week 1

I feel really lucky to be at Venice Arts. In the past week, I've been offered an awesome room 1 block from the beach, a bike to borrow, lots of free thai food, and an amazing house-sit for the Venice Arts director. Last week was a lot of introductions and getting familiar with the classes we offer and the type of tech services I need to offer. Joanne clarified with me that my role is not going to be actually creating a website. I am going to be more of an online mentor. She says I will be the "tom from myspace" of our site: Beyond Myspace. So I will have a page on the site where I will spotlight certain students artwork each week/month, make comments on all the artwork on the site. Then I will be putting together a policy committee for the site, as well as training all the students and artist mentors on how to use the site. So basically I will be the administrator of Beyond Myspace. I still hope to refresh my web design skills and learn more php within everything else.
In addition to this, I am co-mentoring the Arts Discovery class for the 5-7 year old kids. I co-mentored my first class on Saturday. We got acquainted with the kids and made masks. Their attention spans are short as is typically the case for young kids, so we are thinkinng of ways to keep them entertained and engaged for the entire hour and a half. During the week, I will be around offering technical assistance for the other classes as well. Everyone at V.A. has been really awesome and I'm so happy to be here.

Comment from Rebecca White on July 3, 2007 - 5:35pm

What is Beyond Myspace? I looked around the Venice Arts website a little, but couldn't find any reference to it other than as a class title... sounds like local, kid-oriented, arts focused social networking?

Comment from Angela Saylor on July 3, 2007 - 5:59pm

"local, kid-oriented, arts focused social networking" exactly! i couldn't have said it better myself. yeah there isn't a link from the site really. it's still being worked on and its all been done by this amazing volunteer who's a genius php programmer, so i think he's doing as much as he can at a time. it is a site for the kids to use to post their work, comment on eachothers work, and use like an online portfolio. i am going to inquire as to why it isn't linked from the site. strange.

Comment from Angela Saylor on July 3, 2007 - 7:01pm

so actually Beyond Myspace is specifically only for the kids. It is meant to be a private space for the students and is not meant for public viewing.

Comment from Morgan Sully on July 10, 2007 - 1:29pm

Hey Angela,
Sounds like you've got some cool work ahead of you as a moderator. There are actually whole conferences dedicated to online community managers, moderators, organizers etc. - there was one recently here:

http://www.forumone.com/content/calendar/detail/2201

Looks like you're off to a pretty good start. I look forward to hearing more about your projects as they develop.

"All that is possible is seeking expression though human beings."

Comment from danielle martin on July 11, 2007 - 5:30pm

You should also connect with Jessica McCoy, the current CTC VISTA at the Center for Digital Storytelling who is acting as the current "Editor" for the new site, http://storiesforchange.net. We're working with adults, but trying to do the same thing around building an online social network. We just went through a process of creating a submission policy with a committee of volunteers...man was that a challenge.

You should also check out Project Think Different http://www.projectthinkdifferent.org/ and Cara Powers cara@projectthinkdifferent.org (former CTC VISTA). They created a "music socially conscious MySpace" last year and I'm not sure how it's going but she'd probably have lots of experience to share.

Oh and I Delicious'd http://del.icio.us/ctcvista this article about myBloc.net http://www.wiretapmag.org/arts/43103/.

I'm REALLY interested to keep reading how this project goes. I might be leaving the Project, but I'm going to grad school and I'm interested on how to social networking tools to get youth more active as community organizers.

-Danielle

Comment from Morgan Sully on July 13, 2007 - 2:14pm

Hey Angela,
I recently met with an Online Community Organizer for YouthNoise - they have a brilliant platform called My Cause Is - it allows youth to tap in to the power of sharing media that they make to raise awareness and ACT on causes - allowing youth to develop and implement a campaign for social change among peers in a safe online environment - awesome.

http://www.youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=2712

Anyway, I could put you in contact with the Manager if you'd like to chat with her. Contact me off board and I can introduce you...