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One of WebCommons’ non-profit pet projects, the local discussion board Louisville History & Issues, is becoming increasingly prominent in Louisville political and history circles, but even more interesting for discussion here, it is also becoming a highly functional (master?)piece of web software.

Louisville History & Issues (LouHI for short) is based on WebCommons’ fork of phpBB version 2 that is currently dubbed “Citizen Assembly Board” (CAB for short).   CAB has been in development for several years, and has many interesting and unusual features, many not even available on the newest version 3 of phpBB.   Of course it also doesn’t enjoy some of the newest features and design approach of phpBB 3, but that has its own set of pros and cons, and I will likely muse about that in a future post here.

LouHI is currently undergoing a phased release of its “Version 3″, which I am touting as the “finally useful!” version.   Read about the changes in Phase 1 as well as plans for later phases after the jump.

As stated in this LouHI thread, the following notable Phase 1 changes were made to LouHI, most of which were really changes to the CAB software base:

• Save posts as drafts. The ability to save your posts as drafts so you can work on them off and on until you are ready to submit for the public to see. This should help with creating more thoughtful, more organized posts. (Note: CAB’s “save as draft” feature is even more powerful than the similar feature in phpBB 3 — in phpBB 3, you can only save the subject and message, but with CAB you can save the subject, message, poll and all the post-related settings!)
  
• Easily share topics with others you know not using this board. The ability to share topics with friends, family or colleagues using ShareThis technology. You will be able to share via e-mail, AIM, social bookmarking and networking sites, etc.
  
• Safe delete of topics and posts. Topics/posts deleted by users and moderators will be recoverable. Deletions won’t become final until the administrator intervenes.
  
• More reliable e-mail delivery. Enhanced e-mail delivery that improves the chances of e-mails sent from the board arriving in the inboxes of the board users.
  
• Easier to follow or not follow topics by e-mail. Watching (and stopping the watching of) topics will be easier to access and less cumbersome to activate.
  
• Fantastic new urban visuals. Ten new banners, including some aerial shots of Louisville provided to me by Donald Vish.

But that’s just the beginning.   I am currently planning six phases of development for LouHI Version 3, containing a bonanza of new features for CAB.

On November 1, I announced what would be included in Phase 2.   For kicks and giggles, I will reiterate the changes here:

• Major rework of forum and topic watches. This will include the ability to have forum notifications sent by e-mail in daily digests, and topic notifications will now contain text from the topic reply. It will also be easier to start watching a forum using an easy link at the top of the viewforum page for each forum. Notifications will also be better formatted and any existing bugs in the formatting will be fixed.
• “Share this forum”. This will work like “Share this topic”, but it would be for sharing whole forums with friends.
• Forum guidelines rewrite, with easier access. What’s currently called “Forum Rules” will be totally rewritten using ideas from the book Managing Online Forums and placed in their own special page that will be reachable from its very own menu link.
• Tooltip reformatting and fixes.
• Minor polling enhancements and fixes.
• Even more new banners!

Phase 2 updates will likely be going live before Christmas.

But what I haven’t told the LouHI community yet is what’s coming in phases 3 through 6.   OK, I gave them a broad brush overview of Phase 3, but not the rest yet.   The following statements are tentative, of course.

• Phase 3 will include the redevelopment of the menu, search, breadcrumbs, pagination, login, registration/activation and “who is online”.
• Phase 4 will include the redevelopment of topic posting/printing and user profiles, adding an integrated event calendar, and providing for attachments in posts.
• Phase 5 will include the redevelopment of the front page (which currently shows the featured and forum lists) in a way that makes the page more like a portal into all that the discussion board offers.   RSS feeds for featured topics and individual forums will also be added in this phase.
• Phase 6 is still hazy at this point, but it likely will involve some cleanup of the previous phases, plus the addition of even more useful features.

Perhaps because I’m not offering excruciating details yet, this may not be clear, but the central goal of Version 3 (and subsequent development) is to create the beginnings of what could be called “Computer-aided Public Discourse” and/or a “Public Decision Support System”.   Ultimately Citizen Assembly Board will become more than just an ordinary discussion board — it will indeed evolve into a platform for community information sharing and decision making.

Once Version 3 is fully realized, I believe the Louisville History & Issues discussion board will be poised for big success.   And that goes for other discussion boards to be built with CAB as well.   Hint, hint.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 18th, 2008 at 3:05 am and is filed under Citizen Assembly Board Development, Online Communities & Discussion, Project Developments & Hype. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.