WiserEarth Technical Development

We are reinvigorating the engagement and outreach process around WiserEarth’s technical development. This draft purpose of this group is to focus on three areas:

1. Sharing the Technical Development Roadmap
2. Surfacing key User Interface Issues
3. Co-developing and testing Prototypes of upcoming improvements
4. If you’re interested in the WiserEarth API, please join our API developers group

All technical development on WiserEarth is ultimately in furtherance of WiserEarth’s mission:

“To help the global movement of people and organizations working toward social justice, indigenous rights, and environmental stewardship to connect, collaborate, share knowledge, and build alliances in order to strengthen their ability to address and solve the world’s problems.”

In practice, that means a focus on:

• Improving ways for people to share information on WiserEarth
• Improving ways for people to form relationships on WiserEarth
• Improving ways for people to work together to problem solve

We know there are numerous usability issues with the WiserEarth platform. We are looking for your help to surface the most important of these. Please share your feedback and issues here.

Here is Jame’s extensive bug list (thank you James!).

Importance can be measured in many ways. However, as a starting point, it could be as follows:

• Significantly impedes sharing, connecting or collaborating
• Affects a significant number of people using WiserEarth – this means considering non-members browsing the site, and members conducting standard tasks.
• Significantly impacts the initial stages of becoming a WiserEarth community member

So for example, we recently recoded all of WiserEarth’s main menus because they were negatively impacting 30% of all visitors (Flickering Menus in IE 6.0 and 7.0, and non-scrollable My Group menus in Safari and Chrome), and are core to the functionality of the site, and affect users at the start of their membership lifecycle.