AKA Whatcom could be divided into the forks, the flats, and chuckanut mountain in a lightly populated hill-country between Skagit and Nookack. The relevance of the border, and Lummi Sovereign Lands are also important to consider.

Similarly, Fidalgo could be considered the seaport of the Skagit, a border settlement between San Juan and Skagit.
By contrast it makes sense to divide the megapolis roughly in three… With the North being areas closely associated with the North and the Snohomish Basin, Central being associated with the Duwamish-Green-Cedar, South Seattle, Renton, etc… , and Southern Megapolis being most Tacoma, Puyallup.

I would question giving a City an identity as a bioregional place, because through a bioregional frame a city is an unsustainable ecological parasite.
Does our site shake up our understandings of place, or do we represent more legible dominant narratives that cities are viable places?

[Paul Cereghino]

Vocabulary is confusing to me… “topic” vs “guild” vs “group” vs “forum” (and I know what I am looking at.

Make it much simpler.

[Paul Cereghino]

Now that I am logged in I want to fluidly move among forums. Have the main menu change based on user status. Ad a single menu item with nested links to all forums and sub-forums? Alt: have the topic links change from link to page and instead link to forum. Have link back to page in each forum sidebar.

[Paul Cereghino]

This is a great query, perhaps Jon could on-board here, and describe what specific outcomes would create value for his endeavors (info-share).

One simple strategy would be to center the participants and an understanding of their needs over either OneWorld or RegenCascadia.

Naming can be useful. I wonder if this is a “Bioregional Education Symposium” and we could have an invitational question, like “what forms of education are necessary for us to regenerate the bioregion?” As part of defining this broad amoeba of BioRegEd??

A “symposium” has a long historical, and current professional development vibe. But using open space becomes submersed as the method and more the hook then the bait, a surprise, rather than the center of the event name. “Open Space“ also has meaning in the “planning“ professional world as any land that is not dominated by human development which could be confusing :-). This we are playing de-centralizing games and reclaiming symposium, while maximizing legibility.

[Paul Cereghino]

Great Quinn! This is a good target then for getting the asset mapping toolkit up and running. Does Clare in Eugene have a login?!

[Paul Cereghino]

It might be that every buddyboss group has a manually assigned custom sidebar that is the “@@ guild sidebar” that has a link to the @@ guild home pages. Maybe such a guild sidebar could be used for guild posts etc?? Some standard feature that ties things together. However, when on a phone, even with good responsive themes, complex pages get hard to navigate… everything is just stacked. On a phone your salvation is the menu… so having good menu access to the stuff you want is key.

[Paul Cereghino]

I was able to edit the discussion, and change the forum easily. That was some nice fluidity.