When I first thought of starting MetroCascade, I was spurred by the information I gained serving as a volunteer grants adjudicator on the CRD‘s Arts Advisory Council. Even though I grew up in Victoria (moved away for 30+ years) and have lived here again since 2002, I had no idea the region was home to so many arts organizations until I saw grant applications pass before me.

By the same token, through my (sometimes peripheral, sometimes more immediate) involvement in the local tech community, I learned about all the different initiatives – many flying well below the radar – in that field.

In addition, my frequent visits to Victoria City Hall (whether for council meetings or planning workshops), along with a constant scan of conversations on Vibrant Victoria’s forum, gave me insight into urban planning and development issues. And if you engage with urban development, you’re also engaging with a city’s economic drivers.

So there I was, three-legged (an abundance of pins, as it were), moving in three distinct silos. And it was quickly obvious that each one operated without ever leveraging the synergies of the other.

And there’s the rub, ladies and gentlemen: people too often function in silos, and not too many of us manage to keep more than a couple in sight (much less occupied) at any one time.

My basic conception of MetroCascade is that it should be a platform that breaks down the silos, and connects the dots. (And it could work that way anywhere, not just in Victoria, BC.)

I had originally conceived of the “Read” cascade (the middle section that registers blog and news items) as literally a scrolling, rolling cascade of links, in a box with a 16:9 ratio like a TV screen. Below that, I envisioned the information as parsed out in archives sorted according to categories – arts, technology, msm news, for example. Somewhere that vision for the interface got shelved – the scrolling cascade seemed unworkable, and parsing the information out as ham-fistedly as all that didn’t work well, either. Currently, the site is still a work in progress, although we feel we really have something to work with now.

Ok, so now we’re starting to get some user-feedback on MetroCascade, and one of the first issues to come up, methodologically, is how to sort the information. (It’s not a bad problem to have – we initially worried that we might not have enough material for our Victoria cascade, and instead it turns out there’s quite a steady stream of items).

Some users want clear boundaries between content areas – visually, but also in terms of categories within the “Read” cascade. (O shades of my original conception for the lay-out!) But as hinted, above, too much sorting / parsing …and silo-ing of information gets ham-fisted, and (imo) reintroduces silos again. This could especially be the case if users access MetroCascade only through an RSS reader.

Note: currently, we don’t have an RSS feed on our site, but we will. We will also eventually roll out features for registered users, such as letting users customize their cascade so they can screen for the type of information they want.

At that point we’ll have an interesting problem: do we let the registered users have RSS feeds for their customized cascades? On the one hand, why not? But on the other hand, we’ll be reintroducing silo-making tools if we do (a user could share their customized feed through, for example, Google Reader, and in this way become a conduit for a personalized silo). In a way, it might not be bad – but in another way, it automates the information to an extent where seredipity gets taken out of the equation.

(On that note, relative to blog feeds, see Fred Wilson’s recent post, The Blogroll I Want For AVC: “…I stopped using a feedreader about three years ago…,” he writes. The blogroll and/or feedreader cut out the ability to find great new stuff (serendipity). I’d add that it can put you back in a silo, which is exactly what you want to break out of, though…

Stay tuned to see how we tweak that issue. First up, though, 2/3 of our bootstrapped start-up (Werner and I – we are a very small team) leave for Vancouver on Thursday to attend NorthernVoice 2009. Yay – bloggers and social media types unbound from screens, and in the flesh instead. What a concept…!

- Yule Heibel