Question

I just created a group -web technologies. Then later searched under web, and found many others - how can we consolidate, so that until there is a critical mass in one discipline, there aren't way too many with one or 2 in them (which makes them essentially DOA)? Also, what's the plan for managing as the groups get bigger and bigger- maybe a nesting? i.e. math and it's sub areas, programming and its sub areas, etc...?

Answer 1

We're actually having a lot of discussions about this as a team right now. The large number of user groups is certainly something we're looking at. We'll hopefully have a workable solution to make the whole process of finding the group you need less overwhelming in this respect sometime over the next month or so.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Answer 2

farmdawgnation- thanks for the reply, and glad you're working on it. I've seen far too many groups over the years (listservs, websites, whatever) that never get anywhere for lack of critical mass. I am currently program chair of a web tech program at a community college, and am very excited to steer them here - but want them to network with similar folks around the world (the intent of open study, i believe) - so short of linking to everything remotely web in it, would love to know where- html? css? php? and so on. I suspect you can find some pretty reasonable (and time-tested) categories already in K-12 curriculum, or even collegiate - and start by using them as a template. Then ideally you'd allow people to sub and supersubscribe- so i could be subscribed to java under programming, but to all of web development, including its subsets php, jsp, html, etc... where it gets tricky is that jsp is also a subset of java- so ideally you'd have aliases or cross-linking so that you could get to it both ways.

Finally, it probably makes more sense to just incorporate a rigorous tagging mechanism, instead of an organizational hierarchy- so that jsp would be tagged as computer science, computer programming, web, and java whereas php would be computer science, scripting, programming, web, php and so on. Please let me know if I can help with this conversation. I've just discovered you guys in the last 48 hours, and have already shared with my class (40 or so students?) and 2 professional educators. I have very high hopes and am impressed by the rapid forward motion of the product.