Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
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We started to cover this in the Reinvention topic, but I figured we should discuss it in a topic of it's own.
Here's a starter list which we can cut down / combine. I'm going to use more general topic names, we can give the topics "titles" later (i.e. Head Shop)
Conversation
Policy & Help
Politics
Science
Temple
Art / Design
Literature
Games & Gameplay
Music
Gathering
Give your opinion!
I think we should have a philosophy / theory section (the equivalent of the head shop) - this could include the 'temple' bit, perhaps? That would leave the 'politics' section as covering current affairs more than theory, which would make it ripe for integration with the science bit. I'd also like to see a 'Creation' style area - on Barbelith it's always interesting to see what crops up there, and it would help keep the rest of the board free from people plugging their projects.
So, I'd like to see something like this:
Conversation
Policy
Philosophy, Theory and Spirituality
Current Affairs and Science
Literature
Art & Design
Music
Creation and Gathering
I notice that on your list there's no comics category. Personally I'd be fine with that, as I'm not a huge comics person, but what does everyone else think?
I am unsure if you are deliberately omitting TV/Film?
I think we'll be combining it with Art / Design / Film
For now atleast.
Why not branch away from barbelith more?
Limit the parts even furhter?
Talking
Thinking
Art
Politics
Fix
just a thought. :]
"I think we should have a philosophy / theory section (the equivalent of the head shop) - this could include the 'temple' bit, perhaps? That would leave the 'politics' section as covering current affairs more than theory, which would make it ripe for integration with the science bit."
Actually, I think it might be interesting (not necessarily straightforwardly productive, but at least refreshing) to have Science and The Temple fused into a general area on and of systems of belief and-or-VS knowledge and practice.
Messy, though.
Chat
Internal Policy
Contemporary Thought
Spirituality, Faith, Religion
Visual arts
Books
Games
Music
Meeting
It would be realistic to combine the Switchboard, Head Shop and Laboratory, there's no reason that these fora should be separate unless you expect high volumes of traffic. A forum title such as "Contemporary Thought" would define the area and you could describe the subject matter as current affairs, philosophy, cultural analysis and scientific discussion. Currently barbelith does not have the kind of contributors that require all of these defined spaces, they are not being used regularly. Combining fora would additionally mean that a separate thread for different elements of the same topic would not need to exist.
There is an argument for the separation of each of these subjects from one another but essentially that simply means you have to click through to more pages and without a huge level of traffic that reduces usability rather than increasing it.
I'll come back to this later...
We quite realize the need for fewer fora. I really like the one's you've chosen though. It's in line with what Museum said as well. So I think those are the ones I'm going to go with.
Here is a final list,
Conversation
Policy & Help
Contemporary Thought
Spirituality, Faith, Religion
Art & Design
Books, Criticism & Writing
Games & Gameplay
Music
Gathering
The next thing we need to sort out is the sub-descriptions to properly describe each combination of fora.
Please don't dump Film, TV and Theatre, even if it's in a different form!
You're saying you'd like it to be there, even if it merges with a different fora? Or you'd like it to be separate?
Merging is fine - but my tired eyes last night didn't seem to see it merged in with anything else.
I had an idea, but I have no clue how easy (or, indeed, possible) it would be to actually implement. Is there any way we could have a list of tags for each forum? So if you started a thread in, say, a 'media' forum, you would then be given a choice between 'TV', 'film', 'music' and 'digital' tags to mark the thread with. And then when someone went to look at that forum, they could choose if they wanted to see all the threads listed, or just the ones with a particular tag. It might solve the problem of having too many subfora, while also stopping things from getting too mixed up.
I also prefer 'literature' as a forum name to 'books, criticism and writing' - and I'd still like to see a 'creation' style area, possibly fused with the 'gathering'. Something like 'projects and meetings', perhaps? I really like the idea of having an area where people can come to share their creative projects, or even iniate new ones in collaboration with people they meet on the board.