Last Monday (13 July) we finally launched the new design and some improved features of ouishare.net live website. Big up to Anne-Marine, Johann, Karol, Cyril and Francesca who helped make this happen :)

Now we also need a little help from all Connectors before we can make a public announcement and call to action via a special members’ newsletter!

Here’s an overview of what’s changed and what needs to be done.

New features: Community pages

Now each community has a page where anybody can “join” to be displayed among the members of this community. The page also shows leading connectors, as well as events and projects connected with the community. You can select all the associations from the community admin page.

As a new feature also members can add themselves to any community pages by clicking “Join” on the page. Currently such linking can be initiated only by members themselves, not by page admins. Therefore it is important that you go and “join” all the communities you’re part of, and invite all of your community members to do the same.

TO DO for local community managers:

• Go to http://ouishare.net/en/admin/communities and find your community
• Check all the content
• Fill the address field with your city and country (it will later help us put all communities on a map)
• Add relevant events and projects (even past events)
• Review the “users” section: it should reflect the community leaders (up to 6 people, 3 of them randomly displayed in communities listing, and up to 6 on the community page), and unselect other members
• Ask your community members to log in and join the communities on our website!

See the tutorial with screenshots on how to edit community pages >>

Improved features: profile pages

Your profile now acts more like your business card, displaying all relevant information like your location, job title, organization, bio, contact links, as well as your proficiencies. The new additions are list of languages you can speak, and fields for skills & interests.

Those who attended the Summit may remember the project of Bernie and Marie-Anne to collect informations on everyone’s skills. We have thought about adding the collected information in your OuiShare profiles, but you are very welcome to log in and add it yourself :)

While you’re going around on the website and joining communities, organising events and participating in projects, we’re planning to visualize all those associations on your profiles at some point.

TO DO for everyone:

• Log in to http://ouishare.net
• In the front end navbar, look for your profile photo (right side, next to the social icons) and select “edit profile” from the dropdown
• Review your profile and fill in all the missing information (see the tutorial with screenshots >>)
• Review your location and “title”
• Add a bio
• Review/add your photo (square format is best :)
• Add your social links
• Fill in your interests and skills (as lists of tags, separated by comma)
• Add all languages you can speak
• click UPDATE :-)

Some of you have double accounts for several reasons. If this is the case, you can cancel the excessive one on the bottom of its profile while in the edit mode (look for section CANCEL MY ACCOUNT). Each connector should have only one account, or in case of real need of duplication (testing or whatever) only one account should be classified as Connector. If you get really stuck with this, write [email protected], telling me which account should be kept and which removed :)

Community pages: one list, one language

As you might remember, we used to have to add the community entities separately in each language. This situation created a 5x duplication of each community. Now that members can join the page, and to avoid the situation where they should join again for each other language, we have kept a single list - 1 page per community, that is currently in English and editable under the “English” section of communities’ list. All other items are still visible in admin, but are not displayed on the website. Community has currently a single descriptive text field, you can add texts in several languages there if you wish.

In the future we are hoping to add translation fields to the community pages. We will also have permalinks something like ouishare.net/france/paris per community.

Events

With new design, we decided to explore the idea of showing all events everywhere, regardless of language (because otherwise some language-based listings were pretty empty). However it might not turn out to be the best solution, so please see how it looks in your language and give us feedback what would work better for you.

You can still upload your event under your language section in order to better identify it in the backend.

Read more about events display here >>

Issues

NB! If you find any issues or bugs on the website, or have some ideas for further development, please note them down in this doc >>

Backend design in general is a bit of a mess at times. I (Auli) am going to work on it, but if you notice something that you’d like to see fixed / improved as a priority, please let me know, either in the doc or by e-mail!