Category Archives for Participation

Participation & Community Interactivity

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Why are people participating?

  • This is a “community of interest” — like a class, a set of organizers has pre-existing buy-in to the project.

Barriers to entry: know-how [can be solved pedagogically] and willingness to participate [community status can be leveraged]

  • How-to and friendly reminders shared with team regularly
  • Participation of others increases willingness for participation of the reluctant

Interactivity as part of the process

  • Making many people participate in blogging by asking each committee to blog once a month
  • Some people love it, and were in there commenting imediately, other people had to be put on a schedule to post on the blog

 

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:

 

Accessibility: Process and Outcomes

How was this development accessible?

Pushback on designer/web-creator’s role as a corrective to gatekeeping of former web developer and as a site of power for the input of individuals and committees:

  • Admin Logins shared with many [some security measures in place]
  • Author/user logins shared with all – ability to post to wp blog universal
  • Insistence that committees create their own content for web pages via shared google docs means that many people can input into the content and easily add and edit to it — more voices in the process of developing.

Why is building in wordpress accessible for this project? Because so many people are able to use WP and feel comfortable in it already or quickly after beginning to use it:

  • WP is accessible to many people at various states of comfort with technology due to its WYSIWYG interface, semi-obvious taxonomies, and [relative] build-out simplicity.

 

Agility in Site Development

THEORY: When design is agile, we’ve produced “less than” and not taken too many ideas into the mix, stayed within or below scope, waited for users to respond to product, not overdeveloped before getting user information.

For example, the previous website was a Joomla! build from former developer, heavy and not accessible by anyone who didn’t know the Joomla! CMS [not that the designer was willing to share a login, but anyway].

How was this development agile?

  1. The first web presence implementation was just one HTML page [no screenshot available] — just getting the Save The Date and conference theme “out there” [and collecting SEO on the URL]
  2. Second was Twenty10 WP theme [the default theme] with a header and a few pages — just getting the Call for Submissions forms up and public without any major design work
  3. Third implementation of WP Page Lines framework theme with more design, bells n whistles — adding in pages that were requested, more attractive design, and integrating social media presence.

Non-agile ideas that were researched and discarded:

Collaborative Technology Reasoning: Beg, Borrow, Buy

Why collaborate with a specific technology? Why not just get our work done some other way and all hand it in? For starts, in a collective–or any horizontal project–there’s no manager to hand it in to, no boss, no one to organize the work for you but you. Getting organized is a systems-level problem that best be addressed as soon as possible.

And for projects that have principles that base around justice, equality, accessibility, and collective or direct-democratic decision making, the choice of platforms is a political decision.

For the 2012 Femme Conference, we needed to set up a system where 14 core organizers and 30 subcommittee members can work together — both in terms of accessibility and capacity. Systems we chose thus had to be not overly hard to learn or use, but still must allow for organization and effectiveness.

We looked at possibly using:

I tried to get people to use Crabgrass [open source!] or Basecamp [more useful!], but the request from the majority of the other organizers was that most people had existing Gmail accounts and were familiar with the interface, so we went with G-docs

  • Theory: Choosing the achievability of agility and accessibility over principles, choosing to fight battles later with other technologies. For example, I decided to force WP participation rather than “force” the use of a platform that no one would use.

In an ideal build we’d have Crabgrass or Open Atrium sitting on a Drupal site, but in an ideal world we’d be paying someone to build this. Better to pick that which will actually happen and — most importantly, that which people are willing to interact with.

  •  Theory: I like to occassionally remind people that Gmail is a “begged” resource that datamines our every word typed in, just to raise awareness of the issues in using “free” software that’s not Free/Libre software.

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.