A group wrote me recently asking about the Mosaic Commons Decision Log, which is a custom tool one of our folks put together. It has some features I like - it's searchable, you can mark decisions as important/not or obsolete/not, it identifies the relevant team, etc.

For Sawyer Hill (the umbrella entity for Mosaic Commons and Camelot Cohousing), we're using a simple google document with a dated list. For its purpose, that's totally fine.

What do you use? What features about it do you like, or do you wish you had that you don't have?

Whenever I hear something three times, I take it seriously.

At this conference, the request I heard three times was for a basic website template for a new group just starting off.

I'm giving some thought to how best to do this. (Disclaimer: I'm not sure which hat I'm wearing here, my own personal website building hat, or my cohousing.org webmaster hat)

I think a basic cohousing website for a new group might include:
- What is cohousing
- Vision statement
- Information about land or land search area and status
- Upcoming events
- Contact information, email list signup.

What else would you want to see included? What do you think would be appropriate for a new group to pay for such a thing?

During my session at the conference on Building Great Websites, we talked about wikis and google documents, and the plusses and minuses of each.

My take was that Google Documents were an easier way for most folks to work on a document together, and the wikis were generally more comfortable for more technical folks. (I hear my illustrious husband, who also presented, disagrees with me on this, but it's possible that that only proves my point)

Know your audience, Choose your audience

My conference session description says: "Building a great website starts with asking three questions: Who will be using this website? What do they want and need? What’s the easiest and most attractive way to help them find it? In this session we’ll start with the basics of identifying your users, go over categorization (aka information architecture) and how that plays into building site navigation, and talk about content, tools, and bells and whistles. Other website builders are more than welcome to attend and share your expertise!"

That first question is harder than you think. In order to choose how you are going to serve your audiences, you need to know who they are. Here's who I think hits the Mosaic Commons website (leaving off search engines and crawlers for the moment):

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This blog will be authored by Raines and Catya. If you have any requests for blog posts, let us know!