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Freeconomy Blog

Mon
01 Jun

Freeconomy 2.0 is just days away...

Unbeknown to you all, beneath the calm, peaceful facade that this website may have seemed to portray, things have been pretty hectic since March. It has been eighteen months since this community was born, and whilst it has been successful beyond my wildest visions at this stage of its early development, we're the first to say that we've made many mistakes along the way, and we have you to thank you for pointing them out to us.

So over the last few months a bunch of us have been working around the clock to take on board the feedback we've had over the last year, mixing it with our own new ideas and stuff we've learnt (and are continuing to learn) in the process, which is new ground for us all. And so next Monday 8th June we will be launching what is, effectively, Freeconomy 2.0 (geek talk meaning a second, much improved version of the site!). This will mean the website will be down for the weekend, for which I have no intention of apologising, as I know how much more useful you are going to find the website you wake up to on Monday morning.

The new look is going to be the obvious part - its going to be a lot crisper, much easier to navigate, much quicker, clearer and a lot less cluttered. But that's just the vain part.

The real benefits are in the new, highly evolved functionality we are adding. You are going to have a local news feed on your personal homepage (no longer the map) letting you know all the latest freeconomic news in your area. In a manner only previously available to the Facebooks and Twitters of this world, you'll now be able to import all your contacts from your Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL accounts etc, and with the simple touch of a button you'll be now able to invite all your friends to get involved, helping the community to grow at a rapid speed, benefiting not just yourself but people in areas where your friends live. You'll also be able to share it with other friends on things like stumbleupon, bebo, facebook, twitter, reddit, digg etc.

Your personal homepage won't take a tea break to load anymore either, for those of you who have a slow internet connection, as the map will no longer be your default homepage, and theres lots of great new links to help you find your way around the site with much more ease and speed.

A while back a Bristol member convinced me that allowing members to upload photos would, contrary to my original belief, actually help build community; his rationale being that it would enable him to recognise other members on his street and hence introduce himself and offer his help. So we have just done exactly that - you can now upload a picture of yourself.

Searching is going to be much easier also as we have included some predictive text functionality making it easier for you to find exactly the skill or tool you want, and you'll now be able to organise local events with minimum effort and put out offer / request emails in a manner similar to the phenomenal freecycle. Don't fret about this though, in your profile you'll have complete control over the emails you want and don't want to receive.

By popular demand we've also added the option to raise your 'local' radius to 25 miles, so for those of you in small towns or the countryside, you are now going to have access to a lot more members.

We've got lots of new content, including a more refined philosofree, and a new section explaining how freeconomy works with a great short video. This blog will have a smart new look and all my previous blogs will now be in an archive for you to easily sift through. In the interests of inclusivity, if you want to comment on them you also no longer have to be a member.

Just as positively, we've also put our hands up and got rid of stuff that just wasn't working. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has taken on the mantle of Landshare and is doing a much better job than we ever could, and we've done away with pages such as the Links section and Testimonials. With the former, every organisation on the planet (with even the faintest tint of green ideals) emailed me wanting to be listed on it, even though it was the least read page on the site; the latter was just not being used for its original purpose and we felt it was just cluttering up the site.

We've got an updated and much better presented list of FAQs, and we've now even got some very useful information on how to easily, but roughly, translate the site to your own language if you are from a non-English speaking country.

You will still, obviously, be able to sign-in using your current details, so don't worry about that, nothing has changed there.

All of this was not the work of just myself though - nowhere close. Derek from Internet Development for an Ethical World (idew), easily the best web developer I've had to privilege to work with, has worked day and night to make it happen, though giving me the less than exciting job of testing every little move he makes in Firefox, IE and Safari. Brian, a freeconomist in Ireland, came up with the new banner and a very useful illustrated booklet describing the how, what, why and future of Freeconomy. Emily, an extremely talented Bristol freeconomist, spent the best part of a week illustrating our new poster which I am sure you are going to love.

The site is obviously still going to be free and will be forever, we'll never use adverts and we won't even accept donations. Our dedication to keeping it free was rewarded when just in the nick of time a freeconomist called Matt, who hosts websites on his server, got in touch and offered to host the site just-for-the-love-of-it from now on, which proves that with a bit of faith and hard work any ideology can work. Other members helped test the site, clicking every button and exploring every nook and cranny of the new site to see if everything worked. I can assure you this is enough to drive one a bit mad. It has been a real team effort.

Lucy and Amanda are working on a comprehensive package outlining how to successfully put on a regular Freeskilling evening wherever you live in the world, and that will be available to download from the website also, although this may not be for a couple of months.

In fact the amount of people these days - mostly people I've never met before - who approach me or email me telling me about the ways in which they've been helped or have shared something themselves has become overwhelming, and certainly makes all the hard work seem even more worthwhile. The best of the lot was when I emailed a local member last week in response to her request for an accountant, only to be told she had already found an accountant who was going to now help her for free. Now that is what I call progress and reinforces in me that we really can make a huge shift in the way we live, regardless what skills we possess, and that we can all be really useful to someone.

If you need to use this website for anything pressing we recommend that you do it before the evening of Friday 5th June, as it is possible it will be down for 2 days as we switch servers, copy over the files, test it, fix it and do some maintenance work. To help us and the community overall it would be really appreciated if, on Monday morning, you could go to our 'Spread the Word' section and use the new tools there to tell everyone you know about it, and help us get the word out there even more. We want to create a tool that will greatly benefit your life, but its up to all of us as members, not just the admin team, to help get as many people as we can involved, as so if you could share this site with your friends that is probably the single most important thing you can do. It would really only take about 3 minutes and it would make such a difference.

The next time I write to you, all will be different! I hope you really like it and it benefits your life in a real way. Whether it does or it doesn't, let us know by leaving a comment on my next blog which will be available on the new site.

THE FREECONOMY BLOG is written by Mark Boyle, founding member of the Freeconomy Community

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