New standard types of Relationships (network) +5
Note: This suggestion is about the "Edit Relationship" link in the "List" view of the "Network" section in users' "My Profile" page.
(Update by Honore:)
As part of Angus' original idea to clean up the edit relationship drop-down list, we've since gone ahead and done some work to come up with a more fleshed out suggestion. We took out quite a few relationships that didn't make sense, and added in some that were applicable that were being used by WiserEarthlings (but not on any lists) or just made sense to add. We also show the reciprocal relationships where it makes sense e.g. a Person can be a 'Funder' of an Organization and from the Organizations perspective they are 'Funded by' the Person. In some cases the reciprocal is the same e.g. A friendship (or relationship 'friend') once confirmed by both users is the same whichever direction you look at it from.
With the spreadhseet list that we came up with being quite long and spread out, I've simplified it into a diagram which includes the more important likely-to-be-used connections, such as People to People, People to Organizations, leaving out smaller ones like People to wikipages, etc. (Those smaller connections have also been cleaned up. If you'd like to see the full list, download this spreadsheet.) Regardless of this list a WiserEarthlink can still select 'other' and come up with a description that best works for them.
We look forward to your comments and suggestions.
People relationships diagram:
Organization Relationships Diagram:
________________________________________
People Relationships - text list:
People to people:
• Friend - Friend
• Classmate - Classmate
• Family - Family
• Coworker - Coworker
• Mentored by - Mentor
• Mentor-Mentored by
• Collaborator-Collaborator
• Consulted to - Consulted by
• Inspired by - Inspiration to
People to Organizations:
• Record Creator - Record Created by
• Board Member - Board Member
• Former Board Member - Former Board Member
• Director
• Manager
• Employee - Employer
• Former Employee - Former Employer
• Member - Member
• Volunteer - Volunteer
• Consulted to - Consulted by
• Funder - Funded by
People to Groups:
• Administrator - Administrator
• Member - Member
People to Events:
• Record Creator - Record created by
• Organizer - Organized by
• Participant - Participated by
• Funder - Funded by
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Organization relationships - text list:
Organizations to Organizations:
• Funded by - Funder
• Funder - Funded by
• Parent - Subsidiary
• Subsidiary - Parent
• Partner - Partner
• Affiliate - Affiliate
Organizations to groups:
• Related Organization
• Participating Organization
• Funded by - Funder
Organizations to people:
• Record Creator - Record Created by
• Board Member - Board Member
• Former Board Member - Former Board Member
• Director
• Manager
• Employee - Employer
• Former Employee - Former Employer
• Member - Member
• Volunteer - Volunteer
• Consulted to - Consulted by
• Funder - Funded by
Organizations to Areas of Focus:
• Expert in
• Active in
• Interested in
Organizations to Events:
• Record Creator - Record Created by
• Organizer - Organized by
• Participant - Participated by
• Funder - Funded by
Comments (1 - 9 of 9)
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Flag comment for removal angusparker about 1 month ago
@Honore: Thanks for creating these useful graphics. Looking forward to getting the community's feedback. When might you / could you implement this suggestion?
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@Honore: Yes, given Arash's explanation I think the focus should be on creating a good complete list of relevant relationships for drop downs. I am working on a master list given the current options and will post above for comment.
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Hey Angus,
Per Arash's explanation, we do allow the directional relationship between two parties, so we can facilitiate that aspect. As for the arrow, it's somewhat already reflected through the Network visualizer diagram. For the moment, are we just focusing on adding new entries to the drop-down menus? If you can list out the phases and what you'd like to see happen, I can better initiate the groundwork for this idea. |
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@Honore: There needs to be some way to show the directionality of a relationship. Client or Consultant only make sense as a pair pointing in different directions along the relationship of two users or user/org or two orgs. So if there isn't going to be initially (or ever) multi-relationships allowed between entities then we have to rethink the relationship names and I would suggest add an arrow to signify direction. This shouldn't be too hard to set-up as a default. i.e. the entity from which you are connecting from becomes the origin, which you could change to the other direction if needs be.
e.g. User ----- Funder ------> Organization
e.g. Organization A ---- Funder ------> Organization
Now without using the pair Client / Consultant you could have something more neutral that also works better for Org to Org - e.g. Service Provider could be a better option.
e.g. User ------- Service Provider --------> Organization e.g. Org A --- Service Provider ---> Org B
To complicate matter a little I think we also need another standard relationship between two organizations called "Partner". This is a pretty standard way of describing two organizations which are doing something loosely together and may have a Memorandum of Undersatnding / Agreement.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
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Bowo - absolutely groups need to be on the network list first. This goes hand in had with another suggestion:
Automatically adding Relationship Links +3
We should have as many links as possible automatically created by virtue of the user experience / interaction. e.g. When someone joins a group, creates a resource etc then the link is made. They can of course delete that link if they want to. So opt-out rather than opt-in as much as possible. |
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Honor - agree we want something simple and easy to use. Probably worth revisiting when more effort is put into the vizualization and search functionality so we can develop so use cases..
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Hey Angus, About the multi-choice options for the network - it's a good idea, but the concern is if it becomes too overwhelming for the user to have that many choices. I know Google Mail tried a similar approach when it opted for "labels" instead of "folders" (an email message can be labeled many different ways, but would have been restricted to being placed in only 1 folder). Well, the problem has been that people either love it or hate it - and those who hate it usually don't understand and get confused why they can't make folders in gmail. If we offer users multi-choice, it would add another layer of complexity to the the networking feature. If we eventually work on improving it and getting it more user friendly, we can re-visit this multi-choice option, as it makes a lot of sense.
-Honore |
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Great ideas, I will put these fixes into release 18 (we are currently working on release 17). And I'll also ticket up seperately Bowo's suggestion. :) |
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In the "List" view of the Network in My Profile, Groups are not listed yet. So, this need to be done first. My +1.
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