Hi everybody!
This is a list of the different web 2.0 tools being used for this virtual community for the different functionality to be accomplished. If you have other ideas of what tools could be used, please add to this file or comment on it and we'll see if they are more appropriate and useful than what we're starting out with.
Below I list the web 2.0 application and the functionality it provides. I also give a brief description of how it is envisioned to be used. I also have questions (underlined) that I pose and I would be interested in your thoughts about those.
Twitter: Spontaneous Communication - To make this community work effectively and dynamically, twitter provides the ability to send short messages (declarative or interrogative!) to the entire network. This can be a very powerful tool for getting things done and getting contributions from the right sources very quickly. If you haven't already, please get a twitter account and follow me (kdavidian) and others in this group, and we will all start following you. I will create a tweme for this activity, but I haven't done that yet.
PBWiki: Collaborative Document Workspace - We need a place to put ideas and thoughts on paper and PBWiki was recommended for that purpose. It wasn't in my original "architecture" for this activity, but it's a good example of how somebody recommended it be used, I tried it, and it's proving to be very useful. (Thanks, Andrew! twitterid: ahoppin). Also, as of Tuesday, 10 June, the "Commercial Space Wiki" is being referred to as the "Michael Mealling Commercial Space Wiki" because he personally paid for the upgraded Silver service level so we now have 10GB of file storage space on the pbwiki servers. I recommend that we store files that cannot be stored on Google Docs (the web 2.0 application that is mentioned next) such as pdfs.
Google Docs: File Server - Since we can now store up to 10GB of files on the pbwiki site, you might think that we don't need Google Docs. But in fact, Google Docs is a good place for massively collaborative document projects, so I think it fills a need that we might not have right now, but we probably will in the future. Also, it provides a location where we can put files (documents, presentations, spreadsheets, etc.) of certain formats (.doc, .ppt, .xls) where we can link to them from this wiki, or access them directly.
Chat: Sometimes you just need to talk to someone in real time. Even twitter (with all of its scalability problems) is to slow. Here is one solution:
Quick Surveys: SurveyMonkey I had a thought that we could use Survey Monkey or some other site like that to put together quick surveys and collect responses in a semi-intelligent way. I've used it in the past and it's very easy to use and can provide good stats afterwards. Please let me know what you think of this idea! If you have another survey site you'd propose we use, please do so!
That's about it so far. I originally thought about using facebook to take advantage of their "groups" function, but I'm not sure we really need it. Do you have an opinion about that? Should we create a space commerce group in facebook to join? What would be the function it would serve? Would it be effective?