Finesse wrote:Unfortunately most people only check the forums. So if we were to put it someplace else, it may not get alot of traffic.
I agree that this is a problem, and it is one of the primary reasons I'm hoping to move to the new system. The system you describe could work, but I'm thinking the goal you seek might be better achieved with a different tool.
At my last job we had a wiki (one of our executives had an idea we should "get with the times," but that's a different story). And they attempted to use it to "stimulate innovation" which basically meant they tried to use it as a forum. People would edit the main page to add their responses, and yeah it kinda sorta "worked," in the sense that it was possible to document a thread of conversation. But sometimes author information was omitted on the comments, and there was no ordering of which topics were most recent, so there was no way to see if there were responses that might need responding to. So it was basically unusable. Wrong tool for the job.
I think using the forum for resources probably wouldn't be as bad as that. But for example as the list of sticky resource topics expanded, the list of sticky topics would just grow and grow and the discussion would get pushed lower and lower, while the resources section stayed empty.
(I had written a comparison of blogs vs wikis vs forums here but I deleted it because it was mostly trying to steer the solution in a certain direction.)
I think the essential question is, what should be the division between the forum and resources? And how should they be linked to each other?
Right now blog articles are sometimes cross-posted into the forum and discussion ensues, which is fine, but I sometimes think it might make sense to have it organized differently. I don't come to the forum to read gurus' blogs. I come to the forum to see what
my friends in Dallas are thinking about and what ideas they have. If they read something and they have something to add, that's cool, I'm interested in that and there should be a place for that.
Here's a possible solution. For resources that are external (i.e. from external blog posts or articles), someone can cross-post the article into a basically static resource page and create a forum thread for discussion of that resource. The forum thread would include a link to the resource page and the resource page would have a link to the forum thread, "click here to discuss this article". Since the article is static, it could also be copied into the first post on the thread.
For resources that are internal (written by one of our members), the resource page would still have a parallel foum thread for discussion. The page would be editable by the author, perhaps in response to the discussion, or gaining insight over time.
For either type of resource, there would be other pages for convenient navigation. There could be a "Framing Resources" page, and a "AA Resources" page, and so forth. A particular article could be linked to from multiple navigation pages if it addresses multiple areas. There could also be sticky links from the forum to the resource navigation pages, but perhaps not to the individual resources themselves.
I guess I can't help but try to steer the solution in a certain direction. But really this is just a proposed organization.
[size=75]I'M OUT OF THE HOUSE AND I'VE GOT MY GOGGLES ON! ONWARD TO SEX LOCATION!