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  • From: Judy Hallman <hallman AT email.unc.edu>
  • To: "Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/" <internetworkers AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [internetworkers] CMS Seminar
  • Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2006 18:28:54 -0400

Paula, (and Woozle),

You bring up some good, important points. On the registration, I see some people who I know are paying their own way and taking vacation. I've done that myself.

Scheduling workshops and conferences is extremely difficult. We had our first RTPnet conference on a Saturday, but the staff people preferred weekdays and there were more staff people coming to the conferences than volunteers. There must be an art to scheduling these things, but I haven't learned it yet. I _am_ getting better. One of the first professional meetings I planned, I scheduled for the night of a Duke/UNC basketball game! Won't do that again.

Also, I asked John Kenyon for dates he could come. So Nov. 2 was his choice.

I think fewer people are willing go to training sessions these days. We can learn what we want to learn when we need it on the Web and don't need to travel and pay for training. Unfortunately, I don't think that Drupal and CiviCRM are that easy to learn from the Web yet. And it is good to talk with people face-to-face who are interested in the same things you are.

Personally, I'm interested in developing better _collaborative_ ways to help people find answers to their computer/Internet questions. I've put some stuff on RTPnet, but I maintain it. I've just started playing with Drupal Organic Groups and think that has a lot potential.

By the way, the plan is that I will do the list half-hour. I plan to show a little bit of nccommunities.org (using the CivicSpace download -- old versions of software), nccommunities.civicspaceondemand.org, and rtpnet.org/hallman/drupal (I like this one best -- it's basic Drupal and Organic Groups).

Judy
----
Childers.Paula AT epamail.epa.gov wrote:

This isn't something that anyone has noted yet here, but I think it
worth mentioning.

I do at least some "web stuff" for several organizations with whom I
volunteer. And I know many other geekly folks who also build and/or
manage websites and such for various nonprofits and community
organizations. Yet almost all of us work full-time at other jobs, not
related to those organizations. A nonprofit has to be of pretty good
size to have paid staff, and even then, the paid staffers are often NOT
the ones who handle the "web tech," as they are hired for other skills:
organizing, lobbying, outreach, education, grantwriting, etc. The web
tech is either outsourced or handled by geek volunteers. You have to be
a pretty darn big nonprofit to have paid in-house IT staffers.

I would think those most interested in learning how to use free open
source tools like Drupal would be the smaller organizations - which
would likely mean a higher percentage of volunteer IT staff. Like me.
I'd love to learn Drupal and CiviCRM, to see if it's something I think
any of my organizations could use. But I certainly can't come to a
training event during the regular workday. Saturday, probably.
Evenings, sure. Workday? No way.

Maybe this isn't all that relevant - maybe I've misread your target
market for this. But at least it's out there for your future planning.
:-)
Best of luck,
Paula

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