July 6, 2007 - 12:30pm
2 comments

Field Report #2

So I just completed my first week of work at NAMAC and it went pretty well. A bit slow as I get acclimated to the new work environs, but slowly starting to get more exciting as i look at the breadth and scope of the projects that await.

The upcoming projects of note are:

  • The Leadership Institute Network: this is actually an online social network that Dewey (the Senior Manager of Leader Services) developed using Ning - it's purpose is the sustain the connections of leaders after their annual Leadership retreats.


  • Media Centers Map: this is an idea put our by Jack Walsh (Co-director here at NAMAC) to map all of the NAMAC members - and possibly beyond. I was thinking of modeling it after Ben Sheldon's excellent Mapping Access website.


  • Media History Timeline: already in existence, we'll be looking for way to integrate this into the current NAMAC website - perhaps connect it to some of the other technologies we have in the works. Here's the link:http://www.mediaartsmovement.org/index.pl?task=timeline_view


  • NAMAC Website Development: over the next few months, I will also be completely reworking the website for NAMAC with an eye towards integrating some nifty social web apps to make it more dynamic and community dialog oriented. I've been looking at the different tools out there keeping in mind NAMAC's Strategic Plan - how will each tool specifically attend to a part of NAMAC's plan and Mission?


  • Wikipedia Media Arts Page: This was a quick idea thrown out yesterday during a staff meeting - way to increase member engagement by having members define the media arts - currently, no entry exists in Wikipedia to define the media arts as a field or practice.


  • CTC VISTA Panel: This too will be a special project to engage CTC VISTAs and promote the CTC VISTA Project at the October NAMAC Conference - I'm thinking some stories from the 'frontlines' of some of the VISTAs serving at member (and non-member) orgs would be great.

Over this week, I will be synthesizing all of this into a clarified workplan and present my findings at a Staff Retreat next Monday. A big part of the retreat will be a discussion on what the new site will look like and how it will function + what the roles of each of the staff members here will be once it's up and running. I'm of course thinking of using Drupal for this and it actually looks like the current hosts of the NAMAC site (Carnegie-Mellon's Center for Arts Management and Technology will be offering a free cms to NPOs based on open-spource CMSs - DotNuke, Drupal and Joomla).

Wish me luck!

-m

Comment from danielle martin on July 11, 2007 - 5:10pm

danielle martin's picture

Hey, I'm doing a center mapping project too - except we're just getting Ben to build it for us ;). MassIMPACT is trying to verify what tech centers actually exist out in housing developments and get it on a nifty map. Maybe there could be some overlap...I'm also thinking of putting a bug in Thaddeus' ear that the next step for the center map is to have the centers themselves start mapping other local community resources.

And man, I want to go to NAMAC conference BAD...I missed the boat for being a presenter though, right? And I'm too old (a mere 31!) for the scholarships?

-Danielle

Comment from Morgan Sully on July 11, 2007 - 7:46pm

Morgan Sully's picture

Hey danielle,
that sounds awesome. I'll check on the scholarship thang. Did you read about Google Earth's recent initiative of NPOs using Google Earth? Here's some specific case studies:

http://earth.google.com/outreach/case_studies.html