Hey all, we’re so excited that our platform has become so quickly adopted by people who care about serious policy proposals and discussions. To maximize the user experience for all, we wanted to present a vision for how the platform directs itself and what this is all for, some best practices, and some new features.
Vision
We can all play a part in shaping our future by observing our guidelines for how to best structure your posts on the forum.
Firstly, we’ve added tags for
observations (statements or ideas of policy) and detailed contributions (much longer, includes implementation details). Please tag your current policy proposal. This helps others to better understand the aim of your post. Your observation can become a detailed contribution through feedback from the community in the comments, and editing your original policy proposal. Please add a section to your post underneath it with the detailed contribution as opposed to deleting your original content, so everyone can see the changes.
We’ve added a way to solve for duplicate posts through “Merged Policies”. If you become aware of posts that are basically the same, you’ll be able to simply create a proposition, just as you would submit a policy, in the “merged policy” category. From there, cite the policies that are effectively the same. This will also allow for discussions where people can link policies that are also the same in the comments. Our moderators will actually execute the merge of all of those suggested merged policies through the discussions. Merging your post with others helps to aggregate votes and create higher visibility for these essential proposals.
To be rolled out
Next, we’ll add an ability to form a collection. A collection is a topic area that serves as a way to consolidate similar topical posts, so people can discuss topics as a whole. You can think of it as a way to discuss a topic area that you’ve searched about! It’s not the same as a tag, as the collection appears regularly and you can discuss the collection as a unit in and of itself. Collections can’t be voted on.
The homepage will delineate the view between the observations, and detailed contributions that can be seen.
Best practices:
If you use the platform enough, you will be promoted to trust level 2. Currently less than 1% of users are trust level 2. If you’ve commented or posted 5 times, if you’ve read 15 posts, and if you’ve spent 2 hours reading the platform, you enter trust level 2. At trust level 2, you get more votes.
Feel free if comfortable to add your social media links to your profile in your description. One of the coolest things people have pointed out is the community, and meeting people who share interests and values. We’d love to see folks connect! We’ve introduced direct messaging as well to help facilitate this.
Please take advantage of the search function. It’s sophisticated and has advanced features. For instance, if you’re looking for veterans related posts, simply searching “veteran” yields an interesting array of results, that you can then sort / filter on various factors of your choosing.
You have the ability to pin categories or subcategories, so if you care about a particular area, feel free to do so!
New features:
We’ve added two new tags for observations and detailed contributions. For instance, “End 1986 liability shield for pharma” is an observation.
We are adding some new categories and introducing subcategories!
Energy and Infrastructure (Category), Transportation (Subcategory under Energy and Infrastructure), Homeland Security (Category), Election Reform and Political Integrity (Subcategory under Liberty), Justice (Subcategory under Liberty)
We’ve added direct messaging to help facilitate conversations
P4PAdmin