Toronto is having one of its moods again.

It began snow-storming this morning as I was on my way to a Get Involved web site meeting. Dorothy had booked a big hotel suite for the two of us to meet up with web guru guys Mike and Peter to go over what had already been discussed and decided about the web site… and how we wanted to tweak it up to be all that it could possibly be.
Not being even remotely a computery person, I can only surmise I was brought in as the designated lowest common denominator.

(Actually, I don’t need to be quite so self-deprecating; a technical whiz I am not, a social-networker I very much am. I’ve been involved in interactive web sites and writing for the web for 7 years or so… a blogger for 4. I’m on MSN. I had a little ebay addiction for a while (under control now – but who knew a person needed that many purses???) I also belong to Facebook and Twitter as well as a variety of chat rooms, common interest web sites and special interest groups. So as a volunteer and networker I’ve already got a couple of ideas I want to put on the table.)

But how to do it? How will it look? How exactly will people make connections? What are the security issues? How will we identify organizations? Just sling them up – or identify them by communities? How will we inject life and movement and excitement into the site? How will we create relationships between members – both individual and organizational? How will TVO be represented? How will the get Involved team itself interact on the site? What sort of challenges will we be putting out there? How will we quantify the results for members? How do we create real value – and real connection between GI members? How do we make it FUN???

Dorothy has one of those easels with big sheets of paper where she’s jotting down all the things we’re talking about with coloured markers. Turns out they’re also giant Post-It notes, so as soon as one is filled up, she rips it off and sticks it to the wall. Soon there isn’t an inch of wall space left downstairs, so she starts sticking them on the wall beside the stairs up to the loft bedroom. The outside light has long since faded and we start to fade a bit too. We yank down the notes and roll them up. Dorothy will turn them into talking points and pass them around to all of us tomorrow.

Snowstorm? Brainstorm? The Perfect Storm??? We’ll see tomorrow…