Digital Arts Service Corps - online collaboration

Meeting notes from 12/8/06. (My bad, TANs!)

Laura Hanley — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 05:22:12 +0000

Whoops...so I realized that I haven't posted the notes from our conference call on 12/8/06. Here it is 1/7/07 and our next conference call is tomorrow. My apologies for the delay in posting these. I promise to be more quick in posting tomorrow's notes (if you let me!), do a better job, and be more interesting.

Tim got us started out with a very informative, interesting, and later entertaining, presentation on using on-line collaboration software, specifically Vyew. He did a better job than I could ever do explaining it in his blog. If you haven’t checked it out already, you really should…it’s neat stuff!

Next up will be Cheryl, who will teach us about having a Disaster Recovery Plan. No matter what part of the country, or the world, you’re in it’s always important to have a plan, and we look forward to learning how to go about getting that done!

We briefly discussed using MySpace for the organizations we’re VISTAs for, but I don’t really remember where that discussion ended up going…any comments/input would be greatly appreciated!

Next, we did a best of/worst of for November and early December (personally or job-related). Sorry if any of the details got mixed up or something is listed as happening that didn’t happen that way…feel free to let me know or correct me in any comments! Here’s what people had to offer!

Best thing that happened:

Cheryl – She has been interviewing with nonprofits learning a lot about what different organizations do. Informational interviews are a great way to not only learn about what others do, but a networking opportunity as well!

Andrea – She got a new bike (and helmet)! Living in a place where she can ride year-round, I’m sure she’ll get great use out of it!

Kamilla – I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear anything you said! If I had thought about it before, I could have emailed you to get your responses, but alas I didn’t. L

Corey – Thanksgiving! It’s Thanksgiving – what is there NOT to love about it!

Laura – She took an HTML class! What’s big about it is that this is the first computer class that she has ever taken. Seeing how it seems that most of the other CTC VISTAs have backgrounds in computer or at least technical skills, Laura is on her way to expanding her general technical knowledge…something she honestly never thought she’d do!

John – During the Thanksgiving holiday, one of John’s favorite moments was seeing the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. He’s also glad to be keeping busy with work!

Jeff – Cisco recently donated phone equipment to his organization, which he has been having fun playing with!

Tim – His boss has been facilitating workshops on Open Data and Open Gov, and Tim has been assisting in the preparation for those workshops. I really hope that’s right…I didn’t really understand what you were talking about. L

Worst thing that happened:

Cheryl – She has also been remotely working on technical assessments for different groups. She is responsible for writing up the results of questions asked during the assessments, and wants to figure out an efficient way to do this. Something that could automatically generate results would be great!

Andrea – Along with the joy that the holidays bring comes stress…especially stressing about getting things done before the new year. Hang in there…it’s almost over! (Or here, rather, by this point.)

Kamilla – See above

Corey – She continues to face struggles in working out her loan situation. It really would be great if she could use her Ed Award when she finishes to help pay off loans!

Jeff – He almost ran over a kid with a U-haul trailer. If you ask me, that would be enough to ruin anyone’s day.

Laura – Although she was fortunate enough to go back to Indiana for Thanksgiving, she was unfortunate in the fact that she got sick in doing so. But I guess that’s what going from sunny, warm San Diego to grey, rainy, chilly Indianapolis will do to ya!

John – In order to get to DC for his best moment, a 10-hour drive from Boston was required. Not so fun.

Tim – One thing he has been working on is improving security for social source commons. The reason for this, however, he is less than thrilled about (understandably). Apparently someone got into and tampered with it. That’s never a good thing.

Our next call is scheduled for 1/8/2007 (yes, tomorrow/today, but I’m writing this as if I actually posted these on time). Sorry this turned out kind of long…I hope it was at least was up to par. Until then!

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!