Laureatespace - An Online Community for Merit Scholarship Award Winners
This website has 2,500 plus web savvy student award winners who, along with all their educational work, are busy collaborating in chapters across Canada to make a difference in local communities and on issues they care about. They use a system to tag every item in the community to a theme such as poverty or environment allowing users to log in and go to their local chapter page or explore issues by theme. This approach greatly improved usability for users. In addition because of the complex layers of interaction and the bilingual nature of the site we drew upon the expertise of independent usability experts to improve up on the site architecture in way that maximized ease of navigation while minimizing clutter.
In this case we learned users like to have control over how to access and organize their online resources within the community. This approach has allowed participants more control and supported the growth of web content in an emergent way. Student members can renew their awards online and apply for supplemental funding for special project work supporting administrative tasks of foundation staff.
Laureatespace has a sophisticated online community tool to support online engagement and collaboration of members. The discussion board tool fully integrates individual member information and is programmed to quickly show a returning member what is new and who has recently logged in or commented on an item. User controlled email notification of new postings helps everyone easily reconnect to a discussion over time as new content is posted.
