The A Spot

Let me just get this out of the way first.  Even after all the warnings…I totally underestimated what it would take to sustain a blog.  But Matthew and I are back at it again with a very cool new resource to share.

Along with Anna Prymakova, in the ISC Ukraine office, we put together a pilot project to shed some light on online government information in Ukraine - www.tvoyaderzhava.org.ua/en/.  Mining the collective brain of the nonprofit tech community we set up a wiki website using a Customized Google Search engine and del.icio.us tag feed.  The result is a simple, user interface that allows Ukrainian citizens to search all .ua.gov websites and using tags browse the different interactive features of over 250 local, regional and national government websites.

We put these resources together after conducting a focus group with users of an IATP center (Internet Access Training Program) initially set up by IREX.  The group highlighted the overwhelming about of online information with little understanding on the part of citizens about what they could do with the information, how to best access it and determine if it was credible.

Anna recently demoed the wiki at an IATP center in Sevastopol.  In her words: she started with sharing with participants the top 5 gov websites of Sevastopol region and of other regions, introduced them to the structure and navigation techniques of uagov at del.icio.us and del.icio.us itself. Then shared with them tvoyaderzhava.org.ua, customized google search, tips for using the site, introduced them wiki-concept, and rss as well, then we analyzed more of online opportunities of forums, Q&A, chats, writing an electronic letter tips, problems government has to overcome while starting answering questions online, why some websites are actively updated and useful and some not useful.  The site was a hit with the users.

The site is in both Ukrainian and English and next steps are for Anna to create a wink presentation that can be shared with the network of IATP centers across Ukraine.

All told the pilot cost around 7500 USD including - domain registration, wiki set up and customization, content creation and posting, time to tag, translation, two site visits.  Thanks to Google for making their search engine available for free to nonprofits.  We used Dokuwiki which is an open source wiki tool perfectly designed to handle multiple languages.  We also contributed back to the code with further translation of parts of it into Ukrainian.  For more on what we did check out - http://www.tvoyaderzhava.org.ua/en/main/about/start 

ISC - UCAN Playing the Social Media Game 2

Originally uploaded by ISC ALC
The participants in the Social Media Strategy Workshop loved the social media game and we had a lively discussion about how they would implement these tools as part of their strategy.

So I have been struggling about what to write about in my first post to the A Spot. First it was a biography post, then a top 10 list post and finally I settled on something with a bit more meat that I think folks will be interested in…a social media workshop in Kiev with NGOs.

Today I facilitated a workshop for staff from NGOs in Ukraine on strategies for using social media tools. This was part two of a series of workshops sponsored by the Ukrainian Citizen Action Network which is a USAID funded program based in Kiev but serving all of Ukraine. My organization, Institute for Sustainable Communities, is the parent organization to UCAN. The first workshop was an all day event introducing the basic tools and concepts of social media. For this second workshop we decided to go deeper by focusing on the strategies for using these tools. A third workshop is planned for later in the spring which fill focus on one or two specific tools.

(more…)