I'd like to share a note of thanks to all of you who have been part of TakingITGlobal's V6 celebration of our online community relaunch!!



The event on Tuesday December 16th was a hit and attracted many members, partners, friends, staff, board members and supporters who shared in the spirit of celebrating our success! The theme of our event was “How do thriving communities form, grow, influence and sustain?"



Guests were invited to share their reflections of the theme on the wall. During my brief remarks, I shared my own inputs on how this question about thriving communities is what heavily influenced our decisions in the process of imagining and creating the new version of our website, and that it remains relevant as we move forward.



Have a look at the videos posted from the event:

V6 Launch Video Part 1



V6 Launch Video - Part 2

Just after midnight...December 16, 2008 - the new V6 has launched!!

This is a monumental day for TakingITGlobal and I am thrilled that we have come together to bring the site up to the standard that it has reached today!

Very special thanks to our design and tech team along with other members of our leadership team, virtual volunteers and translators who have worked tirelessly to bring our imagined concepts into fruition!!

I look forward to our celebration & launch party!

For those of you clicking through the site and noticing that there are still some issues that need to be resolved, I've typed up a list of about 32 'bugs' or items outstanding for completion that will be reviewed over the next few days/weeks...and in some cases we are still working through the process of completely revamping other site sections (i.e. Projects) that will take about a month before they will be ready for launch...So while V6 is live and 'launched' - the revamp process for the site is still underway and charging forward with a renewed sense of cohesiveness!

Since the start of the revamp process in early 2007, we have really worked through some complex and intense debates, issues and challenges and have followed through with delivering an experience for our community that flows and helps us further support our network of youth leaders who are changing the world. As you click through the launched version of the site, please pause and know that you are appreciated for the massive effort that you have contributed to...

One of our dreamed up new features that will launch tomorrow is a dynamic map that will allow TIG to provide users with different snap shots of activity on the TIG site. This is all thanks to Todd Fraser, a Flash Developer who helps us out every once in a while on cool projects like this!

For the homepage, it will start off with featuring our active members and in sections like Resources, it will have points on the map for upcoming events or where organizations are located. In the Action Tools section, it will show latest actions taken by members including petitions signed, commitments made, and projects started!



This map will replace the often discussed Google Map that has been featured on our beta of V6. The design of the new flash map integrates more cohesively with the design of the new site as a whole!

We are really excited about the possibilities of applying this map to share an array of information in an a more interactive and dynamic way.

Stay tuned!

We are as close as ever to launch and want to take the time to celebrate how far we have come!

Tomorrow night - December 16th - we are hosting a V6 Launch Party at TheStoreFront project at 957 Bloor Street West in Toronto - if you're in town - please join us!!




Check out the event page for more details: http://events.takingitglobal.org/21923

In order to provide an introduction to the new features of V6, we have worked with Engage Learning Systems to produce a short video that will play when people visit the site. Ideally, in the upcoming months, we would like to have other short video clips providing an overview/tour of various sections.



Here's the script:

Hi, I'm Jennifer and I'd like to introduce you to the latest version of our Online Community at TakingITGlobal.

Version 6 of our website has relaunched at tigweb.org, and we've streamlined the experience to help you connect with the global issues that affect us all. One of the first things you'll notice, is that our header has been changed. Don’t worry, all of your favourite tools are still here and can be found in the new header.

Our site sections include:

Community - a launching point into our social network of youth leaders from around the world

Action Tools - where you can make commitments, launch petitions and organize projects

Resources - helping you discover organizations, opportunities and events

Youth Media - a place to play educational games and a space to share creative expressions

Global Issues - a knowledge center to learn about issues ranging from global poverty to climate change

Regions - a hub of activity connecting you to what is happening in your region, country or city

There are also some cool new features on the homepage for you to explore like the video player, a member map, and a feed that highlights the latest and most popular content that fellow members are uploading to the site!

Are you ready to start exploring? Search through the TIG Tag cloud to see what other members have highlighted, check out the ‘Browse by” section and learn more about the issues that you care about! Use the “I want to” drop down to take your actions to the next level.

See you online!

We now have a clean and updated footer that reflects the changes to the header/navigation changes.



Also, after extensive debates on where the placement of the login button should be in the header, it has been moved to the top right corner (yay!) in order to keep with usability standards of social networking sites. The idea is to maintain ease of use for super-users of the web along with consistency for existing members who login in a frequent basis.

Another major site-wide design creation is the 'Join TIG' banner that will appear for members who are not logged in. After extensive testing, we learned that having a 'join TIG' banner significantly increases our sign up rates which is important as we want to try and convert users who spend time browsing the site and find the content relevant, to become members of the community.

We have been working on rewriting the text that is on our current About Us section...starting with an updated 'timeline' document that I prepared a few months ago on the history of TIG. Our Development and Communications Manager Nick Yeo has spent time re-organizing how we communicate who we are, why we're here, what we offer and who we work with and as part of the content re-write, we have also redesigned the About Us section! Here's what it looks like. You will notice that we have a special focus on encouraging people to make donations - with our inciting thermometer! The amount needs to be updated - our goal is to raise $250,000 through an individual donor campaign.

Today we had a meeting about revamping our Project Pages. Here are some of the outcomes from our discussion:

- need to separate the public listing/directory of projects with the collaboration tools and create more incentive for groups to post their projects, so we can more effectively aggregate strong youth-led action projects happening around the world

- we established that there could be 4 types of project page options:
(a) FREE - public listing in project directory - to devleop a very basic template (info page)
(b) FREE - collaboration tools (project blog, wiki, discussion, member listing etc)
(c) $10/month for Custom Header & upgraded storage space for files + livechat
(d) $100/month for custom template + storage space + up to 20 affiliated project pages

- important to develop a series of template design options, possibility of allowing people to move elements of page around in design

- important to link the concept of 'best practices' or sharing lessons learned to be posted with projects/initiatives.

- need to merge functionality of TIGgroups (mailing lists) into projects. we also discussed revamping the TIGgroups functionality. since it is complex and heavy on our servers to manage, our thinking is that we rewrite the code to make the technology more efficient and then only have the mailing list functionality available to for projects/initiatives. We would then transform the current TIGgroups space to be more informal and into an online 'feed/bulliten board' posting of content that would send alerts to people but not actually contain the full contents of the message in the emails. this would ideally drive more traffic to the site and reduce maintenance costs. we currently have 3800 TIGgroup mailing lists.

- increase options of privacy levels so project page administrators can decide which sections are public/private

- change review process of projects to allow public listing/posting prior to approval on admin, but have a mention on the page that it has not yet been reviewed (to improve search results - as it is hard for editors to keep up with approvals on demand)

- Link to Global Issues section from project pages (ability to easily draw in useful links/resources)

- social bookmarking functionality within TIG bookmarks (ability to see who else has bookmarked the content & post comments on the bookmarked content) - ability to see your TIG bookmarks in other social networking spaces

- explore option of Text based live chat for the free version of collaboration space

- how can we more effectively promote collaboration and networking between projects and initiatives? suggestion of recommendations / search/tags visible to project members.

- need for ability to track impact - people can state goals + progress made towards goals (i.e. people reached, people trained etc)

- change project 'category' to project 'issue'

- add ability to relate commitments & petitions to projects and easily promote

- RSS feeds

We have been making a great deal of progress on V6 - here is a snapshot of our roadmap (and a sneak peak into how we track progress internally - this is updated on an ongoing basis and we've had weekly meetings to review priorities):

Here is the mockup for new TIG Country Pages. With the shorter URL (tigweb.org) we hope it will be easier for members to promote TIG - and will design banner ads that people can use to promote TIG. The current country pages have too many modules of content which is simplified in the concept of the feed (which is also implemented elsewhere on the site). Having a smaller flag size was feedback (as it is perhaps too nationalistic) and having a larger map size has also been recommended to provide greater visual and educational context. The link to quickfacts will remain - with less stats on the homepage. The placement of the Global Gallery images is meant to have more visual elements to the page. Also, rather than our current 'featured member' that requires a separate submission form, we will showcase the bio from our active members (having higher chances of available content). This concept has removed the google news feed (as some say that this is not relevant or the reason that people go to TIG - as in - they want member content and not news online). Also, this concept removes the 'banner collage' with images of the country as some say that it came across as too touristic.

dare to compare....

V6 mockup



V5 current version of Country Page