I’ve been involved with various organisations and charities over the past few years, and the two main problems they have all faced are:
- Lack of participation
- Dissemination of information
Whilst 1) can only truly be overcome by having the right people, both can be improved by collaboration – something which is tackled by many pieces of software.
A charitable organisation I run at the moment – an after school club at my children’s school – suffers from both these problems, and one way we are seeking to address them is by becoming a virtual or shudder egroup. Physical meetings will always be required, but things like distributing minutes, drafting and review of documents etc. are perfect candidates for solving online.
However the options on offer aren’t that great. Google Apps is the main one, but complete overkill for what we want which is a mailing list and document sharing/editing/review capabilities. Google Docs is perfect for the latter, but we don’t really want hosted e-mail, calendar, chat etc. I know you can turn them off, but the mailing list requirement still isn’t met. Even if I keep e-mail enabled, people don’t always want yet another e-mail address/account to worry about.
Personally I would just set up a wiki and mailing list and be done, but while this is perfect for a technical project e.g. software (that’s how Ubuntu got started), there are more problems:
- (Lack of) technical knowledge
- Administration
Of course there’s a learning curve to anything new. Google Docs gets rid of some of this by behaving in similar way to other applications, but it is still a new way of working. A wiki – although completely natural to me – will be completely alien to some if not all the other members. Compounding this problem is that I intend to step back from the organisation this autumn (after three years), and don’t really want to remain as sysadmin.
Having written all this, I’m now coming to the conclusion that for this particular problem sticking to the old way is the best solution, but I’m still interested if any decent (and hosted) solutions that help run groups exist, or if you help run a non-technical group (i.e. LUGs don’t count!), what do you use?
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: collaboration, google, google apps, mail, organisation, software, Ubuntu, wiki
I agree about not wanting to set up something that involves too much technical stuff for a group like that. Sure, you could set up a mailing list, but you wouldn’t want to maintain it if you ever left the group.
I set up a Google Groups account for my condo association. It has worked well enough for us.
I agree about the paradigm. I remember how difficult was to convince my friends my thesis partner and my family to use Google Docs and finally I needed to give up and return to good-old OpenOffice.org. But, talking specifically about e-mail, I think the ‘forward all e-mails to this address’ feature solves all the problems anyone could have with having a new e-mail account.
This has a small cost associated with it, but it’s pretty slick being on-line and web based.
http://www.sharedstatus.com
My, a wiki of course.
Use wordpress.com to host a blog there and add a wiki module. You’ll need at least one wiki advocate within the organization, however.
For virtual meetings, take a look at http://www.dimdim.com and http://code.google.com/p/openmeetings/
I hope you’re already using Doodle (http://doodle.com). Participation can be boosted simply by choosing the right times for meetings.
Fabian is right—someone is going to have to fulfill your (de facto) role as technologist. The capabilities of the people available might limit your options; but I think having a static configuration for e.g. a Mailman mailing list and teaching one person to control membership and moderate is not out of reach. You can always make yourself available for tech support.
To motivate the establishment of an IT role and infrastructure, you might present the following (also from Planet Ubuntu) to your group:
http://flors.wordpress.com/2008/05/04/the-paradigm-of-the-open-organization/
I have successfully used admiration for this set of principles to motivate the adoption of wikis, mailing lists and other software.
Google groups?
Two options: Google Sites and Ning. Ning makes it easy to create something that looks fun and inviting.