Search & list GSF website member profiles

Comment by Paulus Veltman on Jul 5, 2010

Sure, you need a sponsor and you need be kind to your sponsor.

However, effectively disabling the profiles of your most important assets - we, the speakers - is bad policy.

You can’t have a thriving community if you block the free flow of this type of information, both between members and to the general public.

Please fix this real soon now.

Thank you!

Comment by Alan Stevens on Jul 13, 2010

Paulus,

Thanks for your comment. As a member of a Federation association (PSA Holland), you have been given a free eSpeakers account. You simply need to go to espeakers.com to activate it, and your details will appear in the search.

You are also a member of GSF, which entitles you to a presence on this site. Or have I missed something in your comment?

Best wishes

Alan

Comment by Paulus Veltman on Jul 13, 2010

Alan,

Thank you for your reply. At this time, I would prefer not to outsource my profile management to a commercial party.

All site members have created superb, fully web 2.0 enabled profiles while signing up. I am quite sure this information can be listed and made searchable with very little effort.

Please reconsider. I am sure even a sponsor would see the sense in this.

Best regards,
Paulus

Comment by Erwin Van Lun on Jul 13, 2010

Paulus is not the first who asks me this question. More speakers who registered asked me during the last weeks ‘where did my profile go?’. After I told them that we currently only list eSpeakers members, they were disappointed. ‘I’ve spend so much time to optimize my profile, and now it’s not visible’. Why should I sign up at a third party?

Speakers who work with eSpeakers regard our integration as a service, many speakers, especially from non-English countries, tend to perceive it as an unnecessary step.

I believe if we’d like to integrate fully with eSpeakers we should make it as easy for our members as ticking the ‘create my eSpeakers account to get listed’ during the registration process, without leaving the GSF website. As easy as you can now select your name during the registration process. We’ve received many compliments about the ease of the registration process and personally, I’m in favor of keeping that this way. The easier the process, the more people who signup and complete their profiles and forward the word.

But still, we should leave the choice to the member. I personally believe we can’t demand from our Federation members to sign up at a third party, and leave their details like their email address, in order to be listed on their own Federation website (where they pay for through their association membership).

For the records: my estimate is that 50% of our members refer to an eSpeakers account. However, Non-English speakers don’t use eSpeakers, without an exception, so far as I’ve seen.

For the time being it’s okay just to have the eSpeakers listing, as we currently ‘only’ have 200 GSF website members and there are many profiles available by using the eSpeakers dropdown. That’s a service to eSpeakers members who haven’t signed up yet with the GSF website and a service of website visitors searching for specific speakers.

On the long run, we’ll probably have more Federation members without an eSpeakers account, than who do have an eSpeakers account. In that situation, it won’t make sense not to list the GSF website members on the GSF website.

This feature request is about integrating the listing of eSpeakers and GSF website members, showing them as one speakers directory and search through them independent of the platform where they were created.

Comment by Erwin Van Lun on Jul 14, 2010

update: the phrase ‘GSF website member’ in the original idea is now hyperlinked to clarify terminology

Comment by Erwin Van Lun on Jul 14, 2010

Further thinking about this: we could introduce another social psychology model: it must be hard to get listed. The harder is it, the better.

It happens that I’m currently in the AAAI conference, the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. The paper presented right now is about collaboration in Wiki’s. This is inspiring.

This website is about sharing. It’s not about profiles and people selling themselves, it’s primarily about sharing.

Why don’t we make it a little bit more harder to get listed?

In order to get listed you should have a complete profile + a minimum number of points. You can earn points by:
-writing home page articles
-writing comments/additions on home page articles
-writing in the (future) forum
-logging in
-forwarding messages
-number of added words in the (future) speakers wiki
-number of added sentence in the future speakers wiki
-rating of comments and articles by others

Those who have reached a minimum of points, will be listed on the home page.
Other will be listed in a kind of directory, but they still need to have a minimum of points.

Comment by Erwin Van Lun on Aug 13, 2010

It’s now possible to search on profiles.

I’ve been thinking about this: actually I still believe we should list all registered website members.

However, the default page show the top 50 most active sharing members. Those who’ve posted most articles, most comments or most retweets on our Twitter feeds, are listed as active members.

As this site is about sharing and not about selling, this would be perfectly in line with the website strategy.

Comment by Claudia M Haider on Feb 2, 2011

Dear Erwin, dear Alan,

I would love to see the possibility to search for speakers by language and topic here. If this is only possible with espaekers you should mention this on the GSF website. When I need international speakers the first thing in my mind is the GSF website, not espeakers.

Comment by Erwin Van Lun on Feb 4, 2011

Hi Claudia,

For personal perspective, as a speaker, I would agree with you. The more visibility, the better.

As a GSF representative however, representing a Federation of Speakers Associations, I’m in doubt. The GSF website is not (designed) for speakers to sell themselves. We don’t offer facilities to sell stuff for example, nor to upload an unlimited amount of video, images and products to their profiles. The profile is to be recognized by other speakers when they write an article, leave a comment on an article, or somewhere else on the website.

This will become very clear as soon as we have the home page team up and running. As you might have seen, we’ve made a start and we’ll expect that this will accelerate very soon: the site will soon be crowed.

But it’s not up to me to decide. If we (as a Federation) would like to change strategy and have the GSF website sell speakers, I’m perfectly happy. But that would be an EC decision I think.

eSpeakers is not relevant yet in this discussion. The first part of the discussion is ‘why’ (why should we do this), then ‘what’ (what exactly do we need in order to achieve the defined goals in the ‘why’ answer) and then the ‘how’ (where eSpeakers might come in). So first thing first.

eSpeakers are visible though on the website because they created a very nice ‘where in the where are’ application which is visually appealing. Also, by connecting to their profile database, it’s a service for speakers with eSpeakers accounts: they don’t have to maintain their profiles twice. A service to our GSF website members, which should lower the barrier to signup. So that’s an operational decision.