During the fall of 2009, in collaboration with fellow University of Toronto master's student Michael Murphy and PhD student Michael Jones, I designed a prototype online community for the Green Party of Ontario (GPO). This was for the KMDI class "Knowledge Media/User Experience Design: Fundamental Concepts". Our project was designed for an end-user group that was diverse both geographically and demographically. GPO membership is scattered throughout Ontario and ranges widely in terms of age, policy interest, engagement in party operations and experience with social media technologies.
Our initial construction of the user community involved sustaining discussion and debate on policy issues outside of irregular face-to-face annual general and policy meetings. We feel our design project for a GPO community was certainly successful in that it generated discussion and ultimately advanced the core idea, albeit in a way that will have to be integrated more formally into the GPO sphere in a more complex development effort. Future iterations of the GPO online community will have to balance questions of privacy, security, identity and community while embedding the community within the existing GPO online infrastructure.
We also produced a paper for the project which can be viewed here.
