You don’t have to understand why we’ve structured the Forum in this way in order to use it. However, we’d like to open our thoughts about it so that you can confidently advocate for adjustments to the Forum, or perhaps designing your own virtual community spaces!
Summary
You’ll notice there’s no — for example, “More Neighbours Calgary” category, or “Transportation Advocacy” category. Instead, we have the more-neighbours-yyc and transit or walk-and-wheel tags!
Instead of categorizing different organizations or genres of activism into separate places, we’ve designed the forum to encourage collaboration and connection between folks with different interests, skills, and ideas.
The purpose of our structure is to create space for different kinds of conversation to thrive, that are appropriate for different kinds of users, at different confidence levels with posting.
It’s just like sustainable urban development, or abstracted further, the way a plant strategizes its branches.
We need a variety of different spaces, bringing in energy by encouraging various uses on the platform. However, too many branches separated too far away will make all of our spaces less likely to self-sustain the attention and resources they need.
By accommodating, and amplifying a variety of perspectives in one space, we create a conversation that is more consistently active, and engaging. When we collaborate, instead of compete, each new perspective adds to a stronger, more well-rounded network of knowledge.
Categories
For genres of conversation that should be completely distinct from each other. Often demanding non-overlapping styles or structures of post.
ex: A Wiki post shouldn’t go in Events, and the reverse isn’t even possible.
Subcategories
Mostly exist to communicate opportunities and expectations to users. Think of it like listing the “types of conversations” that you can have within a given category.
ex: The Confluence has lots of subcategories, to help focus many types of post into one space, by signalling the variety of accepted posts.
Tags
For genres of conversation that apply nebulously across multiple categories, should be easily searched as a coherent group, and should integrate into the conversations happening within each category.
The most common tags on this site refer to:
- The subject of a topic (ex: housing, climate, transit)
- The genre of a topic (ex: ideas, podcast, meta)
- The organization representing a topic (ex: more-neighbours-yyc)
Tag culture (or “Folksonomy”)
While organization is important to help users find what they’re interested in, human behaviour and information never truly falls neatly into a hierarchical structure.
Imagine you took a photo of the skyline in which the Calgary Tower is the main subject and focus.
Would you organize that file into “Photos > Calgary > Skyline > Calgary Tower” or “Photos > Calgary Tower > With Skyline”?
The correct answer is this level of brain energy should not be required to taxonomize a photo. It should be put in a Photos category, and tagged #calgary-tower, #skyline, and calgary.
Tags are the primary mode of categorization on the Forum.
We use tags here for genres of topics that should be isolatable, but should not be isolated. These genres spread across multiple Categories, and are integrated as part of the conversation within those Categories.
The usage of tags is paramount to how this forum encourages collaboration and cross-pollenation. Below, I’ve written some examples of usage enabled by the two most-used categories of tag.
Organization Name Tags
Folks from—say [[More Neighbours Calgary]], for example—looking to post their events, updates, or ideas come on the forum to do so alongside other organizations in Events and Confluence.
This way, folks who are looking for events, updates, and ideas generally, might bump into an organization they otherwise wouldn’t. Whereas, folks who are specifically looking for anything related to More Neighbours Calgary, can simply search the tag more-neighbours-yyc, to get an overview of their events, updates, and ideas all in the same place!
Activism Genres
Say, someone from [[Grow Calgary]] is interested in hosting a seminar about plants that are native to the region, and the positive impacts reintroducing them has on the climate.
They’d go to the Confluence Category, and tag their topic as ideas, #horticulture, and climate.
It will appear in multiple tag-pages at once. This is helpful if, say, a member of the [[Calgary Climate Hub]] is looking for new ideas about climate activism coming from places outside the Climate Hub!
Categories
Categories are the first layer of the hierarchy we separate topics into when a genre of topic is distinct from others and should be isolated. For example, posts about events that are already scheduled belong in Events, not the Confluence. Blog-style knowledge resources that are not designed to be edited by other users should go in the Confluence, not Wiki.
Subcategories
Subcategories are the last layer of the hierarchy, but they are essentially just a way to colour-code various genres of topic within a certain category. Subcategories help further establish what kind of topics are encouraged within its parent category, and are still visible when viewing that parent category.
i.e. Subcategories are distinct enough that they should be isolatable from their parent category, but are not distinct enough to be isolated as a separate category, and not ubiquitous or nebulous to spread across several categories like a tag.