Twelve months ago today the Rationalist Association got in touch about redesigning their site and what started as a four month contract has become something of a labour of love.
I've been incredibly lucky to work with the RA, they've happily let me poke my nose into all aspects of the charity and I have been given incredible amounts of freedom to do what I think is the right thing.
Working in a small team with my wife Rachel, developer Julian Halliwell and Caspar Melville from the RA, I think we've done well. The transition from the New Humanist site to rationalist.org.uk, where the Rationalist Association is front and centre has gone remarkably well, or at least that's what the feedback and statistics seem to suggest (a few complaints, loads of compliments). We've made the content more mobile friendly and importantly we haven't added a load of features we'd struggle to support. We think It does the job of displaying the great content however you want to access it, without clogging your bandwidth.
There is, though still a a gaping hole: community. We know it's out there. We created a log-in and asked people to register as a founder member of an online community – more than 3,000 have so far. And the RA has 20,000+ followers on Twitter, as well as thousands on Facebook and SoundCloud.
What to do for that community, or rather what to build? We ran a poll with founder members and now we want to try and deliver what the community wants. Top of the list was that the community wanted... more things from the community: "Community generated content."
Which is what I want to talk about now.
To deliver this it's not just a case of plopping in a forum and hoping for the best. We need to seriously consider how we go about it. Building something for the community takes money and you will notice that the RA is blissfully free of advertising, so there's no advertising revenue to call upon. It also takes time, not just time to plan, design and build the thing but time to get it up and running, to market, to monitor and get feedback. Building a community on the web is devilishly tricky and time consuming.
There is one feature that we've proposed that is particularly close to my heart and it involves finding all the great writing out there that would fit under the umbrella term Rationalism and I'd like to collect and curate it for RA members to browse. Building a system to do that may well be fairly straight forward but I assure you it's never that simple.
So, I'd like to make a proposal.
I would like to find people, RA members or not, who are interested in trying an experiment to gather the great writing (and lectures, debates, films) out there on the web and organising it. This is a kind of pilot, a proof of concept that this is something we can do, and, if we find the right solution, I can propose building for the RA. To begin with we'll need to find a third party tool to do the job. Maybe Google+, or Delicious or maybe even something new like potluck.
The technology isn't important right now, I am more interested in finding people who might want to participate in the experiment, so we can build the case for a Rationalist Association endorsed "Thinkers Library for the 21st Century".
Please remember this is not an official RA experiment (yet), but if you are interested please apply to join the Google Group we have created (it simple and free).
