Hi all!
Its been a while since I last wrote everyone in the very early days of Hungry Onion. I have been hard at work putting the playground equipment together as well as drumming up interest for the playground. Sleep is at a premium…!
In the early days, its easy to say what the goal of the site is- which is to offer a sanctuary for the displaced. There is an excellent point made on the forum that a refugee camp that has no purpose and no organization will simply dwindle away.
With that said, I’d like Hungry Onion to offer a venue where there is the right type of equipment and good content to enable you to have thoughtful and substantial food discussions.
Some projects in the pipeline:
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Moderation/ enforcement guideline:
Remember how moderation issues drove many here? The fundamental problem was a combination of:- lack of transparency/ rule clarity/ consistency
- moderation as a tool to further personal agenda
The goal here is to make transparent/ known the enforcement criteria to everyone, with enforcement consistent across all moderators, and moderators removing themselves from conflict of interest, and agree on major actions (e.g. suspensions). The only point of debate should be on the rules themselves, not the enforcement.
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Geotagging, i.e. location tagging done right, like Fallingfruit.org There should be a map that shows the location of our regional posts. The ideal state will allow one to filter the map on post attributes like recency. Of course with minimal resource and no technical background, I’d settle for a much more modest goal of just having a map that links to the forum posts (and even that’s not easy either). It solves the problem of posts from non-metropolitan areas getting buried, and finding posts from a very specific neighborhood in a city.
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Attract new users
Some interesting stats regarding the traffic source (based on a couple of days of data):
Direct (83%), Search (13%), Referral (3%), Social (1%)
There are a lot of opportunities with SEO, referrals from other sites and social media presence in attracting a new group of users, who may or may not be familiar with the old playground. -
Make it easy for bloggers to have presence on both blogs and forums. This attempts to bring bloggers and forums together by getting more eyeballs on blogs and more content for forums. Commercial forums would never want to do that because they don’t want the traffic to go elsewhere. But there is no such constraint here.
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Real-time translation of posts
The old playground is sparsely populated outside North America, let’s face it. With only a few dedicated expats or locals helping tourists out, the potential of non-North America boards are limited. The first problem? Locals can’t post in their own language (or if they can people can’t read them.) This project is to solve that. -
Phase Hungry Onion into a collaborative project.
With only my free time the site can only go so far in the long term. The goal over time, is to convert Hungry Onion into a collaborative project so interested and dedicated folks can contribute towards the long-term success of the site, e.g. the projects listed above
. Unlike the old playground where there is corporate financial backing, with Hungry Onion, we are truly only as vibrant or as successful as we want/ are willing to be.
Please provide feedback on the ideas. (Good? Bad? Useless?)
If anyone is interested in contributing knowledge in a consultative basis in any of the areas above or getting your hands dirty, you can send me a private message. Remember, I know nothing about how to do any of the above. So even if you know nothing but are willing, we can try to figure them out.
A bunch of stuff on the wish list, I know, but hey there is a blank canvas to take advantage of, why not dream a little bigger?
Cheers.
