Crowdsourcing is essential to the success of this design solution, but the task is too large to be undertaken by a lone Webmaster or even a small team of administrators. That said, reaching critical mass, where enough people are participating in the discussions and keeping the repository content recent through submissions, will be the biggest initial hurdle. Sustained effort by a dedicated team will be required to build interest and to drive traffic toward the site until this participation threshold is reached.
One potential solution for addressing initial startup promotion and participation hurdles would be to establish links with established French language educator groups. There are many such groups scattered throughout Canada, and their participation could be critical to the site’s success.
The current design solution makes use of Google tools such as Groups (discussions), Sheets (database), Forms (submissions) and Sites (display). Data protection on Google servers is robust. Logging into a Google account to post to groups or to the repository would also help to address some security issues by ensuring that accounts are traceable and associated with verified individuals. Users will not be obliged to log into Google in order to view the site’s tools, ensuring that the information remains freely available to all educators. A successful site could potentially pay for administrative costs through embedded ads.
On the other hand, having the site’s data in the hands of a single corporation raises questions of content ownership and privacy. Information posted by individual account holders could be harvested for targeted ads by Google, for example. Google could also decide to demand payment for hosted data in the future, necessitating payment or an expensive transfer to a privately hosted site. Given these considerations, it might be wise to consider alternative hosting solutions should the site prove successful.