This page has a few hints and suggestions for how you might organize this Forum. Remember that the Forum offers you the flexibility to set things up how you like, so consider these as starting points to be added to and adapted.

Home page

The Home page of the Forum is important because it's normally where people will enter. It's therefore a good place to put announcements, links to important information, and links to current discussion topics you'd like people to participate in.

If it's important that people see something, the Home page is a good place to put it.

Information Pages

The Forum is a convenient place to store general information that would be of interest to the group, just like you'd post on any other web site. Because editing such pages is easy, it makes it convenient to keep them updated.

Brainstorming

Use the Forum to brainstorm new ideas on a topic, or to flesh out a design idea. Create a page for the topic, and use post or edit to build up the idea over time.

Project Management

Store 'todo' lists, notes from meetings, action items and more.

Discussions

You can use the "Post" features to add comments or have discussions on any page in the Forum. When you want to discuss a topic in some depth, start a new page just for that topic.

Add a paragraph at the top of the page introducing the topic, and invite people to add their own comments. Encourage them to include links in their comments to other Forums or other web pages that are relevant to the discussion.

As discussion continues, you might want to pull out side topics into their own page (use Copy and Paste to move the postings over to the new page, and leave a link in the original discussion).

Put a link to the discussion in a "Hot Topics" area of the workgroup Home page, so people can quickly find the discussion topic. As you move on to other topics, move these links to an "Older Discussions" page.

Multiple Projects

When you first start out, it probably makes sense to keep information on all your group's projects in the main group forum. As you progress, you might find it easier to separate out the work a bit more into different areas. The "Projects" page allows you to create separate areas for different projects, having their own recent changes list, allowing searching only within the specific project, etc.