Assembling the Team

We need help building The First Drop. Do you have web skills? Want to get involved? Here’s your chance. Check out our mini-projects below, and fire an email to Steve at change@thefirstdrop.ca to get in.

This project was conceived of over a year ago. Since then, Brendan and myself have consistently held two maxims that have driven design decisions:
1) Promote accountability among community participants
2) Relentlessly encourage participation

Both of these exist quite easily in interpersonal situations, but are extremely tough to translate online. But we want to challenge this.

Given time and funds, we’re working from a Wordpress base. But to work towards our goals above, we need to solidify features and build functionality that just isn’t there in the basic Wordpress software. We’ve identified 4 key features that we need to develop to expand Wordpress out of its boundaries, promoting accountability and encouraging participation on The First Drop.

1) Featured Comments
An admin user can, through the back end interface, tag high quality comments as ‘highlighted’ comments. These comments could they be called into the front end design either associated with the original post (An article with featured comments) or by themselves (Featured Comments). They could also be called through different variables (Featured Comments from the last month, or Featured Comments in Category X)
This should be accomplishable by having a user (in the admin section) simply check a box labeling it featured and that information is written to the DB. A function would need to be written that would allow these featured comments to be called on the front end of the site.

2) ‘Remember Me’ Feature without necessity for registration
By selecting the ‘remember me’ tab while commenting, the users information will be remembered not only to expedite the ability to make comments, but also targeted information such as “New Articles since last visit” and “Recent Comments on Articles you’ve commented on”. This is much easier to add if the user has an account, but we need to be able to easily harness the functionality without requiring users to register.
Clicking remember me drops a cookie on your computer so this would have to be dependent on the fact that the user would stay on the same computer. Once this unique ID has been assigned we would need to write the functions that would establish the dashboard giving them personalized information.

3) Request a Source
Someone said something you don’t believe to be true? Call their bluff and request a source. As opposed to leaving a comment, you can send a message to the author (or commentator) asking for clarification of a statistic. The article/comment is then flagged as having a source requested (and later resolved)
A ‘request a source’ button would open up a form field in a lightbox allowing the user to input the fact they want a reference for and send it to the author (or commenter). The author / commenter would get an email letting them know a source has been requested. When a request is sent it is noted in the DB for the specific article allowing users to sort by most requested source. (Would it benefit us to mark the comment resolved?)

4) Rate Comments
This isn’t necessarily in a traditional rating system that relies on “thumbs up or thumbs down” or “rate this comment out of 5″ but perhaps the rating system rates the comment as “Informative”, “Persuasive” or “entertaining”. Users can then look for comments or conversations that are “Information”, “Persuasive” or “Entertaining”.
the feature would take user input and insert that into a new field in the comments table. This information would later be queried into the design either by category / originating post or author.
Determine rating structure and write the changes to the DB. Then just need to write the functions to call this information on the front end.

Easy right? Couldn’t be simpler. But we need a few new faces to challenge us and help us create a venue for wicked conversation. Wanna help us? change@thefirstdrop.ca.