Here at TFD, we’re moving pretty quickly towards contributor recruitment. We’re going to cast our net widely and take on between 30 and 60 regular contributors, who will write discussion-triggering pieces for TFD. We’re less concerned with having established figures as fresh faces, people who can write well and create a discussion on issues surrounding Canada’s next generation of leadership. And we want to capture the widest range of views and backgrounds possible among our contributors. Finding the right people is important.

As we plan our call out and review process, we’d like to get some more perspectives on board. Do you want to help us find 30-60 future Canadian leaders to contribute articles to TFD? We’ll do the heavy lifting, but would like the regular advice of somebody (or a couple people) with editorial experience.

Estimated time commitment: 5-10 hrs / month for September and October

Start: soon!

Interested? Fire an email to amanda@thefirstdrop.ca with a paragraph on your background and reasons for joining the First Drop team. Add a short resume for extra fancy bonus points.

Cheers,

B

Site development. Here’s how it happens. I tell the guys that I want a Cadillac. Then they tell me that a Cadillac might be feasible but we’re going to have to start with a Toyota and work our way up to the Caddy. I say OK, because they’re smarter than me at this stuff. Seriously, we’ve had a nice shot at the first iteration of the site, and are making adjustments for a second design iteration. After that, there should be few changes, included in a quick third design, which is good to go. So far we’ve left some of the most complicated functionality out, but do have some neat stuff in the first version. Stuff that helps us move comment structures past simple blog/article formats. I’m excited.

Contributors. We still have people telling us they want to get involved. We want you to get involved too! Since we’re getting closer to launch, we’ll kick off a contributor recruitment/application process soon.

Speaking of launch…when? Well, I’m done promising things, but if we’re slapped with another futile election, we want this beast to be ready. So hopefully soon.

Cheers,

Brendan

Of course, emails aren’t that momentous (the internet tells me that we send millions of them every second), but this one was special for two reasons.

1) It’s a ‘top secret’ communiqué to the team of people who have expressed an interest in contributing to TFD – hopefully the first among many.

2) Despite it being the first email of its kind in the history of The First Drop and therefore kind of a big deal, I managed to screw it up.

Anyway, if you want to get in on the contents of this email or any subsequent ones, email change@thefirstdrop to let us know that you’re interested and we’ll sign you up.

In other TFD-related news…

We now have a Facebook page. Check it out and become a fan, if you’re so inclined.

With all of us in Canada for the first time in 2009, we’re busy as bees behind the scenes trying to plan a 3 part Skype conference to go over the big dreams and nitty gritty details.

In other news, the holiday Monday has put me in a pretty good mood, so today’s links are themed and the theme is… levity.

Michael Ignatieff thought some thoughts, thoughts that could not be unthinkified.

Once upon a time, Sarah Palin got a twitter account. William Shatner made poetry out of it on Countdown.

Optimus Prime beats the federal NDP to the punch on stealing “Change” as the beginning of a catchy political slogan.

All for now.

-A

We don’t have many costs right now, but the more funds we have, the more ambitious we can be on our site design. The better our design, the better the conversation, and the better the conversation, the better our Country. See the link? Ok, so we need to figure out what organization and financial form TFD is going to take, beyond just a volunteer-built and spread website.

Can you join us and lead this?

Do you have experience in overseeing finances, seeking grants, designing fundraising strategy? Do you have contacts and resources you can tap to answer questions, develop a plan to convince us, and execute on a plan? Can you represent TFD to potential funders with professional, optimistic passion? Details of the role can be worked out.

Please consider your ability to commit and deliver. We’re serious about building this movement. This means we ask people to deliver when they commit. Ultimately it’s going to be these people who will push this movement forward.

Cool? Then we’re looking for you. Get in touch – brendanbaker@ewb.ca. A CV would be nice, but even a quick note works as well.

B

We have a creative brief (being formalized as we speak), competitive analysis, inspiration, moodboards, some information design and need someone to take this and bring a design for the site across the goal line. This would range from a full fledged site design or just establishing a solid design direcion that we can impliment.

You have wicked ninja like skills in photoshop and are learned in the ways of UX. Ideally you’ve got some production knowledge and know what it takes to design for a CMS.

Two goals drive all design decisions:

1) Encourage participitation. This means extra attention to detail in the comment forms and nuances through the site.

2) Quality participitation. We don’t want to encourage typical blog fodder, we want smart people sayign engaging things.

We know what we want, we just can’t visulize it. We’ll challenge you and expect you to challenge us on our beliefs and decisions.

This doesn’t pay, at least in financial terms. Hopefully the reward of  inspiring an upcoming generation of political leaders is enough.  We committed to bringing quality discussion and healthy discourse to our generation. You’ll be contributing great work to a great cause.

Interested? Drop us a line at change@thefirstdrop.ca

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.

Thanks,
B