Initial notes about SPC features and development

Self Publishing Community is built from the ground up to revolve around crowdsourcing news, help, discussion etc from self-publishers who are at the coal-face, learning the techniques and seeing developments first hand. So the key is to have enough people there to engage in meaningful, constructive discussion - tell some publishing friends, and tell them to tell their friends, and hopefully we can get to a 'critical mass' where new members seek out the resource.

Currently the site is set up reasonably bare-bones - basically, it gives discussion group functionality, allowing for users to post news or discussion topics, ask questions/requests for help, and set up polls. Beyond this 'basic' functionality I'd like to hear from users as to what else they'd like to see. Some of the possibilities for building into the site:

• Book/project showcases
• Social networking
• Job requests (eg. publishers looking for designers) and classifieds
• Perhaps even Amazon sales rank tracking linked to your user account.

Feel free to add more if you have ideas!

Where the site functions a bit better than mailing lists is that you have one log-in, and then you can join whichever lists you want on various topics, and have all that content aggregated in one place (eg. 'My Unread'). You can also 'drill down' into that content, so if you just want to look at the iPad-related posts in the eBooks group, then that is easy enough to do simply by clicking on the 'iPad' tag in the right-hand side tag block. Obviously another advantage is that there are different types of content to post (e.g. polls), and video to watch at times (if you post a link to a YouTube video, it should automatically insert it into your post).

I think another advantage over a mailing list is that all the answers/comments to any particular post are collected beneath that post, rather than spread out over the course of time, and various new emails morphing into different subject fields.

To start with I have added just a 'core' set of groups that most self-publishers would be interested in. It is very easy for me to add more as needed, including different definitions of groups - e.g. there could be a different section for 'locality based' groups, for discussing things relevant to that subset of publishers (eg. Australian-based publishers). This would probably be reserved for a 'trusted user' role though, not open for anybody to create groups frivolously...the last thing the site needs is hundreds of groups of 1 or 2 people.

Another thing that I think will be handy is a wiki-like FAQ per group, for those questions that get continually asked. I'm still working on getting this implementation right, so that aspect is still evolving even while the site is live (unfortunately). Be careful investing too much of your time in this until I announce it is ready.

Note too that users have the option of making each post either 'public' (anyone can read, whether a member of not), or 'private' (registered users only will see it).

Feel free to post your thoughts, ask questions, put forward suggestions. Feel free to play around (the New Member Sandbox is a good place to star learning the ropes of posting), and if you feel confident post things such as news into the relevant group (you can create different types of content using the 'group menu' at the top right of each group page).