We are working on a redesign of the NetSquared platform. With feedback from the Community and even from ourselves, we have put together a big list of wishes and needs. After some great redesign mockups, we are inviting the Community back into the conversation to help us continue the process. (Learn more about the redesign here and follow the series.)

Today, we're focusing in on the Project Gallery!

There's currently 407 projects in our Global Gallery. We've heard you loud and clear that the current Gallery pages are hard to navigate and don't contain the critical information you need for a meaningful exploration, so we've done some work to come up with this new Gallery template.

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The Project Gallery (current version here: http://netsquared.org/projectgallery/) is where all Projects "live"—whether they are currently entered in a Challenge, newly-created and preparing for future challenges, or previous Challenge participants or winners.

What's new?

First, a quick note on the current "Overview" page when you click on "Projects" on NetSquared.org. The page explaining the Gallery and the Open Challenges will be replaced by this new Project Gallery page (with Open Challenges moving to the Challenge Gallery page (discussed last week). A quick run-through of the changes:

• each Project's box is a bit larger,
• Project boxes provide multiple action buttons on the main page,
• boxes can be expanded to reveal limited details from the main page, and
• the "star" system has been upgraded to a "fan" system.

Finding Projects

Perhaps most importantly, we've added a couple of ways for you to search/sort/sift Projects so that you can dig deeper into the innovations and areas that you care most about.

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First, we've added the "Project Browser" tab so that you can filter projects by only those currently in an active Challenge, only your favorites (projects you're a "Fan" of), or by those projects you've previously voted for. You'll also be able to browse galleries for specific Challenges.

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Second, we've added the "Issues and Regions" tab for you to filter projects by region, cause, and/or keyword. (A note about "Cause" areas: our taxonomy is not finalized and if you've got strong feelings please let us know!) You will be able to browse just the Projects in your geographic area or in your field.

Reviewing Projects

More than just sorting Projects, perusing all the innovative ideas in the Project Gallery gets easier and more integrated in the redesign.

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The expanded Project overviews embedded in the main page let users learn more about specific Projects without navigating away from the Gallery.   This keeps things much more streamlined and lets users actually "browse" around—shopping for innovative ideas!

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The modified Project view also has a tab to view comments.   Currently, comments on Projects are just like comments on a blog post: they sit at the bottom of the page and just pile up.   The idea here is that discussion really comes out, so users can see questions or ideas posed to Project teams as well as their feedback!   And do so all in an integrated view without having to leave the Gallery.

Give us your feedback!

We are approaching our redesign in a Community-driven way because we recognize that you are the ones who use, read, and play on the site. We are anxious to hear your thoughts about this home page redesign idea!

Follow the Net2Redesign tag to be sure you see all of the posts in this series.

Want to help us make this a reality?

Implementing a redesign like this will require some funds we currently don't have. If you are interested in contributing to the redesign, please contact the NetSquared Director, Billy Bicket, at bbicket@techsoup.org