Alternative developing proposal for Libervis.com 2008
I hope this isn't too tiring for everyone, but on Libervis.com it wouldn't be the first time to propose a whole slew of ideas in a multitude of threads when the brainstorming wheel starts to turn. At some point, perhaps just now, we might as well hit the sweet spot. 
So.. based on the discussion in a previous proposal I had a nice chat with Taco (AKA tbuitenh) on our IRC channel (#libervis on irc.freenode.net) in which we've both basically cornered ourselves continuing on the thread of a truly open discussion site without an agenda.. First, we wouldn't make a really big difference from what we already are in essence. We would only change the presentation.. and then what? We are still a site that lives ONLY on perpetual discussion and occasional article that comes from it. How long before we are all simply saturated by this?
In the last thread I was talking about us being open from the beginning, but also evolving our thinking. Many times ideas that were posted as part of this process involved calls for making this place more than just a discussion place, but rather a place to express creativity, to have fun *doing* something too! That component has been largely lost.
So.. this proposal is based on the idea of getting this back, and doing it big time, the way we never thought of before.
The new Libervis.com would then be divided into four major sections:
- Community corner
- Speaker' corner (basically the debaters section which would largely include what this site is today)
- Art corner
- Geek corner
So, as mentioned, Libervis.com as you know it would largely fall into the "speakers' corner" because it is all about debates, articles, speaking your mind on digital freedom. This corner is what many ongoing thoughts share in the previous thread can apply to.
The other three corners would, however, be largely new. Community corner for socializing, discussing community building ideas etc. Art corner would be for art enthusiasts and creative people who share their art as free culture, including music, drawing/graphics, photography and movie making. Geek corner would be about Free Software, programming, web development and digital technology at large.
This said there are two very important things to note that apply to all of the above:
- All four sections would emphasize a "think tank" kind of thinking: they would be about developing ideas and ways to promote digital freedom, in exactly four ways: community building, discussions and articles, art and free software technology.
- While all sections may have a "domestic" part hosted on Libervis.com as a way to think of new things, they will also possibly link to separate but related web sites that are part of Libervis Network. The geek corner would therefore contain a link to Nuxified.org, a site already developed from Libervis.com.
This makes Libervis.com a central star of the Libervis Network, a workshop of ideas and innovation which then emit new projects (services, products, campaigns, anything).
And here is a picture that portrays the homepage for this new Libervis.com:
There is also a Taco's original concept drawing available here.
This is just a mock up and the final version should look much more attractive. A lot of CSS may be involved in creating this. Not all of the pointers will be visible the same way as presented on the picture so it would look much less like a clutter.
In essence, four corners represent four main sections of Libervis.com. Each sun ray represents a subsection in one of these corners. The exact hierarchy of subsections is yet to be determined, but we are looking to make it 3 per each, so as to fit 12 sun rays as depicted in the picture.
When one hovers over a pointer to the sun ray it will fade up, making the ""Have fun with.. " part fade down.. We can also make the corner to which a subsection belongs to be highlighted when that subsection is selected. Overall it would be quite a fun homepage.
We can still have a footer section below this whole construct display a couple or so blocks with latest interesting content just to make the homepage a bit more attractive to search engines and visitors looking for a quick survey, but this graphical construct would be at the center.
We can also have themes for the homepage that can be switched with a click on a link, or changed randomly. I could then make a "space" theme in which the sun would actually be a sun in space whose rays are being selected to represent various subsections of the site, with which you can have fun with.
The whole focus on "fun" as the keyword is because fun is something most people are attracted to and which is often a driving force behind what many people do. Freedom is fun. It's not just for long bearded philosophers. With freedom you can have more fun than when you are restricted.
So.. the obvious slogan presented in the homepage is: "Have fun with _enter your preference_ in freedom."
Wanna discuss philosophy? "Have fun with philosophy in freedom." Want to draw and sharing your art as free culture with others? "Have fun with drawing in freedom."
Ideas and opinions welcome!
-- Thank you Taco for helping carve this idea.
| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Libervis2008mockup.png | 79.11 KB |
Bright and colourful - I like it.
Just a thought - would a mascot work, in keeping with the sun logo say a cheeky and rebellious phoenix (phroenix?), with a personality somewhere between zippy and chucky.
It's hard to get instant engagement right. The sun in space would give nice depth, far better than a wall of text and artwork which just says "work". A photo of a person is always good, we relate to that on a most basic level, particularly a beautiful woman. There we go, where are all the women in IT? Set up a section here! Then comes the dating and geek cruises...
Seriously though, the new broader approach looks like a great way to trigger a growing momentum. I'd put art and geek at the top given the mass appeal and greatest fun element. Since the front page would have leaders tempting further into various sections this could include photo o' the week or simply the latest photo posted.
Those are first thoughts for now anyhow, well done.
Three things first:
1) looks great! But maybe a little bit too much like a link directory.
2) I would like the categories to be in the part of the page the best matching corner is in. If you swap all corners except "community", it will be right.
3) Can I have the svg of the libervis sun? I'd like to draw another sketch. The graphics designer in me wants out
.
We could give each corner a nice image. Community would be a group of people drinking coffee, Speakers' corner a guy on a soapbox, Art could show some of the art created in it, and Geek... a gnu?
I'd like to note that I remember from the very very very beginning libervis was always meant to be a connection between different communities and different creative minds. We split off our software side into nuxified.org and the mission went to the non-interactive libervis.net, leaving libervis.com only a discussion site. Yes it always was a totally open minded discussion site, but it used to be more. The sketches we're making now are of a new interface for the original concept. If we will implement this, we're going back to our roots. Back in 2004 we were still learning, we didn't really know how to build communities and we actually damaged the original small libervis community while trying to grow by creating new sites. We have quite a few friends who we are still in touch with, but who don't ever post to libervis.com anymore - I assume because it has degenerated from a meeting place for creative minds into yet another discussion site.
Nuxified proves that we do know how to build communities now. It is connected to a few very interesting related sites and communities, and new members flow in every time we do something fun. We can use more or less the same recipe for libervis.com.
The geek corner, and in the future also the art corner, will cause overlap between libervis.com and other libervis network sites. It seems in the past we perceived this as a problem: we forced all the practical free software talk to move to nuxified. This caused a lot of the philosophical talk to appear "in the wrong place", also on nuxified... so we again encouraged that to be posted on libervis.com instead.
Avoiding overlap simply won't work, and we have to wonder why we are trying to do it. Let people write their posts on whichever libervis network site they prefer, and if we think it would fit on another site too, we can offer to copy it to that one. Then it will get traffic from both communities... duplication is GOOD!
Last thought in this post: I would suggest "Have unrestricted fun with..." instead of "Have fun with... in freedom".
1) Agreed, that's cause in the image all of them display. In the real page only one would be faded up at a time. Others would be severely grayed out, visible only enough for visitor to know there's something there too.
2) Good idea.
3) I am attaching an SVG source of this (should've done it already).
We could give each corner a nice image. Community would be a group of people drinking coffee, Speakers' corner a guy on a soapbox, Art could show some of the art created in it, and Geek... a gnu?
Sounds great!
I'd like to note that I remember from the very very very beginning libervis was always meant to be a connection between different communities and different creative minds.
Yeah, sort of.. the "Open Source Community Node" and then the "Free Software Community Node", but indeed for a while it was emphasized as a "node", an intersection of people with various opinions and interested as long as they related to Free Software (and later Free Culture). The rest of what you described seems quite right. It's back to the roots indeed.
Avoiding overlap simply won't work, and we have to wonder why we are trying to do it.
It's sort of a "competing with ourselves" situation. If two of our sites are used for the same thing, what's the purpose of the second one, especially when we really want that second one to succeed? I for one think Nuxified.org was a good move and that separation works, even though it did maybe contribute slightly to the desertion of Libervis.com by some, obviously. But that's also obviously not the only factor.
Then it will get traffic from both communities... duplication is GOOD!
I'm fairly sure google would disagree with that exclamation.
It doesn't like duplicated content, in principle (and sometimes in practice) it would penalize the duplicated page in favor of whatever it perceives as the original, although it may be hard to tell for the bot since the overall design and sidebar content makes the two pages different..
Anyway, I'm not sure. I suppose we can view the overlap situations the way we look at forks of Free Software.. Even if the result is roughly the same thing, they are two approaches which can learn from one another. It's like a scientific experiment with two differing situations trying to get the better result.. Besides, the overlap should be minimal since, just because people can talk about some technical things on Libervis.com doesn't make Libervis.com a better place than Nuxified for it. It's just a little corner and Nuxified is the full experience based on it..
Gotta think some more about that, but, if we view the new Libervis as think-tank oriented then slight overlap isn't a big problem. If Libervis is the incubator of extra-libervis projects it's bound to have some remains in it once the project becomes separate.
This is a work in progress, and some bits of this drawing are / will be rather time consuming to get right. Still I'd like to show a little...
I'm not really happy about the look of the corners yet. Probably the text in them should be aligned the other way, and they need colored shadows. Also I need to reserve some space for nice photos or drawings... Probably going to use drawings, but we'll see about that later.
Why the name speakers' corner is perfect
.
Wow, that looks really good there. I like the way you did corners and pointers. Makes things much cleaner and more natural. Nice work!
And indeed, speakers' corner seems quite fitting.
Wait until you see it finished!
Your design is pretty good as well, I just feel like drawing how I imagined it.
Of course, by all means! I do like yours a lot better.
Me and Taco were working on the design for the front page of the new Libervis when he was here in Zagreb. Here are the mock ups.
Well that looks cool in inkscape, the fades didn't render in Firefox 2.0.11 on Kubuntu, I got flood fills there.
The only thing I would think about changing is the horizontal lines coming off the coloured dots - have them turn to the centre of the sun rather than being parallel?
The symmetry will go anyway unless the four corners have the same number of sub-sections each, and you're hardly going to sacrifice logical navigation of a site which plans to grow in order to preserve graphical aesthetics, just a thought.