Hi everyone,
Just wanted to fill you in on the provisional plan for expanding the reach of the Community.
As some of you may have seen we're currently ironing out with our developers the final issues with email updates. You can see more information on this here:
http://community.autism.org.uk/discussions/feedback/problems-suggestions/notification-posts#comment-786
The plan, assuming the final work is completed in time, is to launch this within this week. Once it's in place we'll be sending out a final message to everyone who had registered as a founder. This will just invite you and the other people who were interested in testing to come in and check on the system.
Assuming the notifications work okay for everyone we'll then be read to become a more public community.
The first step will be to make the Community public to the world. This will mean that the public link to the Community - which current goes to - http://www.autism.org.uk/community will redirect a person to http://community.autism.org.uk
Ideally this would happen very early on next week. Alongside this we'll also be contacted everyone who is a registered user of the new website, to tell them about the Community.
This isn't quite a launch, more of what's called a 'turn-on' or 'soft-launch'. It won't be a big PR event but will invite a much larger group of users to come and join in. Most founders will also get this email, as you're likely to be registered on the website, so please let us apologise now for sending you similar emails so close together.
Alongside this we'll be moving forward with plans to promote the Community in the next issue of Communication Magazine. This is the print magazine sent to the members of the NAS. In the magazine we'll be introducing the Community and we'll also use some promotional materials to ask people to visit our corner of the website and see if they'd like to be involved.
I think we'll see a significant increase in activity from these measures. I hope you'll find it easier to keep track of discussions with the notifications in place and they'll be many more people active within the service.
Alongside these developments we'll also put in place a 'Consultation' group (though hopefully we'll come up with a jazzier name by the time it's live!). For people who are interested in influencing the developments of services and campaigns at the NAS this will be a place you can join to feedback and affect future developments. This will also allow us to avoid filling the main Community areas with these types of discussions - after all the Community is as much, even more, your space than ours and we don't want to have you overwhelmed with our requests for comments and advice.
We're also collating the feedback we've had so far and we recieve from new users to look at improving the service we provide for you. As soon as that's completed it'll be published so you can see our thinking. We may even explore ways to allow you to vote on the areas you'd post like to see developed, though I can't promise that 100% at this time. It may be certain things urgently need to be worked on, so we don't want to offer you a chance to vote if there isn't a chance for you to really influence the decision.
So there's the update but we also wanted to say thank you to everyone whose been part of these few months of testing. We wish things could have moved forward at a faster rate but we need to make sure the service is what we need it to be before going public.
For anyone whose been frustrated by the recent low level of activity or lack of notifications, thanks for bearing with us - this is a big step for the NAS and a learning curve for us all, so we're very grateful you've joined us at the start of this exciting journey.