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Adding Recommended Resources

It's been suggested that the information architecture needs a fourth content type: Recommended Resources, defined (roughly, for now) as a useful resource for using a tool and/or practice, or combining them together, etc. Typical Resources would probably include blog posts, online courses, books, videos, etc.

How might that look?

Today

Currently, as set out in About this project, the information architecture looks like this: an image with no alt text

In brief, members submit their personal profiles (appearing in People), and if they wish contribute to the descriptions of Tools and/or Practices (none of these 3 indexes are shown in the image, btw). Massive.wiki plus some custom code then automatically links them together and:

  • automatically takes the scores provided by tool users to create an aggregated spidergraph, which provides a sort of "executive summary" entry point, setting out the community's averaged consensus of thinking tools across 11 or so dimensions (we'd love your opinions on these dimensions - see How we measure thinking tools)
  • embeds content from each People profile into the corresponding Tools and Practice profiles, transforming the latter into zettelkasten overviews, each providing an "about this tool/practise" text and an automatically created index of "who uses this tool/practise, and how"

Tomorrow?

There are different ways of doing this.

a) Separate Resource items

an image with no alt text

  • How it works:
    • Member submits a file following a "Recommended Resource" template
    • a link to it, along with some key content*, appears wherever relevant: the Member's Profile (if existent), relevant Tools and Practices, etc,
      • key content includes the any URL provided in the Recommended Resource, so users can go from a Tool/Practice profile straight to the destination URL, rather than passing through the Resource file
  • Key advantages - Members can:
    • if they wish, submit just Resources - they'll appear wherever relevant (as well as in a Resources menu, not shown);
    • add plenty of detail about the Resource in the description within the file
  • Key disadvantage: quite often all that's actually needed is a URL, so having to submit a file just in order to submit a URL looks like overkill

b) Bullet points in the Personal Profile

In this picture, the member includes Recommended Resources as bullet points in his/her People Profile, and the TfTMap builder embeds them wherever relevant. Overall I think this is the better choice, although it probably does (or should) limit the amount of value the member can add to just a few words.

an image with no alt text

So, which one is best, or can one of these be made better? Post a comment or edit the page directly, as set out in How to comment. Note that if you do edit the page you can make any changes you like as I've just made a snapshot (aka "permanent version") of this file, as set out in Wiki practice meets blogging.

Revision Notes