About organizing categories

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I have a proposal for categories, see if you like it.

For big organizations, I think its very convenient to subdivide them in two transversal axis: one regional and other thematic. In our case we have categories for the Hubs, to communicate with people that lives near you, and we can create others for themes of interest (for example, policy making, narrative change, transforming business or fundraising).

And it’s interesting to have a global category, for topics that may interest to everyone, but moderated to have a controlled quantity of content. For example, the same things that go to the global WEAll newsletter.

And for a platform like this, we also need a “meta” category, to talk about the platform itself. Inside it we may put, for example, the new users onboarding section. This does not need to be a first level category, since new users will be directed there with a link in the welcome message or similar, and experienced users do not need to see it every time. There may be other subcategories like Manuals, FAQs, Need help, Platform feedback, or even Sandbox for testing things.

For the simplicity i said in other post, I think there should be only a few first level categories:

  • Hubs, with a subcategory for each hub.
  • Perhaps one for each main theme of interest (but not more than 4-5), with subcategories if needed for more specific themes.
  • The global category.
  • The “About the platform” category, with subcategories for the sections mentioned above.

This could give a quick “bird’s view” of all the content for new users, and facilitate searching for one specific content you are searching to.

And perhaps we can also create categories for “Projects” (like the Discourse evaluation test with all the missions). They should be nested inside of one of the general categories.

What do you think?

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@andres.moya there’s some discussion specifically about hubs in this thread: Feature Wishlist / Brainstorm - #4 by DavidMGreen

I think one of the concerns that was raised was that if you use hubs as a primary category, then each hub as a subcategory, the hub won’t be able to create its own categories. (Discourse only lets you have two layers).

Strongly agree with limiting the number of categories. In addition to the needs you’ve identified, I might add:

  • Onboarding
  • WEAll News (new projects, monthly meetings, monthly talks, etc)

What was your thought on themes of interest? My concern is that so many of the topics are cross-disciplinary that it might get confusing for people where their posts should go. Another layer @Aamirah-WeAll and I were talking about is that you can also make categories that have specific group permissions. IE you could have specific groups for citizens vs members, or potentially categories for specific projects. This might be a good way to prevent category overload

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It might be good to gather all the potential topics and then narrow them down and upvote to select the top ones?

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You are true: i didn’t remember that there are only two levels of categories. As they said in the other thread, perhaps hubs may use tags to group topics of the same project or working group, for example.

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Also using permissions to hide some categories to all people not interested is a great way to avoid noise. The drawback is that public categories may be indexed and searched, and read even by external people without registration (if we want). So it’s a good way of broadcasting information to the world. But private categories not.

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