We (@Ruxandra & @Noemi) just had this morning a call with Laura Gillies from Imagination for People that talked us through the Assembl software, mainly to understand how Edgeryders people can use it.
Can it work for us?
Laura says that Assembl is a tool that allows an organized discussion with a great number of participants (from minimum a couple hundreds to several thousands). The tool lives on their own server and was designed for ongoing, in-depth discussions which would be stimulated by the publishing of constant syntheses. There is no possibility today to import already existing discussions from other platforms, like we thought of doing with #Lote4 Stewardship discussions. Plus, any one of us involved in a conversation in Assembl would need to register there, via Facebook, Twitter, google or with an email address.
The advantage of using Assembl instead of usual forums is the way they thought about the community management and facilitation functionalities.
There are the “harvesters” that create “table of contents” and thus structure the whole discussion in different threads.
The harvesters can highlight part of the comments of the people, that would appear in the idea summary, so that people can quickly overview the content and understand what the whole discussion is about and intervene.
The synthetizers manually create a synthesis of the highlighted comments for each part of the table of contents that make sense. That way, anyone new coming into the conversation can easily browse the contents.
What's happening next?
We are now thinking to create a workshop where either somebody from Imagination for people presents the tool, either I am presenting the tool to the Edgeryders community that is interested in knowing more about Assembl. @fjanss
We are still waiting for the answer from Laura regarding creating a space on Assembl where to test the tool live. As their sandbox isn’t currently public on the web, that application will be.
At a minimum, we can host the workshop, have a couple of us test functionalities of the application, and look at what, if any, community conversations now or in the future can benefit from using it.
Any other ideas on how you see yourself involved with Assembl? Perhaps you want to initiate a conversation there that would happen over months and involve hundreds?