Crowdfunding the creation of the next version of LFGSS

A little bird told you?

No, I follow him.

And my skype is guessable: david.kitchen

I'm rather amused by the "If you're not on Facebook you're unfindable" view.

That's why you're building microcosm so all the inoverts can be found isn't it?

tr

Just now picked up on this

My club is on multiple platforms, paper, twitter, a forum and face book

Face book is bring lots of people in - but is Facebook and compared to LFGSS rather restricted. I can't bump a thread etc

Mr Kitchen - hope I didn't miss you today - been running around like an idiot. Did have a quick chat with one of our devs and some of tools you are working with we are working with at the moment too, which is good news. I'm heading out to play 5-a-side in a moment but if you're going to be available tomorrow, I'm in the office all day so happy to chat.

Yup, available tomorrow. Give me a call in the morning.

Just now picked up on this

My club is on multiple platforms, paper, twitter, a forum and face book

Face book is bring lots of people in - but is Facebook and compared to LFGSS rather restricted. I can't bump a thread etc

What's the club? A cycle club? We'd love to be able to help when we're ready to, and to get your feedback sooner than that.

http://leavalleycc.co.uk/

Just thought - do you have a UI expert on board or are you doing that yourself David?

http://leavalleycc.co.uk/

Awesome, as local cycle clubs are exactly the kind of site I'd love to be able to have use Microcosm if we balance it all right.

Just thought - do you have a UI expert on board or are you doing that yourself David?

At the moment doing it myself. It's not my speciality, but I'm also not without experience either. UX/UI is probably me biggest need at the moment, we're aiming for a natural flow and experience, with a fairly minimalist and clean flat-style UI with tactile and obvious calls to action.

Apologies for the mangled post..

David, what I was saying was that the multiple platforms we now have to use are a problem.

Website gets our of date immediately
The forum we use is rubbish
Face book brings a lot of people in- but its Facebook

This software sound about right....

Yup, that's pretty much what I saw was one of the problems with forum software... the defragmentation of the community across multiple external systems just to do stuff which should just be done by the forum. By the forum because that's the website where most of the people hang out and the communication happens.

Is microcosm going to be bigger than an iphone app?

Ahem: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1ezZxUthmrZvx6C6UPCn6JVs8QA7_CCI1KE4DQnYltVE/viewform?pli=1

On it...

"Why are you nominating them?"

"the founder told me to"

I should probably think up a real reason

A real reason would be good.

Maybe that you guys invested less than 6 months ago, and we're just about to launch alpha, and that we invite you guys to pop in, and we're already engaging devs on the API, and that you like the way we even crowd-sourced some of the hardware that is being used, our scrappiness, and how we got crowd-funded in 15 hours (Seedrs record). Perhaps it is the unconvential approach (we're not doing the Old St thing) or the aggressive bootstrapping. Or maybe the pent up demand in this space (forums are ugly and feature poor), how the volunteers come from the extended community, how the space seems to be heating up and is very now (Discourse, moot.it, Vanilla, etc)... maybe even why communities matter, what LFGSS has done for London, why you believe that we're placed well to help do the same elsewhere (in cycling) and even across other hobbies and pastimes.

Genuine stuff is better than raw numbers for Wired.

Real reasons rather than just lots of submissions.

In fact, I'd rather people didn't fill it in if they didn't believe it. I'd rather this wasn't me asking you, more just saying that if you wanted to... it's over there.

Definitely. I was scratching my head over the "what's your relationship to the startup" and I can't honestly say that I'm unbiased given that I've handed over real money to microcosm. I've obviously got a vested interest, as have a crapton of other people. I wonder if that's a black mark?

Definitely. I was scratching my head over the "what's your relationship to the startup" and I can't honestly say that I'm unbiased given that I've handed over real money to microcosm. I've obviously got a vested interest, as have a crapton of other people. I wonder if that's a black mark?

There are not that many crowd-funded startups in London, fewer still that didn't do so on the back of seasoned investors, and no other that has been funded so fast and with so much support.

I don't think it would be a black mark.

Why are you nominating it?
Forums are subject-centred communities where people interact and make stuff happen that is often greater than anything they could have achieved alone. Most forums require a degree of technical know how to engage effectively (unlike most person centred social media). Microcosm will make forums much more accessible and engage many more people so lots of good things will happen.

how we got crowd-funded in 15 hours (Seedrs record)...

...how the space seems to be heating up and is very now (Discourse, moot.it, Vanilla, etc)...

I'd wager those are the two a tech journalist would most want to write about (community + competition). Also how much help we've had from everyone already (financial, equipment, time, expertise).

As for being an investor I'd definitely put it down - it shows that a community believed in it and made it possible.

Microcosm has gone live (in a limited and kinda borked way - sans design) on real servers today.

It's an important milestone, and was also a test of a lot of theories. Most of what we've done this past 3 months has been build back-end to power websites, which isn't glamorous stuff at all.

When you deploy stuff like this, with so much complexity and moving parts, you basically dream that it will just work, and hope that it might work with some hacks, and dread that it will be totally borked.

For what we have (database, backend, load balancer, front-end)... it all works as expected.

The important caveat is "as expected"... which is to say that it does work (phew), but also that it's uglier than Craigslist right now as some things we purposefully left to last.

We've got a couple of days to basically clean things up, and kick the tyres... and then the hack weekend to focus on the real thing (the API behind it all), before finally throwing open at least one little site so that people can kicks tyres and give feedback.

What we're hoping for over the next month or two, is that you bear with us whilst we do the most gnarly bits of developing the front-end experience. We've built a good chunk of the back-end, and now the front-end needs our work. For us to really do a good job there, we're going to need feedback from you guys.

We realise that for several weeks, just trying to use the site will be a somewhat painful experience. But we're also hoping that we make good on this stuff too and are able to listen, learn and adapt really fast so that you see that your feedback counts, and that we are building what you want a site like LFGSS to be.

Anyhow... one milestone only a few days past the deadline (that I'd set in my head weeks ago).

Nice one Velocio!
How can we give you feedback? You're moving lfgss to microcosm?