contact info and stuff

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I put together an Address Book card with everybody's name, company, and e-mail address, (from the VISTA Roster that we all got). I thought that I could distribute this, and it would make it a lot easier for everybody to contact each other.

What I would like to do now is come up with a good way for everybody to:

a) update and distribute the vCard files (when changes are made to their info), and

b) distribute thumbnail headshots of everybody (to attach to their info cards), for that those of us who are terrible at remembering names.

Maybe this is something that nobody else is interested in, but I would very much like to have up-to-date contact cards, and little pictures, of all of the CTC VISTAs. So if any of y'alls have suggestions, or better ideas, let me know.


Comment from cheryl jerozal on September 15, 2006 - 10:10am

maybe you could include screennames too?

i am not sure if we can include files on blog entries, but if we could and we could make posts that were visible only to logged in people then you could just put it up here. big ifs though.

so maybe... well, we could set up a livejournal or similar account that everyone would have the username and password for and put the contact info there in a locked entry. again files can't be stored there, but maybe we could just have an old fashioned list instead? although pictures would be nice. we could store the pictures elsewhere and not name them meaningfully and just link to them from the entry.

it seems like most of our contact info won't be changing too much (at least over the year) so we could just have one person in charge of the contact info and anyone who wanted to change stuff could contact that person. but if we went with the livejournal-type-thing idea anyone could just log in and change their own info.

Comment from Corey Funderburk on September 16, 2006 - 7:50pm

I think your idea is awesome. Let me know what you need and I'll send it on. Maybe include birthdays? You can never be told by enough people to have a good birthday... Thanks for you work on this!

Corey

Comment from Ben Sheldon on September 18, 2006 - 3:06pm

All of the contact information (except birthdays, but I'm adding it) is already stored in the ctcvista.org profiles, and most of it is accessible. Rather than trying to regather the information, I can try to make it more accessible.

Are vCards a format that people like? Is that easier to use than importing a spreadsheet?

Comment from cheryl jerozal on September 18, 2006 - 4:24pm

i was under the impression that checking the "make private" option would make the contact info unavailable to anyone not at project headquarters. but that does not seem to be the case (for example tim chose make private but i can still see his profile: http://ctcvista.org/user/978 ). that means it is possible for us to share contact info with only the vistas through this site -- i didn't realize that before. but i think there should be 3 options for profile privacy levels - public (anyone can see), protected (anyone logged in can see), and private (only those who need to see can).

Comment from gariet cowin on September 20, 2006 - 3:42pm

Whatever's cool with me. I was just looking for a way to get everybody's name and e-mail together with a picture of them, so that I can remember who is who. I don't know about everybody else, but I find that I communicate better when I know what the person looks like who I am communicating with.

Becauses when there is a picture next to somebody's contact info, I feel like I am communicating with a real person, and not just some mysterious faceless cyber-entity.

The moral of my story: Pictures of ourselves in the contacts section would be awesome. Especially if they are only accessible to those who are logged in.

Comment from lauren bratslavsky on September 20, 2006 - 5:12pm

Just an idea to throw out there --

I know there is a spreadsheet feature on gmail that looks almost like excel and can be shared. That could take care of sharing our info in one online sheet and also can be set to editable by any of us. Also, gmail has a chat feature where you can upload a picture and use that as an icon. The chatting feature can also maybe lead to an online meeting place? And one more thing about gmail (sorry, I really like gmail), there is a calendar feature that we can add events and birthdays and anything else.

This option though would require anyone without a gmail account, to add yet another email account to the ever-growing email addresses we all have. I've got 100 invites if anyone is interested in a gmail account, regardless.