The way Edgeryders 1 (like other similar exercises I have participated in) grows by siphoning users off the mainstream social networks and other discussion spaces, like blogs. It works like this:
- The project team makes a sustained effort to be constantly visible, trying to generate interest and disseminating the net with content that links back to the project home base.
- When they click on such a link, users are typically taken to a place where a case is made for their participation ("what we are doing and why you should be in it"). This is static, read-only careful copy, and in the case of STF it needs to be multilingual. It also may include a project blog (non-static, but still essentially read-only)
- Once they have made the decision to participate, they are directed to signup.
- After this, they are socialized to the read/write part of the exercise with the help of a community manager, who may refer them to how-to static content.
Functionally, we have two parts: an onboarding funnel that welcomes people coming into the project from the wider Internet and the rich conversational space where the exercise actually happens.
We all know the rich conversational space will be the Edgeryders platform – hopefully just one customized group. Question: how do we want to implement the onboarding funnel? [Matthias] has pointed out before that ER is not suited to hosting third-party websites: we can host stuff like the unMonastery website on our server, but not on our Drupal installation. On the other hand, I think there is a presumption that the conversational space here will be not just a vanilla ER group, but an ER group with some level of customization. So, how do we do this funnel? Is it worth adding the static pages to the group, or should we instead install a Wordpress outside of edgeryders.eu to host the copy