As we’re applying for funding, one of the things we could do with that funding is to contract with experts in online community design.
I asked how to price this out for a forum built on Discourse and got a lot of great responses! Read the full discussion on Discourse here: How do we price out website/Discourse development? - #4 by fzngagan - community - Discourse Meta
We can structure the scope for design and development as
- Community concept
- Design
- Development
- Maintenance
People who have offered to support include
Eli Chang from Pavilion
I’m one of the folks who founded Pavilion with @angus - thought I’d reach out to help with your community development budget. If a time on my calendly (Calendly - Eli Chang) works would love to chat with you about both the overall expense categories and specific costs for items if we were to help you do them.
Are the Coordination/Content sections you listed going to be for salaried staff at your organization? A category that might be worth including is Discourse or community-administration training for said staff/whoever will be overseeing the community. Would also love to into more detail with you on what you’re envisioning r.e. Strategy, Outreach, etc.
Nola Sabes
https://discourse.nolosabes.com/
I had a look on your project before when you were seeking a volunteer admin. I didn’t reach out, because it seemed quite an effort and I’m already busy on another volunteer project (community.couchers.org ).
But what struck me as the most interesting potential was not keeping content and community separated, but going for an integrated platform. It seems the project is basically the community it wants to support and grow. So it could make a lot of sense to build everything centered around the community features and not link to the community as a specific, separated area.
I sketched up a basic view of the landing page to illustrate this approach. The central ideas are setting up simple and direct engagement routes (Join & Connect; Act & Lead; Learn & Train) that will link to dedicated discussion and information spaces. And, as said, building everything as community while rather dropping the common forum look and and terminology:
Well, just sharing this because I like to sketch up ideas. In case you’d want to go that direction, I’d estimate a budget around 5000$ and I’d certainly be excited and curious to work this out with your coalition.
About the budget: I typically ask 100$/hr and would estimate around 50-60hrs to build that. Though that’s not a budget proposal, that would depend on specific facts. It’s just a rough statement that I’d estimate you can’t get something that custom for 2k. But you also wouldn’t need 10k.
About my role in the framework I mentioned: I can take care of all aspects, though some only to a limited level. More or less like:
- community concept: Entirely. I love that work
- design: Half/half. I’m a web-designer and when clients have a design system in place, I can fully adopt that. But I don’t work as a graphics designer and would hand related tasks to dedicated designers.
- development: not the programming part. There’s actually 3 aspects to implementing a discourse site:
- admin knowledge of Discourse
- styling knowledge
- programming knowledge with respect to the Discourse code-base. I’m not a programmer and need to hand over the coding of custom functionality.
With regards to the mock-up: That’s essentially a community concept sketch. It takes some styles from your site (like pictures, logo, a few colors). But it’s not designed in the graphics sense and you don’t have a design system in place to draw from. Then, how much custom programming you’d need to implement a site like that basically depends on the features you’d want. As it is, I’d just imagine it necessary to integrate a donation/newsletter panel.
Jay Pfaffman
In a former life I was an academic and know a little about grants.
I can probably help you get at least a good-enough estimate for stuff that you could put it in a grant proposal.
Most of the things you include are vague enough that it’s hard to tell exactly and it’d depend on what your budget is.
I’ve published a version of the feverbee site before. I imagine that it needs some love. And just what you want and mean by that affects the price.
Hosting is also all over the map depending on the plugins you need, where you need it hosted, and so on.
There’s an autotranslation plugin. It works.
the main thing for the grant is to make up some budget for the technology that seems credible and is within the constraints of the grant.