Topics are the overarching themes on ThinkCycle, which provide a shared working space for communities interested in specific problem domains. Topics should facilitate the creation of well-posed challenges, an archive of relevant resources, discussion of ongoing issues and development of evolving design solutions in a shared problem domain. The active communities formed around topics of interest sustain Open Collaborative Design on ThinkCycle.
Each topic is loosely moderated by an editor (initially the topic creator) and ThinkCycle members who subscribe to it. Any member can contribute shared resources, ideas, discuss challenges and design concepts within a topic. These postings are emailed to all subscribers. A shared filespace and discussion board allows members to exchange relevant material. Members can also add related publications (references to paper or books), along with reviews for them.
Though there is no restriction or formal moderation of content posted; the topic editors and community provides guidance and maintains focus for the topic. As this is setup to be a self-organized and distributed activity, we suggest some guidelines below for creating topics and sustaining communities of interest on ThinkCycle.
Creating Topics: Guidelines for Developing Online Communities of Interest
We encourage domain experts, problem stakeholders and design teams to create topics on Thinkcycle. These topics should be actively developed with the participation of interested individuals and organizations. To make topics useful for the ThinkCycle community, please consider these guidelines:
Focus and Relevance: Topics on ThinkCycle must have broad relevance to a community of interest, particularly in the categories of problem domains listed e.g. Health, Education, Energy, Community, Sustainable-Living etc. Consider the key design challenges in the problem domain and interests of individuals who you expect to join this topic community. To eliminate redundancy, please verify that key aspects of your topic are not covered by existing ones on ThinkCycle. It is better to have a few topics with an appropriate focus that can sustain active interest, rather than many narrowly defined topics without much activity.
Design and Action: Topics must be devised with potential outcomes that are clearly oriented towards collaborative design or participatory action in critical problem domains. E.g. Topics like Cholera Treatment Devices or Human Rights Monitoring are focused on design and active means for tackling critical challenges. Topics like Chippewa-Cree Tribal Members Empowerment promote awareness and adoption of sustainable practices and technologies in particular indigenous communities. Topics like Community VC Fund for Open Source Innovation encourage dialogue and novel solutions for supporting collaborative design.
Problem Domains vs. Projects: Topics are not intended for use as personal project spaces. For new collaborative design projects, you can create separate ThinkSpaces within topics, that serve as shared online (or private) working spaces for design teams.
Describe and Categorize: Please write a 1-2 paragraph description, outlining the broad focus of the topic i.e. the motivation, problem domain and key challenges. A well-formulated and focused description provides a meaningful framework for members to contribute to the topic. Select an appropriate 'Category' for the topic, or choose 'General' if you are unsure.
Modifying Topics: To change the topic title or description after submitting a topic, do not press back on your browser and re-submit changes; this will create a duplicate topic (if the title is different). Instead select 'Edit Topic Summary' to change it. Topics can only be deleted by ThinkCycle Administrators.
Seeding Content: After creating a topic, please add relevant challenges, resources and links to seed the topic with appropriate content providing a framework and incentive for others to contribute.
Creating Community: You will receive an email confirming your new topic. You may send this message to people interested in joining and contributing to the topic, i.e. designers, domain experts, problem stakeholders (non-profits & communities) and organizations (in industry or government). Encourage them to register as members on ThinkCycle and subscribe to the topic.
Sustaining the Community: As a topic editor, it is your responsibility to maintain active interest in the topic, provide updated content and help moderate contributions (i.e. make suggestions to contributors when needed). If you are unable to do so, you must request someone else to serve as the topic editor. In that case, you should notify the ThinkCycle Administrator to change the topic editor.
Disclaimer: ThinkCycle does not assume any responsibility for the nature of content submitted by members of the ThinkCycle community to topics. Contributors must ensure that appropriate copyrights and due credit is given to any original sources of the content. All intellectual property for content submitted is retained by the contributors, however they agree to share it for review in the public domain by placing it on ThinkCycle.
You may create a topic now, if you feel it is relevant and fits these guidelines.
