We’ve just launched this community platform and are interested in your feedback and suggestions for developing it further.
Our hope is for this platform to become a space for thinking, discussion and exchange about the future of our food systems and to foster interaction across sectors, disciplines and world regions. TABLE is rooted in three Universities and as such, we’re very keen to welcome students to this platform and help provide a space for them to engage with stakeholders from other sectors. We hope this will enrich students’ own learning and help them shape research projects that have real-world relevance.
Corresponding the idea of this being a ‘community’, we hope to develop this platform with you, its users. We welcome your feedback on the platform and also invite your comments and suggestions on how this platform could become most useful to you, your colleagues, or other user groups you can think of.
What are your overall impressions of the platform?
Are there any features that you find are missing?
Any bugs or other issues that you run into?
Do you have ideas for how we (the TABLE team) can encourage thoughtful dialogue in this space?
Any further suggestions for people or organisations that we should invite to this space?
Hi Walter, Helen, Matthew and team - the platform looks great!
I like the fact that it has echoes of the FCRN google discussions, so will be familiar to your faithful followers, but also is intuitive enough for newbies.
I have tried out the sharing, liking and notifying functions, all are straightforward and seemed to work fine.
A question around users - are they able to specify their user name or does it have to be their full name? I feel there should be an openess about who is participating, i.e no avatar/alter-egos, especially when some of the topics could be sensitive, or could drive predatory research.
We (IFSTAL) will of course promote widely as this is a fantastic area for our participants and alumni, and the new UK Food Systems CDT is also a key group. We are part of the food systems teaching community of practice, many others may emerge from there.
Topics will surely drive traffic? and phd students and maybe those thinking about embarking on research may find it useful to glean opinions from the other participants.
Thank you, Rosina! These are great suggestions and we’d really appreciate if you can share this within IFSTAL. Another way in which we hope to engage students on this platform is by connecting to food and sustainability courses.
On your question: you can actually change your username, but I agree this is not very clear. The way we set this up is that the login function on our main website (tabledebates.org) is tied to that of the community platform, meaning that people only have to login once and not have separate accounts for tabledebates.org and this community platform. You can change your username here https://tabledebates.org/user/ on the main website and a change there will also appear here on the community platform. A bit complex, I agree. We’ll keep working on the tech behind this platform and I hope this will all become more straightforward in the future.
I’ve also taken a look and I agree with Rosina, it all looks good and fairly straightforward! I also have a question on the user part: is it possible to see some more information on the users? For instance, I can see in your name (Walter) that it says ‘TABLE staff’, but I don’t see any bio info on others. It would be nice to know where people work / what they are working on.
Otherwise, I think it looks great and I particularly like the Internship and Thesis matching system. Curious to see whether and how that will work across institutions etc. and how to get students to find their way here. I for one will definitely try and check out this space more regularly!
Thank you Anke. It’s still on my list to discuss the internship and thesis match maker with career services at WUR but if you’ve any other suggestions that would be very welcome .
That is a great suggestion. I’m gonna discuss it with our developer.
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