Community Corner

There are several ways to get feedback from persons visiting the Community Corner. Before starting, have a reasonably clear answer to the questions:

• Do we want comments about something written or a document?
• Do we want viewers to select from a set of choices?
• Do we want a quick sense of approval or disapproval?
• Is this feedback from anyone or a select group?

For getting comments on something written, blogs and discussion forums are best. Both offer the ability to add comments. If the original content is brief, enter it in a blog or forum post and invite readers to add their comments (blogs) or make replies (forums).  If the document is long, consider adding it as an attachment to either blog or forum entry. Or you can put it into the downloads area for both downloading and commenting. This approach tends to get a wide range of ideas, from those most motivated to write a response.

If you have a series of choices such as asking people to select a meeting date, use the forum polling, like the one following

Polls can have yes/no selections or ask viewers to pick one of a series of items, as in the above example. They do not support 1st, 2nd, 3rd etc choices. With a little creativity, you can emulate a limited number of choices. See the next 2 posts - First Choice for Meeting and Second Choice for Meeting.

For quick approval / disapproval the easiest feedback is to permit rating. Community Corner has a built in 5 star rating system. Viewers click on 1 or more starts to indicate how strong they feel about a forum posting, a download item, or a blog post.

Who can feedback? It can be as open as anyone on the Internet (usually bad idea -- invitation to collect garbage and spam) or restricted to a select group of members on the Community Corner installation.

How to provide feedback and who can provide feedback are set by the site administrator. Community Corner has built in reports which summarize the feedback.