Paucity of posts & thoughts on why & possible remedies

[fishtailfrank]

A person of influence whom I’ve decided to ought to be known as “Neptune” suggested that any and all perspectives regarding the homelessness support forum would be welcomed & considered on their merits.
My perspective is perhaps as different as you could get – or maybe not .

Firstly the forum appears to have an extremely low posting rate & presumably traffic isn’t exactly causing server gridlock.

I’d speculate that this is because the target audience isn’t reached in the most efficient way.

The current targeting of the homeless via posters & the like will go so far – however the forum is really aimed at homelessness prevention.

I’m making some assumptions here which may of course not be universally true.

They are that most people who become homeless don’t tend to dwell on the matter until it’s too late.

However their peer group may well be able to indentify issues when these people lack insight.

It may well be true that if this group were aware of a forum which dealt with a range of social issues, including but not limited to homelessness, then the chances of the forum being of use & demonstrably used would increase – if done well I believe it would increase significantly – pure guesswork tho.

Generally speaking the best way of raising awareness is to embed the message within their social arena in some form.

One of the most widely used arenas are the e-based social networking sites such as bebo & facebook etc.

Whether such sites would be interested in taking on what might appear to them to be an issue with which they aren’t concerned is unknown – however if you don’t ask you don’t get.

What I do feel is that it’s unlikely that a forum with a scope that appears limited to homelessness & is as localised as county Durham – hardly a household name on an international site – is pretty unlikely to register as being worthwhile. If the scope of the site was broadened to include lynx to other service providers in other arenas as well as geographically broadened to say the northern region, then it’s more likely to be considered as worthwhile. Just my opinion of course.
The potential benefits of such an undertaking being successful to the site hosting the advertisement would be potentially financial ( remember this site would comprise an amalgamation of local sites concerned with homelessness & other pressing social issues) in terms of advertising revenue if it was deemed a success. There also could be a spin off aspect of good press for the “socially aware caring sharing” web (I have an aversion to the word “net” quite why I’m unsure) based company.

This would provide an opportunity for the company that designed & ran the site – to contract out their expertise to the other service providers within the amalgamation of service providers who felt they wanted to take part.
Of course I may be completely wrong on this matter - but f I’d have thought that to enquire to find out if such a relationship was potentially viable would be worthwhile.
If so the company which finds out what would & would not interest them could be in a strong position to create something suitable to all parties.

Just my opinion.

I had written much more – the site timed me out & I lost the whole lot – live & learn

[fishtailfrank]

The inability to edcit is extremely irritating BTW

[Gary]

Thanks for that fishtailfrank, some interesting reading there.

The inability to edcit is extremely irritating BTW

Please expand on your comment, ie are you talking about the format of dictionary files for instance?