User guide

Introduction to reading and writing on BIO

You and other members

Discussions

Blogs

What "Friends" are

Top right corner of your page: your mail box and quick adds

The big deal is groups

Search, text and tags

1. Introduction to reading and writing on BIO

Things aren't written in stone. You can modify your profile any time, and also erase any comments that have been put on your wall, and any comments you add to others. You can also pull out of discussions.
You aren't limited to writing pure text. The formatting bar enables both stylistic changes to your text ( bold, italics, underline and strikethrough) as well as hyperlinks, picture uploads, and file attachment uploads - selected here:

2. You and other members

“Members” are users of the site that have set up their identity and have agreed to its terms and conditions. Click on the Members tab and scroll to see other members, or use the search function at the top of the page.

3. Discussions

You can address the main discussion or reply to an individual that has posted onto a discussion. The person who created the discussion can get email notifications or replies. To get notifications of all changes to discussions, see tutorial here ...

Recent discussions are listed on the home page. To see or add to them, select the “Discussions” tab. To start a new discussion, select the + sign on the Discussions landing page. Sort the Discussion Forum content by newest discussions, latest activity or popularity.

Featured discussions show up on the top of the Forum page. We are currently using this functionality to bring forward discussions that relate to the current stage in the OCP update schedule.

On the Forums page, you can also filter by topic category as well as recency and popularity.

4. Blogs

Blogs are similar to Discussions. With more ownership going to the writer, they are less fully featured: discussions aren't threaded.

5. What “Friends” are for

The site lets you request to have “friend” status with another site user. If they agree, you are then enabled to send private messages to them within the network that are not visible to anyone else, including administrators. Your friend will get notifications of these messages in their regular email inbox. You can release each other from “friend” status at any time by "removing as friend". There should be a better word than friend and 'friending', because the act of "removing as friend" isn't an inherently personal or negative act. The limitations of old language and new things.
We're a small and well intentioned community. However, if someone sends you unwelcome info, you also have the option to block their future correspondence.

6. Top right corner of your page: your mail box and quick adds

You can use this box to jump quickly to take an action, although most of these buttons are redundant affordances. Only the inbox and Alerts indicators are unique to this piece of screen real estate. Messaging among members is enabled when a friend/connection invitation has been made and accepted between two members. All messages go to the inbox; they are private and are not visible to either site admin or other members.
Site administrators can message all members. We don’t intend to do this very often.

7. The big deal is groups

Use BIO to communicate with everyone, or to create a focused group. The big deal about the internet is that groups can be formed very easily now. Which eliminates the old scarcities of time and place, and the transaction cost of meeting. We want to work with that reality, to enable self responsibility, inclusion and affordable governance. That's the idea here.

You can set up a private or public specialized group as a “site within the site”. Forming a group is very much like setting up a network. Group members can be automatically enabled to send messages to all the others in the group, even if they are your not BIO "Friends." If you are about to set up a group, please think twice before enabling this last feature, as the last thing we want to do is to give each other unwanted or unnecessary emails.

8. Search, text and tags

Use the search box, located in the top corner of your screen, to search by content or tags.

Tags are short form descriptors that can be added by members to any content - forum discussions, group discussions, photos & videos. Tags are as useful as people's tagging habits. You can tag your own material, you can also tag other people's.

Any BIO page can be tagged by anyone. Select the information icon located beside the tagging field for more info.

Aside from text tags on the site, people also use 3rd party tagging mechanisms such Twitter and Delicious tags. In a networked world, tags are in many ways more functional than bookmarks, because they give you content previews, they are machine agnostic, and... see Wikipedia

When you see other material that could be of use to the group, use the delicious tag “BOWEGOV” or the Twitter tag #BOWEGOV and your link will appear (after a short indexing lag) in our list on the right column of our site.

Confusing at first. Maybe we need to explain this better some time.