Digital Arts Service Corps - resource portal

To Wiki or Not to Wiki, that's the question

danielle martin — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:00:32 +0000

Part of my work this year for the CTC VISTA Project is fostering some resource development among the VISTAs. This is new concept for a project that has mostly focused on just training, supporting, and placing capacity building VISTAs in community and technology centers. As Paul Hansen mentioned in his Project update article in the last Digest:

"It's because a more focused structure makes it much more feasible for us to provide substantive (priority area specific) support and training to the our VISTAs. And, in a tighter network of VISTAs, members are more likely to support each other in more general ways, as they face the challenges of VISTA service."

As a sometimes idealistic VISTA Leader, I see creating resources as just another way to support CTC VISTAs - to not only give the current VISTAs a chance to summarize and exhibit an aspect of their work but also capture that work for the next round.

Fellow VISTA Leader Ben Sheldon and I have been hashing out both the ideal ways for the VISTAs to collaborate, tempered by the practicality of VISTA life, such as limited time, varying technology skills, and motivation/value of the CTC VISTA network. It's a big challenge to build an active community and build the right tools to support it at the same time. So, we started informally polling VISTAs old and new, by phone, email, and at the MA area meeting. I appreciated all the responses, especially because they were honest and surprisingly in-depth.

The current blog system was created under the idea that VISTAs would have one point of entry to contribute content to the Project. The problem with the blog is that it is traditionally a journal of a VISTAs tasks, impressions, and musings over time. When we encourage people to blog once a month, the entries are often entered out of guilt, contain several different ideas or discussion points, and VISTAs don't got back to entries to update them if issues evolve. Even with the addition of tagging, you still need to read through a month's work of reflection to find one idea. Plus, blogs are still primarily a one-way / one-to-many communication tool or as Ross put it "communicating by publishing." Unless people comment and the author responds, there's not any two-way collaboration on the ideas.

And these IDEAS is what I'm trying to harvest, chunk, and sort.

So, our newest idea is to create a wiki. I am a self confessed wiki skeptic. Yes, I use Wikipedia, and yes, I trust the content, but the wiki collaboration process seems very techie and wonky from the outside. Former VISTA Leader, Saul Baizman, created and maintained a wiki for the Project but he was primarily the only person who added anything to it, even among Project HQ staff.

BUT (there's always a but..), why do we think a wiki is possibly a good tool for our little resource gathering project? As usual, Tech Soup has a clairvoyant sense of what I'm wondering about as a community technologist: check out this article, Nonprofits Share Their Wiki Success Stories, by Brian Satterfield. First bit that struck me was the reference to a "wikimaster" - a sort of editor to oversee/maintain the wiki with a "big picture view." We've been talking at Project HQ that some central editor is going to be essential to keep the resource development hopping.

Second part that caught my eye was the case study of how Alzheimer Society of Ontario rolled out the use of their wiki. They introduced the wiki technology in person ("...the organization initially got the wiki off to a good start by getting major stakeholders excited about the technology"), then did in-person trainings, online documentation, and Quicktime movie tutorials.

Our idea is to create a mini-working model of how the wiki could work and do a focus group at the PSO in January with new and current VISTA to gauge their reactions to the tool. I'm hoping to work with Aliya and the other TANP VISTAs to do a survey in the coming months to get opinions as well.

Ben can speak more to the wiki technology options (Drupal module vs. Media Wiki vs. hopping into existing wiki site somewhere), but I'm curious as to how the CTC VISTA community at large feels about resource development and wikis as a tool.

ANY INPUT IS WELCOME...in fact, more input is exactly what we're aiming for!

CTC VISTA 2.0: The Evolution of the Project's Communications

danielle martin — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 18:37:30 +0000

by Danielle Martin

Last fall, then VISTA Leader Saul Baizman wrote a candid article on the latest evolution of the CTC VISTA Project communications scheme for the Fall edition of the Community Technology Review entitled “Build an Information and Communications Technology Infrastructure in 21 Days.” At the time when Saul first started tackling the problem, the Project’s site was mostly a static site with contact information and some examples of the Project work. In his tenure at the Project, Saul helped the site evolve from a confusing, multi-tool system to a more simplified contact directory complimented by a webblog system.

Old CTC VISTA Project Directory

But like all things technology, new dogs with new tricks appeared in the form of an open source content management system called Drupal. After a little fiddling, the Project staff discovered that Drupal could perform many of the same functions under the same database umbrella. Concurrently, the Project has evolved in emphasizing opportunities for collaboration and resource sharing among CTC VISTAs on our new site CTCVISTA.org.

The idea of developing common resources as a Project is not a new one. The implementation of the priority areas (Community Networking, Community Organizing, Digital Media, and Technical Assistance to Nonprofits) last year was stimulated by the potential of connecting often very different organizations around the theme of empowering communities with technology.

Over the year, Project HQ staff realized that any discussions and content sharing among the VISTAs needed to be simple and, more importantly, fueled by their immediate challenges and interests, and not just by more general issues of the larger field. CTC VISTAs could be better served by a simple space for sharing timely, specific resources. Also, with a wider view of all the work of each organization at the ground level, the Project has the perspective to connect the dots – to spark connections among similar projects across organizational structures and geography.

This expansive view across organizations, as well as across national membership organizations such as CTCNet, NTEN, NAMAC, ACM and others, also made it clear that there are many existing (and unfortunately unused) resources available. In a time of excessive content generation and media overload, the Project didn’t want to reinvent the wheel. However, many new VISTAs don’t have time or research skills to sift through all the content available on the Web. So with the advent of aggregation and tagging technologies, we decided to incorporate tools such as Delicious for social bookmarking and other tools to pull local CTC VISTA site content into “resource pages.”

Unfortunately, this call for collaboration clashes with the current environment where non-profits are often in competition with each other. We see the CTC VISTA Project as an ideal proponent for fostering a new environment of resource sharing for several reasons:

As usually new recruits to the non-profit sector, CTC VISTAs can bring fresh ideas and tools into existing non-profits.
The one-year timeframe of CTC VISTA’s work allows for focus on specific tasks and development of a reachable end goal – but many of these tasks are almost impossible without reaching out to others for help or training.
These VISTAs are connected through the CTC VISTA Project, and thus there is an inherent network of peers to reach out to for help and advice.

New CTCVISTA.org

And thus, we revamped the Project website, using Drupal technology and are attempting to adjust our thought processes and communications mechanisms to new, open and tag-based ideologies. The VISTAs now only have to log into one place to view the directory and blog about their experiences. Each bit of content created on the site (blog entries, newsletter articles, and new resources) is tagged by both priority area designation and free tagged by the VISTAs according to their own naming conventions. The Project also adjusted how VISTA Leaders support groups of VISTAs, now by priority area and with focused monthly conference calls and resource portal home pages. We also plan to use the new resource portal as a place to gather pertinent content in a timely and useful way.

So in the way of all great iterations of technology, we did not throw away the hard work done by past VISTAs like Saul – we made a conscious effort to evaluate our work and communications and extract lessons learned. With a focus on user-generated content and social networking principles, the Project hopes to create a positive experience for a new set of VISTAs as well as create a space for continuing innovation and cooperation in the years to come.

Danielle Martin

Danielle Martin is a VISTA Leader, serving both at the CTC VISTA Project HQ as well as with MassIMPACT, coordinating new programs and training in digital storytelling and other multimedia community organizing projects with housing developments in MA. Her background is in after-school multimedia programs for youth, instructional design for web-based trainings, and fundraising and development. She was previously the Technology Director at the Charlestown Boys & Girls Club (MA) Computer Clubhouse.