Last week I attended an NTEN Member Appreciation Webinar entitled: 10 Tactics for Growing Your Community Online. As NAMAC's Online Community Manager, I found this webinar very helpful, engaging and well worth my time.
The NAMAC conference was an experience. It was great to reconnect with CTC VISTA Project peeps, learn about new media arts happenings and experience a great new city. It is hard to say how the conference was overall. Each panel was completely different from the next, and hardly seemed related to the previous one.
Comment from Kevin Palmer on November 27, 2007 - 12:48pm
Hey Sarah,
Too bad they're not keeping you bust at GRCMC! That entire van production process was exhausting just to read but sounds awesome. Any chance you've taped the whole process?
In terms of real world skills, knowing how to get a club license may be the coolest skill learned by a VISTA so far this year.
NAMAC was great...started missing Austin the second I hopped on the plane back.
In late October, I flew out to San Jose to attend the MuniWireless '07 Silicon Valley conference. As a VISTA I run a project that provides free wireless Internet access to low-income residents of subsidized housing in Boston's South End neighborhood.
Comment from Morgan Sully on November 7, 2007 - 10:20pm
Hey Gabriel,
Morgan here from NAMAC. this is a great write up of your experiences at the MuniWireless conference. Do you have any pictures to accompany your post? are there any links to some of the reports you mention?
When I was a VISTA the San Diego community technology coalition, I compiled some reports on the digital divide and municipal broadband.
You can view the reports here: http://del.icio.us/sdctc
In the meantime, would you be interested in submitting your field report to either NAMAC or the next VISTA newsletter (or both)?
I think some accompanying pictures could be helpful for illustrating a bit of what you're talking about too.
Comment from Gabriel Fishman on November 7, 2007 - 11:07pm
Thanks for the compliment.
I'd be happy to submit it to either NAMAC or CTC VISTA, or both, whichever you think is appropriate. I didn't take any photos at the conference, but I'm sure that I can find appropriate pictures or graphics to illustrate. I didn't really know how to footnote the blog post, so I didn't bother, but I can definitely do that for publication.
Just let me know what the process and the deadline is.
Morgan was a CTC VISTA Leader in 2007 (before we changed our name to the Digital Arts Service Corps) and while this round-up is a little dated it still contains some valuable resources.
Greeting VISTAs,
WARNING! Federal grant applications are, by far, the most difficult and the most competitive type of proposal to write, even for veteran grant writers. They require more than 100 hours of work reading/understanding application requirements, researching and writing.
Lauren Bratslavsky developed this one-page handout (attached below) detailing resources for video editing, computer skills training, free media, digital photography and more.
here are two link to fun web development stuff to look at, learn from and implement - updated daily (at least).
The most popular web development bookmarks on del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/popular/webdev
My favorite bookmarks on my del.icio.us account:
http://del.icio.us/memeshift/webdev
I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of PLANNING OUT YOUR WEBSITE. Before you can even start thinking about what the colors will be, you need to have a few things in place. 3 i can readily think of are:
Comment from Morgan Sully on March 13, 2008 - 3:10pm
For more tips on budgeting and living on a VISTA Stipend, check out Danielle Martin's excellent post here:
Surving on a VISTA Budget: http://ctcvista.org/node/57
You'll also find the PDF of the post below it to download.