Problem:

Need more control over My Profile is a 'must have' for our current needs. I am evaluating a number of possible online collaboration tools for a growing community of change agents, and Wiser Earth is our preferred choice... however... unless there is an option to selectively hide much of the personal information on My Profile, it's a non-starter.

Our group members need to know where each other are, and to be able to contact each other quickly and easily, but many have very good reasons not to wish their addresses or telephone numbers, for example, to be more widely available. We would also like to add other profile information to share amongst ourselves, but not with the wider world, even within Wiser Earth.

Solution:

Ideally, from our perspective, it would be great to see three things, working together (and this is a bit of a 'brain-dump', not a carefully thought-through proposal, so it may have all kinds of implications I haven't thought of!!):

1) First you offer three levels of visibility:

PUBLIC INFO
o Show to all Wiser Earth members

SEMI-PRIVATE INFO
o Show to friends, and members of the following group(s) of which I am a member
    [   ] Group 1
    [   ] Group 2
    [   ] Group 3

PRIVATE INFO
o Show to friends only

2) Then for each main block of user info (including the photo!), offer three radio buttons to set the visibility of that data:

o public   o semi-private   o private

The most basic info (like Name and Area of focus) would default to public, much of the rest perhaps to semi-private? About could have two form boxes, one for Public, a second additional one with an assignable visibility level.

3) (less critical) It would be great to have the facility to add additional fields to the Profile -- and perfection would be to have a mechanism for group-specific additional fields to be added to your profile when you join the group (though always with an option to refuse!)... but perhaps that's getting a bit TOO cute!
;-)

I appreciate that all this risks adding levels of complexity that are unnecessary and potentially confusing for some users, but careful wording, layout and perhaps context-driven visibility of options could make this more helpful than confusing. Does anyone have any thoughts on whether there's a wider need for this within this community, or whether what I'm looking for for this particular community simply requires more privacy options than are appropriate on Wiser Earth?

Jon