Release Notes - September 2022 (v5.0.0)

Alongside you, we’re constantly learning and growing in our efforts to support real-world learning for students. Based on the fantastic input and feedback we’ve received from so many of you over the past year, we’re excited to launch our new and improved CommunityShare online platform as we embark on the 2022-2023 school year.

You’ll notice a major facelift throughout much of the platform, with new features and refinements that will make it easier for you to connect with other educators and partners and co-create projects together. These changes to the user experience are explained in more detail below.

What we’re most excited about is the fact that now, for the first time ever, you can connect with people outside of your own community. By opening up our online platform to allow people to connect across communities, we’re providing more equitable access to skills, expertise and wisdom from one community to another. For example, educators and students in rural areas with fewer available partners will now have easier virtual access to the collective wisdom of all of our communities. We are now in six communities across the country, and we’re looking forward to further expansion in the next year.

We’re constantly focused on improving the online platform, and we see this as a continuous process of conversation and feedback with you and everybody who relies on CommunityShare to provide quality educational opportunities for students.

We hope you enjoy exploring the possibilities that this new national platform creates and, as always, we’d love for you to give us your feedback so we can continue to make CommunityShare an effective tool for you.

Our national network of communities (and network partner organizations) currently includes:

You can now collaborate with users in any of these communities regardless of which one is local to you. You’ll also have visibility to other users in new communities as we bring them on board.

To help you easily identify the community that is local to you, there is now a box in the upper left corner of your screen that displays “My Network” with a logo of the organization that has partnered with us to bring CommunityShare to your local community (network).

Please note: You can’t change “My Network” on your own. If you move or change networks, or think your network is incorrect, send us a note and we’ll change it for you.

Each Network has one or more Stewards who are available to help connect Partners and Educators and move projects along. You can now learn more about the Stewards of your Network. Simply click the My Network box to see your Steward’s contact information and bio.

To find people in the platform (Partners or Educators) who live in other CommunityShare communities, simply click the box labeled “Include partners or educators outside my community.” This will show people matching your search and filter criteria who are more than 50 miles away from you.

When you check that box, people outside of your community will appear with a circle around their profile photo to indicate they are available for “Virtual only” interactions. Their location is also listed along with their distance from you.

You have the option to not be shown to users outside of your local community. Simply navigate to your name in the new side navigation, click “Edit my profile,” and deselect “Virtual” in the box asking “What kind of opportunities interest you?”

When you search for Offers or Projects, you’ll see everything that is available whether they’re coming from inside your community or from another community.

In-person Offers or Projects only come from Partners or Educators within your own community. Virtual Offers can come from Partners or Educators both within, or outside, your local community.

If you toggle the button to include Projects or Offers outside your network when exploring what’s available, these will appear with a special “Virtual-only” icon in your search results.

It’s important to note that any Project you create (if you’re an Educator) or Offer you post (if you’re a Partner) that you designate as Virtual-only will be visible to people outside of your community.

If you want to keep a Project or Offer visible only to your local community, then you’ll need to select the box for “In-person” when you create it (even if you also want it to be available virtually). “In-person” Projects and Offers don’t appear in search results for people outside of your local community (more than 50 miles from you).

We’ve also made a number of changes to the look and feel of the CommunityShare platform based on direct feedback from you and our analysis of common pain points.

These refinements are just the most recent in our continuing effort to make the platform a valuable tool for you to connect with people and collaborate on Projects and Offers more quickly and easily.

You might notice that we’ve moved the main navigation bar from the top of the screen to the left side to make it easier for you to navigate through the platform and allow more space for you to see important details about the people and projects you’re managing.

“My Stuff” includes all the people you’ve bookmarked, Projects and Offers you’ve started or are participating in, and active Conversations you’re having with other users.

“Explore” is where you can go to find new things, like Partners and the Offers they’ve posted or Educators and the Projects they’ve created. That’s also where you can find Impact Stories - examples of activities that have worked in the past.

A very basic change you’ll notice right off the bat is we’ve renamed Educator “Requests” to “Projects.” We feel the term Projects better represents the deeper projects-based learning that we know can really improve student engagement. Whether it’s a simple interaction or a long-term project, we want to capture the collaborative spirit that goes into our collective CommunityShare work.

When you log in to your account you’ll see a brand new look and feel for your home page and dashboard. This will give you quicker access to the things you’ve been working on and a streamlined experience to take the next step or explore new parts of CommunityShare.

We’ve worked hard to give you everything you need at your fingertips within just a few clicks. Redesigned cards offer a more intuitive summary and snapshot of Projects, Offers, and People, and quick links help you see what needs your attention next.

You can always return to your Dashboard at any time by clicking “Home” in the left navigation bar.

CommunityShare exists primarily to help people connect. That’s why we put in significant time and effort to optimize the search and filter experience. You’ll see streamlined filter options at the top of the page, with more advanced filters still available, and smaller cards that help you browse through the results and more quickly find people that interest you. We brought this same simplicity to the search and filter experience for both Projects and Offers.

The other key ingredient to connecting you to your community is helping you more easily browse profiles for the information that’s most relevant to you about the people you’re trying to find. That’s why we’re introducing a new design for profiles that makes it easier to see how to connect with a person who interests you.

It can be difficult to know where to start with your collaboration idea. That’s why we’ve rebuilt our process for creating a new Project (as an Educator) or a new Offer (as a Partner).

We’ll walk you step by step through the most important questions and things to consider that will help you find the right person for your idea.

Once you’ve created your Project or Offer, you’ll have a central place to manage and edit details as your idea evolves, find and invite others to help, and send them messages to collaborate with you.

Our new Projects and Offers design also makes it easier for other people to show interest in your idea and start connecting with you on it.

Once you’ve connected, you can manage messages in our new messaging system that makes it easier to track your conversations across multiple Projects.

We want and need to hear about your experiences. Your feedback is one of the most important ways we have to make sure that we’re constantly improving our efforts to encourage and support quality educational experiences. Evaluations give us the information we need to design new features and best practices going forward.

That’s why we’ve made it easier for you to see when an Evaluation is needed and to complete them after your Project or Offer is done. From your dashboard, you’ll see an option to Evaluate a Project that you’ve created or are participating in. The quick link takes you to a few questions that will take just five minutes to complete and help us continue to make CommunityShare better for everybody.