Create a People Directory for members to present themselves

[aschrijver]

The idea is that any member that wants that can be added to the Directory. The directory would be very similar to Mozilla Pulse. On the entry level you see a grid of Avatars with name, profession, bio and some links to their own website, linkedin, etc. Then it would also have a ‘Read more’ button that leads to a summary page where they can further introduce themselves and state their interests with regards to Humane Technology and the community.

I often get questions, such as “Could you point me to some researchers that work on [XYZ]?” or similar, but that is hard to answer. Requires searching through Introduce Yourself thread and the forum at large, and many members don’t mention their profession + interest, or are entirely anonymous.

[aschrijver]

This is the forum discussion related to this issue:

• https://community.humanetech.com/t/3940

[aschrijver]

This is how it currently looks like:

It is very basic and needs polishing and brushing of the CSS styles, plus many other improvements. But the functionality is alright, where each Person entry has an entire page in Markdown to present themselves.

Additional entries to _people_directory folder are automatically added to the responsive grid, and can be found with Search.

Note: Pending the improvements and creating procedure for adding entries plus presentation on the forum, the People entry on the main menu is disabled. But you can navigate to https://humanetech.community/people/ to preview.

[patmatsu]

Like what I see on the People page. How will we handle a large number of entries? I know you said there would be a grid, but if dozens of people are in it, it will become unwieldy. My office has a similar problem with our Volumes page. For now it is manageable, but soon it will become difficult to read.

[patmatsu]

Here is how we handled our list of contributors, who number over a thousand.

https://manoacontributors.wordpress.com/

The page is linked to on the Contributors page of the main site. This is not the only solution by any means and may not even be the best.

[aschrijver]

The contributors page offers an alphabetic index, which is not suitable for our own directory. The directory needs to answer questions, like:

• "I am a sociologist, and I want to connect with other experts in the field of Digital Wellbeing"
• "I am a teacher, and I want to develop courseware together with other teachers in the community"

Right now the grid layout will fill up with people sorted by their name. But that indeed gets unwieldy when it grows. I envision the following to be added to the person information one provides:

• One or more (max 2-3) categories, which match the breakdown structure of Docs and the forum.
• One or more tags that allow more refinement of what the person is interested in.

The categories are then used to divide the grid into multiple grids. Each with the header of the category above it. The same with tags, and this has the added possibility to show a 'tag cloud'.

Tags and categories are used globally throughout the site. When clicking on a 'categoryelsewhere on a page in e.g.Docs` section, this should show similar pages, but also have a 'People' section showing the matching persons.

Finally there is search. The search works from a full-text index of the site, and finds people as well based on the search query you type.