Usability Group for Collaboration Platform

I would like a mechanism to send mini requests/questions to fellows that is by default private to a group and that has a short expiration. I think of it as a hybrid between IM, forum and mailing list. I think Drupal has it already:

Currently, every public blog post appears on the rdvp.org frontpage. Does that make sense?

I've been talking to some people about this and wanted to get others' feedback on the idea that you would like your posts to become public (that is, other people should be able to view them without logging in) but that you would not necessarily want them to show up on the RDVP public homepage. My specific example is detailed project progress that our guidelines had suggested we leave off the frontpage. There are pros and cons to adding an option such as this and I list some below. I hope people have opinions about this and that we can work out a decision using this forum (as Vi has recently asked us to do).

Hey guys, check this out...

The perfect Thanksgiving (or Christmas) gift...

  click here: got usability?
  

To ensure that there is no confusion when an event really is, the box with upcoming events on the startpage of the collaboration framework what is now marked with days left, instead should be marked b

At today's meeting, we distributed the attached guidelines for blogging.

This is meant as recommendations on issues that were raised at Asilomar.

We would like to spend some time at the next group meeting on Monday to discuss these and have any constructive debate leading to guidelines we all agree with.

Here's the summary of responses from DV fellows in response to a survey about this collaboration space. (All the responses are in the attached spreadsheet. Click on "results of the survey" below to see them.):  

Here is an excerpt of an interview with David Liddle, whose team developed the Star system in 1978 here in Palo Alto,. The Star system was the forerunner of today's graphical user interfaces (GUIs) like the Mac and Windows.  

In the Intro to HCI (Human Computer Interaction) class I am auditing with Prof. Terry Winograd, project teams have been assigned to perform a "contextual inquiry."

Contextual inquiry involves going out to the field to interview your target users. For those of you who have access to their target users or have people on their team in the field, this is a very good method of starting to gather information with which to build your project requirements.

Hi folks,

Below in the attachment are the notes from our discussion at Asilomar.

I apologize for the delay--I had six pages of notes to try to tidy up. I know I missed some things people said or attributed comments to the wrong person.

Hi All,

I saw in Carlos' recent post that he was getting flooded with requests.

I have two suggestions:

1) Maybe people can post all their smaller, one-off suggestions here. And instead of Carlos trying to fix it right away, he could resond with the level of effort it would take him to make these changes on the current platform. He could simplet let us know if it's easy/medium/hard to do.

Hi,

1) I'd like to suggest a dropdown or another way to "pick" from the list of user names when adding subscribers to groups. I thought I had added Tracy Prentiss to my group this weekend, but I must have entered her username incorrectly because she wasn't added. It would help reduce error if I could pick a name rather than guess or try to remember someone's user name.

Hi,

I'd like to meet by October 18 to talk about next steps for usability and our collaboration tool.

Please send me a name if you want to be involved and what times are best for you.

Thanks.