I’m excited to post a draft of theSpoke Refresh Requirements Document I’ve been talking about for a while now.
For the last year, we’ve been focused on two main goals for theSpoke: building version 1.0 and localizing it into 15 languages so that it is a true global community. We’re now very close to finishing those two goals. We have a decent v1 feature set, all localized versions have launched, and all of them will contain an almost identical feature set by the end of January.
We’re now at the point where we want to refresh theSpoke to move it into the future. To do this, we’re taking the suggestions and ideas we’ve received from members of theSpoke community into account. The document is a summary of all of the requests and ideas we’ve heard, as well as a few ideas of our own. Let me say that it is not a promise that every single thing mentioned in it will be addressed; it’s simply a consolidation of everyone’s ideas into a (hopefully) coherent format. It will serve as the beginning of discussions about what really matters to people in the next version.
I invite all of you to read the document and post your thoughts here. It’s definitely long (17 pages), but we wanted to make sure everyone’s input was there. So now we want to know what you agree with and what you disagree with. Are there things in there that are missing? Do you disagree with a suggestion? All comments are welcome here in my blog, and if necessary we can start a separate message board thread about this.
By the way, a big thank you goes out to Josh Blake, or blakejr, as you may know him on theSpoke. Josh got in touch with me before the holidays and offered to do a feature analysis of theSpoke as a member of the site. He sent it to me back in December and it’s been awesome. Many of his ideas are included in the document – thanks Josh!
If you have ideas and want to get in on the fun and excitement that is theSpoke refresh, please comment, or send me email at mario@thespoke.net.