One of the many themes of this week has been “how do we communicate with each other and with beta testers effectively?”

In some ways this sounds like it should be so so easy. I mean, really, I’m raising a child, Katie’s walked on the wings of bi-planes, Caroline survived growing up in New Jersey, Ethan and Lew made it through being music majors (aka big dorks), and I’m not quite sure yet what Jean, Brittany, and Kelsi have made it through but, geez, talking with others should be a no-brainer, right? WRONG.

There have been many moments where Ethan, Lew and I have had deep discussions over the course of weeks about some functionality that needs changed and then we just go ahead and change it without talking to anyone else – because, man, it’s been the only thing on our minds for a chunk of time and how could everyone else NOT know about it? There was also one week where Caroline was back and forth from Portland more than she was in the office, and none of us knew until we saw her little suitcase sitting by the front door.

And this carries over to talking to the OsoEco community. We keep saying that we want the site to be a collaboration between us and everyone who’s using it – and we’ve put in some definite steps to do this (one major one being the feedback box you can find on every page in the test site; another being the usability tests we’ve been conducting over the past months) – but now it’s time to step it up and do more.

We came up with some ideas earlier this week – right now, we’re going to use the blog to talk about what we’re working on during the week; what are the hot topics we’re wrestling with; and let everyone in on our conversations, hopes, dreams, frustrations, failures, successes… we’re also going to use this space to pose questions to the community – to talk about what things we’ve got boiling, and see if anyone out there has things they want to add to the pot.

We also are wondering if there are any beta testers out there who would like to work with us on updates – what this means, is that before we update the general beta site, we’d have community members take a look at what we think is ready for production and get thoughts, feedback, etc. If you’re interested, please shoot me an email at adeleatosoeco.com (with the at being an @ sign….).

One of the hot topics today has been about Language, better how-tos and what’s this, and words we’re using on the site to communicate what can be done – cuz really, what the heck does Tagging mean? And a Note? What’s a find? And why can I only post a dilemma but not rave or advocate about something?

Tomorrow I’ll be posting some of our ideas that have come out of meetings we’re having today and see what others think. Till then – keep talking. :)