Good and Bad: Where is HoH?

[pdp]

I've had a lot of thinking around where HoH is at the moment and how it can be improved. I haven't been much around lately for some personal reasons and mainly because I wanted to free myself from the perpetual motion I was into, but now I am back and I am more determined than ever before to get everything sorted. I've started putting work in my regular projects (GNUCITIZEN and Hakiri) and I am hoping that I can transform HoH for the better of the community.

So where is HoH? HoH started as a social experiment which I thought will never work. The network grew up pretty rapidly from just 1 user (me) to more than 7000 users according to the latest stats. This is remarkable and mind blowing and it clearly shows that hackers, regardless how antisocial they could be sometimes, are interested and willing to communicate and link with each other. For a while HoH was successful because of all of you.

Because HoH grew up pretty much organically, a lot of bad decisions were made along the way which injured the network to one degree or another. Mostly, I blame myself for being quite unexperienced.

The worst decision of all was to use Ning as a platform. This decision pretty much crippled the community. When I was asked to provide newer features I was unable to adequately respond as I wasn't in control of the platform at all. This was quite frustrating not only for the users but also for myself and the poor network administrators. That forced me to look for other solutions. The most obvious one was Mediawiki. For a moment I truly believed that Mediawiki can provide us with not only the platform but also with a common goal. I was wrong and the V2 project sort of failed miserably. Why? The reason for this was because Mediawiki lacked all the features that Ning provided, i.e. all good communication tools.

In simple words, neither Ning non Mediawiki worked for us. Perhaps Ning works for Britney Spears fan clubs but it doesn't work for HoH. Mediawiki works for Wikipedia and projects that evolve around documentation but it doesn't quite well work for HoH. HoH requires wikis and blogs and forums and IRC servers, and a lot more in order to become a true community enabling tool where people can share ideas, work together and lead. Ning simply cannot provide all that. The only logical solution for me is to move away from the current platform, but where do we go?

I haven't got the right solution yet but I have a few suggestions which I hope I can discuss with you right here and we all take a decision for the better of the community:

Idea 01 - Keep Ning and try to get the best out of it. I am no longer fan of Ning and I do not believe that it works for HoH but sometimes it is good to follow the path of the least resistance. There is a lot of work that needs to be done and we all should get prepared for the times when things will not work quite alright.
Idea 02 - Get out of Ning and setup a similar platform from scratch. Although this looks like an exciting opportunity I do not have the resources to start another programming project. Nevertheless, this is an idea.
Idea 03 - Setup a platform using an existing software solution, such as Wordpress MU and BuddyPress and carefully engineer the whole system form there. We can also provide community members the ability to suggest and write extensions for the platform through some kind of process.
Idea 04 - Go with the Mediawiki idea. It is good for building documentation but I am questioning how good it is as a communication tool.

These are pretty much all of my ideas. I've got a lot of side projects for HoH but I better not share them here right now as I want to concentrate on the main problem for now.

So what do you think?

[pdp]

this is not very hard to program from scratch

[Ricky]

I would say thats a solid ground for what we need.

[pdp]

also, forums are annoying ... perhaps the solution is simpler than we think. in my mind, the platform should do the following:

1. provide a mechanism for communicating with each other
2. provide a mechanism for sharing ideas and information
3. build a profile

anything else you would like to add?

[pdp]

for idea sharing we need interactivity and mediawiki doesn't provide that.

[Ryan]

Hey All,

I came across this discussion and thought I would offer a quick suggestion - socialgo.com. It will appear I have some kind of vested interest in SocialGO, and the fact is I do to some degree as I am an employee for them, but my approach to you is genuine in terms of I think it would be a fitting platform for your network. This site is huge - you have thousands of members and a vast amount of content - you could easily migrate this to a SocialGO site with a tool designed specifically for safely and effectively migrating your content to the SocialGO platform - have a look at it here (video included): http://www.widgetlaboratory.com/new_page::migration_tools_45.html . I hope I don't come off as a pressuring salesman, because it's not my intention - I guarantee not to spam your network nor attempt to contact any other members, but I felt compelled to make you aware of this platform available that, from what I can tell, would be totally right for your network. If you're inclined, have a look at socialgo.com - check out the Layout Manager which literally gives you crazy amounts of custom design capabilities (and is of no extra charge if you're on a Premium account), and write us at [e-mail] if you have any queries in regards to this. Best of luck to you and your members whatever you may choose. Take care, Ryan.

[Ricky]

To interact with like minded people.
To learn something new.
To see the view points of many over people.
To help myself develop as well as help over people to develop.
To give back to the community.

[Mark]

My motivation was simply to find new ideas and methods. Although we all have different skill sets and although I find OWASP interesting its not my area. There are loads of other places on the web for what i'm doing but was hoping that HoH would that me into new areas. V2 was a good idea if we could have kept some kind of admin up.

I was thinking of a PHP-Fusion site. The problem with this is the HBH has the same and theirs work very well and wouldn't want to step on anyones idea. But I still think a forum type system is a better start for us to breed ideas untill we have a full article to put on a V2 style wiki.

[Luminus]

Sign me because I liked the idea of exchanging ideas, develop projects, conduct discussions, etc.

[pdp]

just out of curiosity, why did you guys signed up. what was your motivation?

[root]

Well I got your idea... I just thought that we should stick to mediawiki and that having live talk over IRC would be a good start. Thumbs up for Google Apps though... Writing HoH's own social networking system? It sure is going to be a time consuming task... Question is, do we really need those custom features? Maybe setup e voting poll or something to see what everybody thinks about that :)