Putting Water Seven in order

[Biktor]

Hello friends, I have found many surprises today, great job, you are running  and doing it very well.

Now that we have come back and according to what was discussed on the reborn topic I think it is important to clarify and define how WaterSeven is going to work from now.

With this I mean we have to decide if there are going to be new rules to try to make WS grow and be more dynamic, if current hosting packages will remain and if we are going to re-organize member teams and make them functional.

By the way, we have to update some basic information on our forum, for example the new server information and at least add a link to our community in main page because it is hard for new interested people to find it.

I am not sure if these proposed topics should be only discussed and defined by staff members or we should involve the entire community but in any case I think it is important to do it in order to start this new time the best way.

By now I brought some of my ideas from the reborn topic:

I think it could be a good idea to give a member more features and benefits the same way he/she contributes to the community.  I am not meaning to do it by post number but according to the value of contributions.  For example, if you participate actively and contribute to make a forum or topic to grow, if you put a link back to waterseven in your web (which is not obligatory), if you make your own site to be a prosperous one and in addition to it you tell people about waterseven and invite them to join our community, if you just bring new people to our community, if you create a project to be developed by community members, for example a software development project (which I would find very interesting, more now that we have ROR) or any other kind of project .... if any member contributes in any of these ways he/she will be rewarded with more and more benefits both inside the comunity and our server (obviously having its limits)

[Svinat]

I agree with you. We have to update the community and website. I guess this is something that will be done gradually throughout the coming month.

[Efil]

I'm moving this topic to Feedback and Suggestions board in order to welcome suggestions from the general community. Everyone is welcome to give opinions and discuss.

[Efil]

While downloading the Filezilla FTP client that Peter recommended, it came into my mind..."How about making Water Seven a download mirror to maximize the utilization of our monthly bandwidth which we only use around 10 - 15%?"  We are wasting too much of our bandwidth every month.

[Biktor]

Do you mean something like Rapidshare or Megaupload???, I dont think it could be a good idea since it could turn into performance troubles for our members' sites.... however I think we can do do it as a new service just for our members obviously with restrictions and rules.

[Efil]

Not exactly rapidshare or megaupload since they are generic upload sites. What I mean is "mirror" site, which is more inclined to download mirror for opensource or freeware softwares.

[Svinat]

Hmm, that's not a bad idea. If we could be providing mirrors for open source projects, it would draw members to our community that actually like to contribute.

[Biktor]

 , I agree, but I think it should be only for small projects so that we dont put server on risk.

[F4E]

Yes, that's a good idea.. It's better to utilize resource in some better way than to waste it.

[Rebeca]

I also share Biktor's concern. Although there might be a waste of resources right now, these resources will probably be needed as our community becomes more active. We just started and we shouldn't lose focus. If we want to be good at what we do, we have to choose what it is we will be doing. If we really want w7 to be a mirror server, we have to understand the implications of that... I wouldn't want w7 to be a mirror server that might eventually stop being a mirror server when the members become more active or when we get more members.

So, I think we should first put w7 in order as Biktor has suggested, and then we can decide where to put our resources.

Right now, we should focus on what needs to be done. Maybe we can create a roadmap of some sort after we all agree. So far, it seems we need:

1. To revise the main goal or goals of w7.
2. To know what hosting packages we will be giving.
3. To revise the rules/requirements for being part of the community.
4. To re-design our homepage.
5. To revise the organization/design of the forum.
6. To advertise w7. (When we're done with 1-5, it should be easier to advertise w7.)
7. To check teams and members and their duties.
8. Find out what else needs to be done?


And here are my thoughts on the items above:

1. W7 goals are to provide good hosting and to have a good community. (To say it in a simple way at least.) For good hosting, reliability and maintenance are probably key points for us to focus on. When we talk about a good/generous community, we're talking about active collaboration. Perhaps a concept that's similar to what we're trying to do is that of co-working, in which freelancers (or anyone interested) joins a community in which they can work on their own things but at the same time get ideas from the people in the community and is willing to give ideas back too. The difference with us is that instead of sharing a physical space, we're sharing a server.

2. As far as the hosting packages go, we currently have 2 packages, one which is given to admins and the other for everyone else. I think we should keep a package for "founding members" (admins) since they will be the ones doing most of the hard work at first and it seems reasonable to me to show our appreciation. As far as the rest go, I think we should re-design the packages to fit our community. So a rough idea on this would be as follows:

Founder/Contributor Package
For: Active founders (founding members who continue actively working for the community) and people who give significant and constant contributions (as in those who either pay for a server or pay for extra features)
Benefits: most trusted members, admin or moderator role + badge/recognition, availability of "best" package if requested, access to all useful things made for and by the community
Limits: None unless they stop being active or contributors for 1 whole month.

Tester Package
For: All new people accepted for hosting
Benefits: being a member of the community, free basic hosting for 1 month, opportunity to upgrade if they match the requirements
Limits: 1 month only, but they can renew for up to 3 months total. If by the 3rd month, they have not been able to upgrade because they couldn't match the requirements, they can stay in the community without hosting or they will be asked to leave.

Active Collaborator Package
For: People who after 1-3 months have proven to be active collaborators in the community by actively helping with maintenance, developing or working on useful things for the community, and answering support/feedback questions. (Maybe I'm missing something here?)
Benefits: opportunity to be moderator (depending on role) + recognition, availability of free "good" hosting package if requested, access to all useful things made for and by the community
Limits: None unless they stop being active collaborators for 1 whole month.

Premium Collaborator Package
For: People who after 1-3 months have proven to care about the community, do occasional useful contributions, and who pay $/month or $/6m or $/year.
Benefits: opportunity to be moderator (depending on activity) + recognition, availability of "good" hosting package, access to all useful things made for and by the community
Limits: None unless they decide to stop being Premium Collaborators.

Community Package (No Hosting)
For: People who after 1-3 months (of hosting or no hosting) have proven to valuable members of the community.
Benefits: Recognition, access to all useful things made for and by the community
Limits: None unless they stop being active for 3 months. After 3 months of inactivity (without any notifications), they will lose their benefits (and become Visitors) but their accounts won't be deleted.

Visitor Package (No Hosting)
For: People who participate in the community (as long as they don't break the rules of course).
Benefits: Being members of the community.
Limits: None.

Note: By "useful things," we're talking about anything that members share with the community such as software, lists of resources, access to special sections of the forum only available for people with at least "community member" status in which we can share deals we find or have funner or more private conversations.

3. The rules seem to be OK so far. However, we will probably have to be more specific about the requirements.

4. I can help with this, but I won't be able to do it on my own.

5. The forum is all right, but I'd like to know what everyone else wants or is thinking of about it.

6. I can help with this too.

7. Who's here so far?

[Efil]

This is just a scratch of what comes into my mind from time to time about the Water Seven Community future and visions.

1. What exactly do we want from members?
- Presence
- Participation

Presence
Since not all members are expected to be good posters, and that we don't want the members to completely forgot the existence of the community despite taking advantage of its valuable resources, we have introduced so far the rule of deleting members who haven't logged in for more than a month. And for those who weren't able to recover, to terminate their respective free webhosting accounts.

Participation
Right from the genesis of Water Seven, we have introduced the Weekly Attendance Check, a rule that we have adopted from Fine Spot Network generations.

We have lighten up the burden of this weekly attendance to simply replying to the Community Newsletters that we publish once or twice a month.

One can perform some or few of the following suggestions to show loyalty and gratefulness to the community:
- make Water Seven your browser's home
- use the Water Seven google search bar below the page when searching for something
- use the study notes board to paste rough drafts/notes/comments of what you are studying or getting busy at recently

2. Why do we need more "quality" members?
To optimize the use of our payed resources and lower down the cost of ownership. We are paying three digit dollars for the server. We are pouring our efforts and talents in managing the server and the community. Its exhilirating to know that your efforts are not in vain and that the generousity spreads on.

More to come...my head ran out of charge.

[Svinat]

What both of you, Rebeca and Efil wrote, are good ideas. Still, there are some things that I have to comment.

1. I find it a little strange that we delete inactive forum accounts after just one month. Few forums I know of do this, and if someone returns after several months and find their account deleted, they might not want to rejoin.

2. The weekly attendance will be mucky when we get many members. What about instead making a script, if someone knows how to, so that all the members have to write "attending" or something in a box and then click ok. Then the script can automatically find out which members that did not attend, instead of us reading all the posts in the attendance topic.

[Rebeca]

I agree with Orjan regarding the deletion of accounts. I understand deleting accounts for people who we ask to leave because they have not followed the rules or because we know we don't want them in the community. In addition to that, it also seems reasonable for us to delete accounts with 0 posts (after 1 month of their creation). In all other cases, I do agree that having to go through the registration process again isn't practical and might be detrimental to how much people we can attract to the community.

And regarding point 2, there is no weekly attendance anymore. As Efil pointed out, he only has asked people to reply to the newsletter. However, you do bring up a good point... it would take Efil a lot of time to check those replies once we get more members. So, I also think a different system should be implemented. I know of other forums in which they have scripts that check whether people have logged in to the forum or not. There's no input necessary for the members other than logging in, but I'm not sure what they use to do that. -- But this also brings up something I was proposing on my previous post, which is to allow people to be members of the community even if they aren't necessarily interested in our hosting services. (We've had a few of them already, but not enough.) We obviously can't require those people to do certain things we'd expect from people who are getting hosted.

[edited] I just corrected the name of Orjan because the forum can no longer resist his force[by Efil]

[Svinat]

True, we have to figure out a good way to check the attendance from the members who get free hosting.

[peter524]

Yes, I agree in checking the attendance with a script, rather than reading posts in the forum.

Also I agree in revising the main page, making more organized and attractive to people. In this way, they will be curious and will those who are interested can freely join. It must have subpages like hosting details, instructions for registering, about us, contact us, support (FAQ and help), etc.

In the case of promoting water seven, in my site that's being hosted by water seven, I put the logo and a link to water seven website. I give credits to this community and to Efil.

It will help also to promote water seven by blogging it. Now I'm preparing for a blog to promote water seven's free hosting. I think it may help.