Wednesday, December 03, 2003
phpBB.com :: Creating Communities
The bulletin board system used to create the HCI board - I've spent the day doing a new installation for an online community. The members of the community are not really allowed to meet each other (for medical reasons) and so suffer from isolation issues. This is an attempt to provide them with a route to discussing their thoughts with others who are also in a similar position.
Nothing much new there in principle, though having ones run by hospitals for their patients is slighty different - the earlier ones have all been self-help groups. However, the interesting issues are in access control, privacy and so on. Posts are private - only registered members can see them - but there's a need for medical input to answer some of the issues and tackle some of the fallacies - so we need to do this in a manner that doesn't stop the patients from psting, doesn't stop their friends from replying, and givens them the confidence that the adults involved are different to their doctors and will not pass that information on.
Equally, there are strange people in society who like chatting up sick people, and so we need to manage public access to the space as well so that they cannot get vicarious pleasure in reading the material.
Now these are worked out and the system is customised appropriately, we'll run user trials for both usability and more importantly effectiveness. Does it do what we want it to, and make them feel more included and less alone?
The bulletin board system used to create the HCI board - I've spent the day doing a new installation for an online community. The members of the community are not really allowed to meet each other (for medical reasons) and so suffer from isolation issues. This is an attempt to provide them with a route to discussing their thoughts with others who are also in a similar position.
Nothing much new there in principle, though having ones run by hospitals for their patients is slighty different - the earlier ones have all been self-help groups. However, the interesting issues are in access control, privacy and so on. Posts are private - only registered members can see them - but there's a need for medical input to answer some of the issues and tackle some of the fallacies - so we need to do this in a manner that doesn't stop the patients from psting, doesn't stop their friends from replying, and givens them the confidence that the adults involved are different to their doctors and will not pass that information on.
Equally, there are strange people in society who like chatting up sick people, and so we need to manage public access to the space as well so that they cannot get vicarious pleasure in reading the material.
Now these are worked out and the system is customised appropriately, we'll run user trials for both usability and more importantly effectiveness. Does it do what we want it to, and make them feel more included and less alone?
(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
Atom
RSS