Poloverse Bike Polo Forum Design Fund

Dear Inhabitants of the Observable Poloverse

If you are too lazy to read a long text and vote for the designs, here's the link for you: LINK.

We are (almost) there: our new Discourse forum will soon be ready to launch! For now, we are still testing and improving it, but we want to give you a quick update: There’s a design contest waiting for you to participate.

We are using Leechi to present it to you so you can chip in, if you like - the money will be handed out to the graphic artists (all polo players themselves) who put in a lot of work to create these beautiful logos. Shoutout to Bojo (Milan) and Raimo (Berlin) - thanks, you rock! The winner will get some extra, but all participants will get a fair share of the pot. So please be generous, otherwise we might end up with a design like the above!

In case you are wondering, here's a little backstory and some infos on the forum itself:

How we got here

As most of you would know, the issue with Facebook has been here for a long time. After long discussions in various constellations we decided to do a survey to help us better understand what type of online-platform the community really wants. The results were clear in regard to several points: most of you want to quit Facebook and a lot of clubs would consider having a club page and thereby doing at least part of their organization through a new platform. You care about data security and would prefer an open source solution. Another clear requirement was great mobile friendliness. Finally, integrated tournament calendar and marketplace seemed to be absolute must-haves. If you are interested, here (LINK) you can find the full results again.

What we came up with

We looked at and tested several options, some that you mentioned in the survey, some we heard about and ultimately settled for Discourse. It is probably the biggest modern open source community organization tool around and seems to offer everything we want. We tested software that was easier to set up, but thanks to the vast and very helpful community around discourse, we should be able to imply anything we want, given some time and energy invested. It is close to a traditional forum but has a modern touch to it - like using tags to sort and find content, rather than an old-school ‘tree’-structure of subforums. It also has its own app where you can set push notifications. Oh yes, and by the way: apart from hosting, which we intend to do by ourselves, it’s completely free! We would love to use this opportunity to find a way to collect some funds for EHBA and the people invested in advancing the sport, but at least the running costs for the forum are next to nothing.

So, what are the next steps?

We hope you understand that building a forum for several hundred users is a task that takes some time. Currently we are further setting up the structure, creating some content, improving functions like calendar and gallery and working on the design. We know you are a bunch of esthetes so we want to do this last thing right. Which is why we asked some graphic designer poloists to propose a logo and we want you to vote and pick your favorite!

Let's see them and vote! (LINK)

After a decision will have been made, our beloved Pietro from Milan has offered to do the web design. We hope to be done and ready to go sometime in August! Once we launch, however, we are not done. It makes little sense for us to decide on a structure before we see how you people use the forum. So we depend on your feedback, especially in the early days. And we are looking for moderators for smaller local subforums or for larger international parts of the forum (like the marketplace etc). Once the forum is up and running, get in touch if you want to help out.

We hope you are as excited about this as we are and that have some patience with us in the early days.

Lots of Love, some polo players XX