Food for thought on two things I have discussed with a few NP Staff members...but I couldn't quite narrow it down before. Specifically this is in regards to building a web community out of NP and possibly turning it into a global community system. That pipe dream in mind, it still takes small steps to see how we can make something fit the idea of NP.

Hopefully these will help spawn some discussion :)

GROUPS

I would love to see a way for someone (i.e. editor, guest editor and eventually a wrangler) to create a group for anyone on NP to discuss a given topic. Less fun and more professional than a typical social networking site. Meaning: have a group to discuss Middle East issues, U.S. Politics, or more narrow (oil,  solar power, etc). The thought here would be that a group would get a page, with a forum to discuss issues. While one could easily use Facebook for this, I would like to see NP be "sticky" and keep the users on this site.

I think to execute this properly you would have to start small, just a few small groups to start and have staff/editors/guest editors/wranglers admin the forums. Once a few kinks work out you could add a few more. This would not be to have just like-minded individuals, this would be specifically to get different people talking about issues. Through that means,  staff/editors/guest editors/wranglers could request two parties (one from each viewpoint) to write something up, and post as a single story on NP as original content.

The site's primary contributors on specific topics are still slim, but something like this could also help facilitate research between contributors in the future. Example: if we had 5 key science contributors (marine bio, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, ect) we could get input from each of them on the impact of wind generators in the middle of the ocean, or in a lake near a town. Again, this is pipe dream scale...but if we start to build on an idea like this now, we can work out some kinks for later on.

PROFILES 

I can't quite explain it just yet...but I would like to see more customizeable user/profile pages. Maybe something like Google's Personal Page (with widgets, news headlines from various sources). The idea being: keep people on the site. Make them want to visit their profile to get updates on news -even if the news isn't on NP yet. 

Maybe some of the staff/editors/guest editors/wranglers can do this on their own, but I wouldn't mind seeing a "Stories I love" section with 5 stories that found on the site that are just incredible. The idea being: if someone sees you have a hat and they visit your profile, give them some place to go to see stories that are"awesome". We all use "favorites" to give love to new contributors so this pads that section of our profiles. Think of a list of favorite stories as each of our own personal "J-Tips" section if you will.

This "idea" of customizing profiles is still a floater in my head...I can't quite place what it needs just yet. So this is something to sleep on for now and discuss in the future.