Category Archives for Radical Pedagogy

What’s missing and what’s next

What’s most obviously missing from a conference website is the SCHEDULE AND LISTINGS OF THE ACTUAL EVENTS AT THE CONFERENCE. And, you might note that there are no placeholder pages built out emptily and anxiously awaiting their schedule content as the organizers decide what it will be.

This is where agility comes into play — why build something before I know what the requests are for it, and how the data will come to me?

I will suggest to the people I am working on to build them in two ways:

  • Have each committee load individual workshops and performances into Google Calendar the title, time, and description of the event – then if they get requests to change it, they have access to it to change. This also allows participants to add the events to their personal Google calendars, something many people use. Perhaps I will also share <a href…> code with a link to the Bios page, and then build…
  • One Bios page on the blog that has all the photos and bios of all performers and presenters, listed alphabetically by first name because of course, fuck patriarchy.
  • I’m not sure yet if we will build pages for each individual workshop, seeing as how that text is subject to change. If its requested, we’ll use the descriptions as in the shared google forms so that no emails start flying around with content.

What else is missing? Finesse to the forums, including a Statement of Use [requested by the Collective] and then a community announcement via email lists and social media that there are forums to use, to see if people will actually use them for their intended purposes.

Resources and Fun Materials, like the entire Femme Bibliograpy one Media Team member collected and built, actual galleries, more videos on the YouTube channel [that’s displayed on the widget on the right-hand sidebar], and …

Selected Full-development resources like the sharing the Keynotes via UStream or Livestream, which then need Pages we want to set up. That will be developed in the weeks before the conference and does not need a home on the site yet, though I think they’d have a sub-page under Media and a sticky post on the front page of the site.

External resources, like more info in the Wikipedia page.

And, most importantly, we are missing a Magical CSS unicorn, like the alliedmedia.org folks have in the <meta> tags on their forums and message boards. Hmmrph.

When you spell the keynote’s name wrong and the person who volunteers to fix it breaks the site

It had to happen, especially when you are working your way through school and volunteering and perhaps too tired to pay strict enough attention to detail: someone’s name gets misspelled.

It’s not right and should be corrected, but it’s especially wrong when it’s one of the KEYNOTES of the conference, and you’ve just launched a major media campaign to alert every homosexual in North America to go to your website and learn about said keynote.

My main collaborator is a woman who has never used WordPress, she’s bottomlining the Outreach/Press Release end of the Media team, and she got the email from the Keynote first and alerted me, who was trapped at my desk at work without recourse: what happened next is that she like a total I-can-figure-this-out badass looked up the WP log-ins on the shared Google Doc we have all our log-ins on [agility over security!], navigated to the post where the offending typing occurred, and copied in corrected text.

And somehow, broke the site. Continue reading →

Using Google Forms: failing forward for free

When we decided that we’d use Google as our collaborative software I was bummed that the Evil Empire would be able to data mine our project — and that the possibility of the “cloud” evaporating was present — but I relaxed when I realized it would solve one of the major problems I as a web designer was facing: FORMS.

I *could* take hours to build a form and then have the input emailed to each responsible committee but that sounded like it would take a lot of administrative work and could go wrong at many places. But with Our New Friend Google Docs, committees could make a form tailored to their needs, share it with the Collective’s gmail, and also capture all the responses themselves.

So easy! So amazingly easy that the Performance committee form-builder even taught herself to shut down the form when the Call closed. Now if only the web designer could learn to hide the sidebars so they don’t flow over the input area of the form…

Teaching Ourselves & Each Other: Blogging & Sharing

Theory: Making space for folks to engage in self-teaching is empowering others to teach themselves

An opportunity to honor agreements about process and collaboration:

  • With the Femme Conference, when we agreed on using google-docs as part of our process, that meant we would use the file-sharing and form-making capacities
  • Some people kept sending docs as links not “sharing” –> sent gentle reminders twice over a few months to “Share” so we can all access
  • Some people sent me g-docs with their forms in them –> sent a gentle reminder to make forms in gmail and “share” it with me and the Collective gmail account.
  • Are these details kind of trivial? NO! They determine whether the entire technology setup is going to be collaborative or a shitstorm of emails and confusion.

An opportunity to give people access to resources and to support accessibility by providing resources:

Blogging was happening a lot by four committees and not at all from the other five committes. In the interest of accessibility, I created a google doc how-to and shared it. [download it here] It contains both direct links to WP’s documentation on blog posting and a step-by-step Best Practice Guide that uses screenshots from the actual femme2012.com blog to help folks see exactly what/where they are doing:

 

Radical Pedagogy

Theory: Seeing the connections between participant’s senses of Self-ownership, Responsibility to the project/process, and Horizontal Power

–       need systems that reinforce everyone’s power within the system: including people who think they “don’t know how to use the system”

–       Horizontal power is reinforced where there is leadership on the process and people who are resources, but no one owner

–       Ex: Google Forms instead of web forms, everyone had to learn to make them themselves [and that was a challenge for some folks], but now have power over shutting form down, control of info in form, access to applicants instantly, etc.

Community Participation:

The Femme Conference project has a built-in, existing community of 14 core organizers and about 35 total organizers who would be interacting with this media, either by creating blog posts, content for the web pages, or using the social media to let people know about the conference.

There is an additional community of several hundred people who will be visiting the site for information on participating in the the conference at performers, workshop presenters and attendees.

Theory: We had to pick a technology that community members would be familiar with and comfortable using that also allowed for the needed organization and dissemination of data.

Theory bonus: Organization and Dissemination are two of the three aspects of power-shifting digital technology, the other being production

Problem Statement: Develop Collaborative Technology for a Conference

This project’s goal is to create an internal communications system as well as a public social media and web presence for an LGBTQ conference which can be maintained by many, and which is manageable by an asynchronous, all-volunteer organizing collective.

A major goal of this project is to create a collaborative and horizontal web presence which is decentralized and which many people have access to and control[s] over, instigates interactivity and buy-in, while maintaining the safety of personal data [email addresses, server logins] as needed. For political reasons, it is important to create a space where many types of users feel welcomed to post on the blog, and for other users to find accessibility information on the site.

For marketing and registration purposes, we wanted to create a site that attracts people to the conference itself .

Lastly, members have requested a rideboard and housing-share board for the site. Questions about need for monitoring and safety have come up, so these boards should avoid spam and lurking, while remaining easy-to-use for a range of users.