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Monday, February 8. 2010Co-create your Community Manager
I'm your Community Manager and this means that it is my job to make Shapeways easier and more compelling for you while at the same time increasing the size of the Shapeways Community. Since I work for you, I'm going to ask for you to evaluate me. I am also going to ask for you to determine what the waking hours of the next three months of my life will be like and where we should be headed. I am asking you to co-create my job & output as a Community Manager for the next three months.
I'm asking you right now to take this survey in order to tell me now.
How it will work: The survey is based upon all the comments, answers, ideas, feedback, conversations and emails I've received from our community over the past months. I could not include everything but instead included the ideas, projects and suggestions that were mentioned the most often. In some cases regular feedback was not included because it is already being handled by another project or person. In some cases the feedback and ideas came from a relatively small group of people or even an individual. In these cases however these people's considerable efforts for the Shapeways Community and/or their unique expertise in a relevant area warranted their inclusion. The free form responses or feedback you will write in addition to the survey will be tabulated, mind mapped and will be added to the goals and projects I will undertake. If significant clustering does occur between free form responses I will add these to my list of projects, priorities or goals. I will divide up my time according to the priorities that come out of the survey. I will try to accomplish the goals set in the survey. A high score on the survey is no guarantee that something will happen, just that I will try my hardest to make it happen. There is also a personal 360 feedback element in the survey and I will try to either improve or stay the course with any and all information that emerges from that. I want you to see me as your employee and I would like to be evaluated critically and fairly. At the end of the time period I will do an evaluation to determine how successful I was in meeting your goals and if we should repeat this. I'm not sure yet how and if we can make those results public but will try to do so. The survey will require that you fill in the email address you use with your Shapeways account in order to verify that you are a Shapeways Community Member. I will not see these email addresses. This survey will take you approximately 6 minutes. It would mean a lot to me if you took the time right now to take the survey here. Photographs by Dano and mbiddulph under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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Your commitment to evaluate your own performance feels right, and I believe you'll follow through. Thanks for helping to make Shapeways a positive, constructive place to create. We will challenge you, I'm sure. It's a true pleasure to have a mature, intelligent, forward-thinking person on the other end of the line. Cheers!
Thank you,
Richard.
There are a lot of tools out there. On the free/cheap side: Blender is a powerful free and open source animation and modeling tool. The UI is difficult but the community is unsurpassed. The great thing about Blender is that if you do master it you can use it to 3D print and also to make renderings or go into animation. Bonzai is also a good tool. viaCAD is inexpensive and works well with Shapeways. You could also use Google Sketchup which is easy to learn and free but more limited than the other tools.
If you're a student there are cheap versions of Solidworks & Rhino. There are many alternatives, Meshmixer for example allows you to play with objects but is not a modeling tool as the others are: http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/341-Easy-object-composition-with-Meshmixer.html
There really isn't one tool for everyone. It depends on what you want & what things you'd like to do with the tool.
You have more than 700 pages of models, which makes more than 7000 individual models and 4 categories. So if I don't accidentaly find the right one I have to look through about 1750 models in my category. Not very pleasing. In addition most of the models are in more than one category. I don't expect you to have a category feature like Amazon or eBay, but if you wan't to be a real shop for people who are interested in buying creative products you have to do someting about this. If you just wan't to be a place for people who want to print their own models its fine how it is now.
I think this issue is especially important because you want to "make Shapeways easier and more compelling for [us] while at the same time increasing the size of the Shapeways Community."
Finally I want to thank you to offer this great service to such a great amount of people.
Luis
"I could not find a thing," is indeed a big issue. So the question to you guys would be: what is important? Is it important to create a mechanism that would make it easier for people to discover things? Or is it important to let them find exactly what they are looking for? Would a 100 different categories even help?
One of the things that came to my mind would be something powered by seadragon.com technology, such as the following link.
http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/
I remember when I first saw PhotoSynth. and how pictures re-arrange themselves by proximity. This proximity can be tags. Like the tag cloud, where the objects are weighted by popularity, theme, category, material. whichever images match more of these categories would be closer to the 'central/current' image.
we're already working on this and we should solve this soon.
LUV ME SOME SHAPEWAYS !!!!!