If you’ve used Social Source Commons at all over the past 6 months, you’re likely familiar with the prodigious work of Tim Wescott, our SSC product manager. Tim has helped drive a five-fold growth in our database of tools since his arrival, and has supported our community of users while helping to lead the redesign of the site.

Tim is working for Aspiration as part of the CTC VISTA Program, and we’re grateful to have his big brain on the team!

We’ll be using the SSC Blog to more actively narrate our efforts to map the universe of tools available for nonprofit needs, and Tim will be leading that blogging charge. We’ll welcome your comments in that process, and Tim will be reaching out to the SSC community to interview you about your tools usage and wish lists.

Tim, why don’t you say hello and tell our blog audience a little more about yourself?

Thanks to all you amazing Beta Testers who are putting SSC through its paces and telling us how we can make the platform more valuable in your work, and easier to use. We really appreciate the feedback, and encourage everyone to keep it coming. We hear you, and we’re integrating new features and key fixes for a new version which we’ll post soon.

The feedback we’re getting falls into several consistent areas:

• Shared “Community Toolboxes”: many users want the ability to collaboratively create lists of tools in specific categories such as “eAdvocacy” or “Case Management” or “Micro Finance”. We’ve already got the “back end” code for this support ready, and now we’re working with the excellent folks at Quilted to integrate that support into the user interface.
• Support for “Communities of Practice” or “Sub-Communities”: While the current platform lets you find out what anyone else in the community is using, it doesn’t answer the question “what are folks like me using”? We are working to design support for creating communities based around interests and identities.
• Support for collaboration: In the current Beta, you can find folks who use the same tools as you, but you can’t connect or collaborate with them beyond leaving a comment! We are inviting discussion on how to integrate the platform with apppropriate collaborative tools to support peer support and knowledge sharing.
• Better searching, filtering, and syndication: the current search features are, to be kind, “lacking” :^) In addition, RSS feeds don’t provide enough detail and context, and can’t be filtered to by type of information. We’re working hard to punch up this support and make it easier to find and track the tools you care about.
• Usability, usability, usability: we’ve gotten great feedback on making it easier to add tools and contacts, edit and tag tools, and improve the data model to make more sense.

Of course, we’ve gotten lots of other amazing suggestions and feature ideas, and very detailed bug reports (“D’oh!”). We’re tracking them all, and incorporating as many as possible into upcoming releases.

We’ll send out an announcement when there’s a next version of SSC live for testing, and in the meantime, please keep telling us about new tools you find and how we can better publish and organize the info!