This is how I see the structure of Dadamac.net. developing so far - and for now I will discuss it here as it is being implemented using Drupal.

To start with I had to do a normal website structure, with top down information.

I see the forums as a place where we can also collect information in a bottom up kind of way. The forums will develop as a result of discussing things that we are doing. Previously these things have been discussed elsewhere online, now we can make much of it visible here insted of scattered all over the Internet.

Some of these discussions threads will gradually formalise and become specific projects and as such they will get listed at the top of the site.

Dadamac.net is a bit odd, because it is as much about how we are doing things as what we are doing. I am trying to illustrate what we do, and what we know, and how we go about things, rather than try to describe it. This means that somehow I have to "lay out our stall" showing more than just the things we are involved in, the people we know and work with, and so on. I have to show how everything fits together and how each part complements other parts, and just what it is that Dadamac contributes to the whole thing.

I think I will have people coming into dadamac.net in various ways. If they come into it like a normal top-down website then they start at Dadamac.net. At present the home page is static, but as we get more blogs and photos coming in we will feed that into a dynamic front page. People who come in througn the home page will probably be poeple who are new to Dadamac.

By contrast people who are already involved with Dadamac in some way are more likely to come in via a reference to a particular page, probably within a discussion forum, as that is where dynamic content will be happening.

I am already finding that, in my emails or online chats, I refer people to specific dadamac.net pages instead of explaining things "from the start", so I know that the content is getting  useful. Over time i hope that more of their responses will turn up in the discussion forums as well - but that will only happen if I learn how to make the formums user friendly and a preferred way of continuing discussions. This is the challenge. We have the information traffic - but can we persuade more of it to pass directly througg dadamac.net instead of swirling around outside in an unconnected way. 

If I can do that then I will have achieved one of my longstanding abjectives - to stop being an information bottleneck.

I want to make it much easier to introduce people to each other and enable them to get on and collabrate using structures we have set up. We will let people know what (in our experience) works well and what does not work, and why. If people want to meet people here and copy the way we do things that will be fine, but if they want us to put time into helping them, then they will have to pay for our involvement.

Dadamac.net is the online space where i hope to bring it all togeher- everything John and I have been learning and doing that is relvant to Dadamac in all its various forms.