The other day, I proposed facilitating a discussion at the Open Source CMS Summit 2007, hosted by Yahoo:

Building community online

Community building is more than just software, and more than just people. The nature of online communities is changing, no longer defined exclusively by bulletin boards or superblogs.

Years ago I had a Palm. Back then I used it pretty much just as an organizer. Now I have replaced my mobile with a Palm 700p smartphone (which runs on old [deprecated] Palm software but has a very sharp and bright screen) so as to be able to get online while mobile, without having to drag along a laptop computer.

I've spent the last few days browsing the web, and learning some things — mainly that when viewing them on a handheld, the vast majority of websites out there not only look like (excuse me) crap but don't even work! On many sites, I would scroll all the way down through the page to the bottom, and never find the content. It was all off to the side, where (hello, Blazer designers!) the handheld's web browser will not scroll.

In working on web design and DVD authoring, we're constantly focusing on making the user interface easy to understand and use. Every job is different, with different goals to meet and limitations to accommodate. When it comes to complexity of functionality, these two media represent opposite ends of the poles: Drupal-powered websites have much complexity, while DVDs are incredibly simple. Yet optimizing usability of these two vastly different interactive formats can be very challenging. This is because complexity in itself is not a barrier to ease of use. Complexity is not a disease.