Recently we’ve been thinking of ways we can improve our community resources for Slife and Slifeshare. The truth is, there are tons of cool things we could do to get people involved, beyond having a forum and a wiki, and it would be fun to try out some community participation ideas.

In terms of our support infrastructure today, I would say the forum has been working out great. It’s clear the forum is a great resource. The wiki has been around for a while, people seem to enjoy it, but I wonder if having the wiki and the forum might actually be confusing sometimes (i.e I don’t know how to do X. Should I go read some how-tos in the wiki or post a question in the forum?). Right now the wiki is actually offline due to the server move, but we are planning to bring it back online. And of course we also have this blog.

We were brainstorming other things that we could do the other day and three ideas stood out, a live chat session, a Digg-style feature voting system and a mapping tool where everyone could mark where they are from. Here are some more details:

• Live Chat Sessions: One of the support ideas that we had was to set a time during the week where we could be reached by instant messaging. During this time, anyone would be able to come in and ask questions, give us feedback, tell us what’s working and what’s not working, etc. It would be a completely open channel. Then, every month, we could post the “best” questions and answers on the blog for everyone to see.




• Digg-style Feature Voting: In a nutshell, this would be a Digg-style system where users would be able to vote on features and things they would like to see in future revs of Slife and Slifeshare. The most popular features and fixes would bubble up to the top and it would reflect, in true democratic fashion, what the community wants to see developed and improved. I like this one a lot.




• Geographical Mapping: This would be something like Frappr. In fact, we could probably even use Frappr itself. The point of this would be to create a map of where Slife and Slifeshare users are located physically. The best part of this is that if there’s a particular area/city with lots of users, we could organize a get-together there every once in a while.

Anyways, these are just some ideas. Outside of community, we are also planning to create a section on the Slife Labs site with scenarios for using Slife and Slifeshare. The scenarios would illustrate how to use the tools for various tasks such as keeping track of time, staying in touch with other people, etc.