Wanted to take the opportunity of sharing with you a solution for the G+ Migration, that has come about from Wikifactory engaging the Make your own ceramic 3d printer’ G+ community:https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/109375785524125994679
Wikifactory is a social platform for collaborative product development, perhaps most resembling a Github for hardware or product design. Our features include a version controlled repository with 3D visualisation, a flexible documentation editor, and an issue tracker to invite feedback and contributions.
Since co-creating with +Dries on adding discussion forum-like features to Wikifactory to facilitate the G+ migration of his community which will launch in a few weeks, I’m really happy to reach out to this Google+ group too because we’d love to see you continue!
Here’s a link to a post by +Wikifactory Community detailing the new features:
https://wikifactory.com/@carolportugal/stories/wikifactory-forum-for-digital-fabrication-communities-on-google?fbclid=IwAR1bw8I8d0zpkKA-E3yLB1F12UqHspH0_b0nK8KkiJNOyUrqNuMQL-XIHz0
I’d be happy to connect personally and explore how the forum we are developing with Dries for his community can also benefit yours, as well as address any other concerns you might have.
Sorry, not interested in any site which requires a login for everything. I just visited your site and tried to download a project, only to be required to sign up. This walled-garden approach goes against the very nature of the 3D Printing community, where open access does not require personal information.
@ThantiK I can understand your reservations about requiring login for downloading posts, its certainly not our intention to create a ‘walled garden’ type of community - so I feel I should explain.
At Wikifactory our purpose is to help people develop better products together. We aim to be a platform for collaborative product development not simply a file store (or even a showcase) for projects. In this way we differ significantly from the existing sites for uploading and download 3D printing files.
The reason we request login is that we don’t want to be a dumb file store for people to come and download files from but want to build a community that contributes to projects whether by commenting on files, creating issues or contributing actual content to the repositories.
Since we are in the early stages of awareness building it isn’t obvious to people how land on a project that they can engage more deeply with projects when then arrive looking to solve their immediate need to download a file. Requiring downloads was a recent change because people were simply coming to Wikifactory to download files from projects. Indeed our experience shows that this has increased the quality of engagement, with people who weren’t previously signing up now doing so, and finding themselves able to leave comments and issues which they wouldn’t otherwise do.
Another thing I must point out here is we aren’t requiring much at all by way of personal data and are perfectly happy with pseudo-anonymous sign-ups - so no need to enter a private data (apart from an email address which we will not share).
All that said, we are open to feedback, and are very concerned if this approach is giving the impression that we are trying to require personal data in order to create a ‘walled-garden’. Happy to rollback this change and serve these files to anonymous users if we can find better ways to ensure that visitors do sign-up and engage more deeply with the community. Suggestions welcome!
It is exactly the community of people doing open source product development for which we aim to connect and provide the tools to collaborate. I think it is fair to say that we are already doing a better job of that in many respects than other sites out there. This is being validated by the increasing participation of many of the most innovative and interesting projects in the community. Please don’t dismiss us just because we are experimenting with the best ways to grow! Happy to talk more.