Update
Categories:
Right now I'm doing the legwork for a grant that will allow us to build a social networking site between different computer labs. We don't really need a grant to do this, if we don't get it we'll use the templete off Ning, but we'd prefer to get the grant and use the money towards hiring a professional web designer and publicity events for the website.
Comment from Kevin Palmer on September 22, 2007 - 11:19am
The site and grant sound great! How many labs is it going to connect up to? What kind of web software are you looking at?
There are a number of VISTAs dealing with a lot of what you're talking about in terms of getting community buy-in for web networking/database sites. Here's what I'm thinking for the volunteer management group, we could develop a "how-to" on both organizing and, most importantly, implementing a plan to ensure websites/volunteer databases are used by the constituency it seeks to serve (in CTC VISTA cases it's typically low-income communities and non-profit orgs). I think it'd be incredibly useful for current and future VISTAs to have that as a quick cheat sheet on best practices for getting user/organizational buy-in from the planning stages up through launching it and beyond. What do you think? I'll ask the rest of the volunteer management crew.
Comment from Jack Waugh on October 2, 2007 - 11:30am
"Put up a social networking site" -- fascinating requirement.
I am sure that if CCTS were going to implement it, they (we) would do it in Ruby on Rails.
Comment from Morgan Sully on October 2, 2007 - 3:12pm
awesome Victoria. Did you see my comment on Kevin's Field Report?
http://ctcvista.org/node/1103#comment-584
We've been using Ning pretty successfully AND you can also get your own URL for it (to brand it as your own).