TimeBanks USA e-Magazine | Page 16

Continued from page 9.

Built to Evolve

Community Weaver 3.0 has been developed with extensive, careful input from our advisory coordinators, and with ongoing in-depth weekly consultation with the developer. Its design is future-upgrade friendly. This new version has been designed to evolve and to meet TimeBankers’ needs as the change and grow over time.

One of the challenges of Community Weaver 2 was that changes and fixes required extensive and often challenging programming. The core of Community Weaver 3.0 is designed to incorporate upgrades quickly and efficiently.

New features are already planned or in the works. After the full release of Community Weaver 3.0, we will be incorporating these additional new features – as requested by the advisory group of TimeBank coordinators and specified in detail – for versions 3.1 and 3.2.

Community TimeBanks – clustered or regional TimeBanks all sharing one version of Community weaver. (Already partially implemented in CW 3.0)

Interest Groups – Groups of individual TimeBank members who want to communicate better with each other about a specific interest can join an interest group within the TimeBank.

Projects and/or Partners – Multiple requests/offers assigned within a single TimeBank project or TimeBank partner to allow for better planning, tracking progress, and so on.

Integration with Social Media – enabling those members who belong to Facebook etc to access details of offers and requests posted on Community Weaver through their social media.

Around the country (and the world) TimeBank coordinators and members can then try out Community Weaver 3.0 and its new features for themselves at their own pace, using data drawn from their own TimeBank. The try-out will not affect ongoing exchanges in Community Weaver 2. Safely using a trial version, they will be able to experience the new software for as long and as often as they please.

When they feel comfortable, ready and prepared, TimeBank primary coordinators will click on a command that instructs Community Weaver to transfer the data permanently from Community Weaver 2 to Community Weaver 3.0. The time for that to happen will be completely under the control of TimeBank coordinators.