Thank you to the 169 people who responded to the Flock Together survey - both the bits where we asked you to rank new ideas - and the bits where we asked you for your own ideas.
Both parts of the survey have thrown up some very helpful ideas - saying what’s important - what’s not important - what needs fixing - and what doesn’t
Starting with the ‘quantitative’ ideas, five ideas popped to the top (one of which we’ve already done)
- Full integration into the main party website
- FT events now appear on the main party website. I’d love to do a full Obama with a dramatic increase in opportunities for member campaigning via the main party site (including Flock Together), but it will need to go into the overall party priority list.
- Tidier page to input events
- I’ve never been a fan of the 3 column design - or the design of the input page - and it’s time to fix both! The organisation list also needs ajaxing.
- Flock Together application on Facebook
- Yeah! There’s an event API for Facebook at last. Integration with Facebook should be pretty straightforward (gulp!). I think I’ll be contacting the 9 people who offered to help code Flock Together on this one…
- Ability for users to register political skills and interests that other party members can search for
- Shouldn’t be too difficult, but will need some careful design. My take from the comments is that people would like it as members’ only. Open tagging? Or a closed list of attributes? What skills would people like to see?
- Link to email a friend about an event
- This should be spectacularly trivial to do… I’ve always wanted to polish this off but been dissuaded by others. One late night coding session while bored should be enough to do it.
When it came to the people’s comments, there were loads of them (see below)… but a couple popped out as the biggest priorities:
- Simplifying the front page design
- A top priority - but quite a lot of work. I’ve got some ideas for a dramatically simplified front page. Any redesign is going to need refreshed functionality, a ground-up redesign of the navigation and the removal of a load of unnecessary complexity.
- Simpler filtering, including by region
- The filtering of events by type and distance is too complicated. It is possible to get most of the combinations that people are asking for, but way to hard to set it up.
- Previous and future by-election results
- This will either need some incredibly clever way of interrogating the ALDC database or website or (more realistically) some volunteers (and ideally a volunteer coordinator) to make it happen. Flock Together has the capability to give different users different editing access - but I don’t have time to organise it. All volunteers welcome…
Comments? Questions? Offers of help?
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