(From Wikispaces Update, October, 2007)
http://openrsa.wikispaces.com , is a
great example of a community using Wikispaces to better engage its
members and to develop a culture of civic engagement.
Our Space: OpenRSA is an experiment in using a wikispace, events, and
other social software to help a 250-year-old UK membership
organisation re-invent itself by becoming more networky and less
hierarchical. The organisation http://www.thersa.org/ - Royal Society
for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce - started in
the coffee houses of Covent Garden, so we are just introducing new
tools for conversation with a wider reach.
Our Community: OpenRSA started as a Facebook group - now with 340
members - after a get-together of about 15 people. We set up the
wikispace to give us additional functionality for our larger meeting
on October 1. Anyone can get involved in OpenRSA who is currently a
Fellow of the RSA (and there are 27,000 of those worldwide) or
interested in becoming a Fellow. There's an official RSA Networks blog
here http://mtblog.typepad.com/rsa
friendly unofficial complement run by volunteers.
Our Experience with Wikispaces: Wikispaces was an easy choice because
of past experience, ease of use, and functionality. Participants in
events can add their reports, we can embed video, and also take in a
feed from the chief executive of the RSA, Matthew Taylor. We'll be
doing more prior to an official RSA event for 250 Fellows on November
22.
3 comments:
Edu, while I do understand your excitment about wikis (heck, I use at least two different on a daily basis), I do see a few practical issues that may not be that esasy to solve.
First of all, even if it would get only about as many hits as this blog, from what I understand a wiki still pretty much requires being hosted on a private server. And in this case preferably by one of us, to ensure that we have the access we need.
We would also need at least one, preferably more of us having the time and knowledge to function as Admins. Sure, a wiki is designed to be easier than making toast, but it still takes some effort to get into the loop of things.
Also, wikis are designed to be information-seeking tools. From what I can see, we would have more need of a messageboard. Which of course can be attached to a wiki, but that seems to be a way to do twice as much work for little more outcome.
Now, I am not dissing the idea completely, but I do think it is important to keep issues like these in mind before making any decisions, as it would be quite bad to start a project and have to cancel it halfway down the road because we did not fully consider the requirements.
From what I can see, the average forum would fill most of our needs. A forum can be split into several boards, separated according to content. Clients like phpBB allows childboards where admins can control access (ie private boards for us if we wish to have such), most newer clients allow for pictures and videos to be embeded, etc.
Unless we would get thousands of hits daily, such forum could be stored on a relatively home PC, rather than a server, which makes things a lot easier. They are easy to moderate, if we for example would get a spam invasion like the old Raise forum experienced.
I think the best solution for the time being would be to start with a forum, and perhaps as time goes by, and we get more things to add, like Move Together, we could develop a wiki, after all the issues have been considerated, and have realistic solutions.
That's my two cents, at least.
Thanks for the comments, Daniel. I have a wiki hosted in wikispaces.com, where you can have it hosted for free, or pay a 5$ fare every month if you want to keep it private. Honestly, I don't see any problem in keeping the wiki hosted in a server like wikispaces (sure that are more like this). The Forum services from wikispaces could be good enough (I'm sorry, but I have no idea about phpBB clients; could you provide me any interesting link o information?).The administration would not be so difficult, unless there are some technical issues I am not aware of.
But we'll contiuue talking about it; just were suggestions
A good presentation of phpBB http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhpBB
There are of course several other clients that would suit our needs, I just mentioned phpBB because that's the one I am most familiar with.
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