Here’s where I’m at (after typing this all up, I realise my structure hasn’t evolved that much… but it has, a little):
- welcome area for new members (orientation, introduction, basic general questions answered)
- getting set up to take part in the community and deal with FD:
- cat files → member has cat file
- tech support: spreadsheet and using Discourse → member has spreadsheet
- equipment: get, give, discuss → member has required gear/emergency kit
- support/care/managing FD (access maybe partially limited until member has cleared the welcome stage? or based on something else? need to think more about this bit and see what criteria the Discourse system allows, aside from groups – is it possible to add tags to member profiles? hmm I guess that would be like “adding them to a group”…)
- food: always questions about this, and something we have “specialists” for, I really think it’s good to have it separate to make it visible, which will at the same time attract people and help us reorient them
- grief: separate to avoid flooding the general category (or maybe sub-category of the general one, but excluded from higher-level listing, muted?)
- vets: private
- off-topic: self-explanatory
- helpers: private
- admin team: private
managed with tags, at least for starters: senvelgo, high dose, emergencies, comorbidities, insulin types, moral support, irregular schedules, insulin changes, types of gear, giving/second-hand
On the fence about behaviour/medical training, but I guess we can start it out as a tag… though as with food, giving it its own category might usefully communicate (in this case) how important it is.
Also on the fence about dosing advice, because this is where there is a “learning curve”, we’re not just there to give people the answer (as for many other questions) but to teach them to become autonomous… so, I still think a separate category would make sense. Also, we want to enforce some prerequisites. We already do it with house rules on facebook, but people keep bypassing them and helpers don’t always realise… with a separate category it would be clear: those with the green light get posting rights in that category, and if a post shows up in the wrong category with a request for dosing advice, it means it shouldn’t “simply” be responded to.
Or do we simply make food, medical training, and dosing advice (and grief support?) sub-categories of “support/care”? When a category has sub-categories, is it possible to create a topic either in the parent category or in one of the sub-categories? In that case that give an “out” regarding choice paralysis: when in doubt, post in the parent category, and friendly moderators will move it to the right one?
I’m guessing that there are themes or settings which allow displaying chosen tags like a “menu bar”, with a different tag selection by category? For example, for the “equipment” category, we would have “tag buttons” for syringes, insulin, glucose monitors, test strips, etc.
But for the general category we might have other tags put forward.
I realise, writing this, that I have a hard time saying “categories” each time because in my mind, I am thinking about this community design within the “boards” or “forums” paradigm. So that’s how I’m thinking about Discourse categories, but maybe this is not quite right. The kind of separation I feel between these various “spaces” I envision for the community is more like separate physical spaces, actually. I might be twisting categories a bit, beyond how they were thought or expected to be used.