How can we emphasise and improve Yoomoot.com's potential as a family of niche communities?

Make 'creating a community' very simple

• There is prominently displayed button saying something like "Create your own community"
  
• User clicks the button
• Screen asking: "what is your community about? e.g. stamps, monsters, east hungerford high school, moomins" followed by "create" button.
  
• If a category or synonym of the chose word already exists (OR the word/s can be constructed from existing categories/synonyms) then the user is told something like "why not join the existing _____ community? OR create a community about something else. [followed by input box and "create" button]
• If a category or synonym of the chosen word does not already exist, then a category of that name is created and the user is taken to the category's newly-formed profile page, which is in editing mode, allowing the user to create a description and add a picture.

• By Nicolas Holzapfel
• Oct. 18, 2009

Allow other sites to set up synced forums

So a forum would exist simultaneously simultaneously on an external site, with it's own branding and ads, and on Yoomoot.com, but the same moots would exist on both. I'm not sure exactly how this would work or even if it's possible.

It's important that external Yoomoot forum to be synced with the main Yoomoot.com forum because Yoomoot is all about avoiding duplication. For example, what's the point in having 1,000 seperate discussions about a particular with the same arguments being endlessly and pointlessly repeated? Better to have one comprehensive debate.

• By Nicolas Holzapfel
• Oct. 18, 2009

Educational Application

I'm struck by Yoomoot's potential, especially in terms of educational application. How could users from a group, i.e. a class, create a forum for discussion.

I'm thinking about a study group/forum. Students from a class would need a way to find a select group of parent moots that pertain to their topic. A page similar to a facebook-like "groups" page could come in handy to solve that problem. A user could set up the page, and assign moderators for the content. I could go to the "Keene State College Chemistry 101" page, and from there participate and share in the conversation that was connected to that class. I could also ask follow-up questions that might not be directly connected to the questions posed by the instructor or forum moderator.

Google Wave kind of has that down, but a hosted conversation has its inherent limitations. Each new discussion/question potentially needs a new wave to minimize the risk of convoluted and complicated discussion points. Yoomoot solves some of this problem by starting with the question, and allowing the conversation to flow from there.

• By Matthew
• Oct. 18, 2009

Add an 'add' button to category profile pages

If you create a moot via the 'add' button of a category profile, the new moot automatically has that category attached to it.

This makes it easier for a group of people to treat a category profile as a homepage:

Users don't need to understand categories to contribute to a niche community: For example, let's say there is a 'Protect Gedling Wood' community group. They set up a category called 'gedling wood'. They give the category's profile page URL as their homepage. They tell people about their homepage and people come straight to it. They click 'add' to ask questions and stuff and, even if they're not Yoomooty enough to think about categories, the question still gets asked on the gedling wood page, as they would expect.

I also just think this is more intuitive. For example, you click 'help' you see existing help moots, then you click 'add' to ask your own help question. It shouldn't be necessary to manually categorise your question as 'yoomoot+help' when you're already in the help section.

• By Nicolas Holzapfel
• Oct. 18, 2009

Add 'invite users' interface to category profile

The user profile has one; category profiles should have one too. If someone is successfully invited via this method they auto-fave the category and the first page of Yoomoot they see is the category profile page they were invited to.

If a category has not moots, a big version of the 'invite users' button should occupy the space where moots should be.

• By Nicolas Holzapfel
• Oct. 18, 2009