Blog and first wiki glossary are LIVE!

Though the national redesign is on it's fourth day of delay (not bad!), the wiki glossary and blog are now live. Over 60 posts fill the community blog, dating back to 2006, and more than a handful of terms exist in the first wiki glossary dedicated to river conservation - very cool.

For me, the blog wrangling continues - hence my light blog posts over the last couple of weeks - and wrapping up what we plan is the last day of web development.

There are lots of little details left to complete, but we're planning on launching the redesigned national website tonight. Really.

As somewhat of a teaser, I released the blog and wiki to the organization last Friday and have gotten some good feedback as well as suggestions for moving forward. One in particular was to create a redirect for our blog and wiki so we can drop the added verbage (i.e. /wordpress/ and /wiki/index.php/Main_Page) at the end of the URL.

I assumed that we would keep these URLs as destination sites, only accessible via our website, but it didn't make sense as a co-worker suggested. So we redirected both to simply the subdomain, wiki.americanrivers.org and blog.americanrivers.org.

On a side note, I recently learned what that little box was actually called next to the URL...favicon (favorite + icon). Pretty cool.

Riverpedia: draft of wiki glossary using mediawiki

I'm pretty psyched about this: our very own RIVERpedia that can complement Wikipedia's existing river entries as well as create new ones. It's kind of lofty, but our goal is to expand the knowledge-base of river terms. I've been talking about wikis quite a bit (internally and externally), so it's good to finally see a public facing wiki.

Though we're using two wikispaces.com wikis internally (for more test purposes than anything else), this is our first effort with MediaWiki. Once we created a subdomain, our partner downloaded the software and got us off the ground. Though I was envisioning a wiki embedded in a page that looks like everything else (similar to Mobile Active), it appears the software is still evolving.

From our partner regarding the recent effort to use MediaWiki:

This is the most recent version of MediaWiki (1.9.2) which in turn required the most recent version of serverside PHP5.2. I installed the new PHP last week and ended up bringing down my server for several hours because of a number of existing bugs which often occur in latest versions that haven't yet been well tested. Things are fixed now but that experience coupled with MediaWiki's dense code has left me no fan of this software...

Now I have to go learn everything there is to learn with MediaWiki...

Very cool web 2.0 wiki for non-profits

I haven't participated in the *conversation* as much as I would like, but I think Best Practices in Using Web 2.0 in Nonprofits is a great example of walking the talk.

Over the last few months, I've been looking into different wiki platforms to test functionality for when we launch our wiki glossary of river terms on the redesigned national site - see the front page mock-up, left navigation.

I've looked in to (and tested some) wikispaces, Socialtext, Mediawiki, and PBwiki. I'm sure all have their perks, but I'm still a bit unsure what would be the best fit for us. I'm probably leaning toward Mediawiki (hard to go wrong when backed by the wikipedia foundation as a friend pointed out), but the real question for us is what will work the best within Convio's Content Management System (CMS).

I'm chatting with folks from Convio on Wednesday to talk about this as well as introduce our second half partners (firm who'll attach code to the designs) with the national site redesign, The Element Agency. I'd really like the river glossary page to look like all of our other pages, regardless if it is hosted elsewhere. The blog will have to be hosted outside of Convio - couldn't get around that - but I'd prefer to keep it simple with just the blog living outside.

I've found some great examples to model our effort after, Techsoup, Reuters, and MobileActive. I'm really excited about the wiki, very cool stuff.

Wiki-ing for volunteer help

I can be persistent, and at times impatient, but I’m really jonesing for my organization to test out a wiki. There’s a lot of buzz floating around wikis (great podcast) online, and everyone knows within the organization that I’ve been proselytizing like no tomorrow, but can we take the leap of faith…let go of the notion of message control?

I’ve been trying to pitch various uses of wikis within, such as Riverpedia, Toolkitpedia, MERpedia, or and Outreachpedia, and though there’s been interest, I can’t land the kill. I’ve been putting on the hard sell and it’s got to be getting annoying, but I’m pretty eager to give it a test run outside of our organization.

My latest idea: dress up the wiki as a spreadsheet and ask for the public’s help to map out our national site’s information architecture (IA) by conducting a content inventory analysis. I’d love for folks to weigh in on this process (like, um, the blog here) and help us break down the pages that live on our site…the building blocks for the redesign process.

Can we really turn our visitors, online activists, and supporters into virtual volunteers—working at their own pace? That would be cool and it even plays in to Tim Reilly’s #4 core competency.

Spies = intellipedia, river movement = riverpedia

Currently, our national site boasts a glossary link, but it goes to USGS’ website. That’s less than ideal. And, one of better pages that define the various terms used in river conservation work is on a website that has been on its way out, restoringrivers.org.

The staff survey we did last month revealed that over half of my co-workers felt we do not speak to our newbies, first time web visitors, well. Not sure if a running list of river terms breaks down those barriers, but what if our river glossary was dynamic. Yup, a Riverpedia. That would be pretty cool. We could capture all of the terms relevant to river conservation virgins to the leading professionals—and the professionals could help us edit the list!

We’re already exploring wikis internally for document control purposes, but I really like the idea of exploring a Riverpedia. This would first of all allow anyone in the organization to add new words, edit existing ones, and / or manage pages relevant to their specific work. I really like the idea of decentralizing knowledge…as well as the need for multiple updates to be completed by the web team.

Techsoup has a new glossary that is a great example of how we could structure our Riverpedia.

Wiki, wiki, you're so fine...for spies?

I swear, this is not from the Onion: Gov’t launches a "top secret" Intellipedia system.

I see this as somehow reinforcing the use of wikis; albeit, a little scary when it comes to national security, but cool. Over the last few months I’ve attempted to spread the wiki cheer around the office. And, there have plenty of soap box moments—a little embarrassing in hindsight—but I get pretty excited over this stuff.

I think there is great potential for wikis in the workplace. Good god, with the amount of document trafficking we all do, wouldn’t it be nice to receive just updates? As well as cut out all the useless emails—I think 25% of my day is spent hitting the delete button.

Fortunately, I think some of it may be sticking. Every April, for the last 20+ years, American Rivers releases a report titled, America’s Most Endangered Rivers. It’s a big time suck for us, but an endeavor well worth our effort. Basically, it’s our trump card—we generate (and get) a lot of attention when the report is released. It has essentially become our biggest branding opportunity too. We see 5x as much traffic over a few days and reporters—not to mention groups too—can’t wait to get their paws on the names of the rivers before the report is released. Confidentiality, to say the least, is huge.

In fact, I just received the folder of the rivers who made the first cut, and it’s marked with a big CONFIDENTIAL stamp. After the proposals are scrutinized, the selection committee will narrow the list to eventually 10 rivers.

After that, we work extensively with our partner to gather more information, e.g. text, photos, graphics, etc. And thus, the challenge for us, is managing the flow of information. And all of this has to be done in complete secrecy.

How do we manage this process? We went around with a few ideas and wikis made it to the top the list, for now. Of course, when I saw an opening, I started pushing for completely opening the communication channels and creating a blog. Easy cowboy. Not smooth, so I decided to give it a rest for the last couple of weeks. But, I’ve decided to hit the war path again.

I’d like to lay on the offensive for creating 10 private wikis, one for each river. There are a couple of candidates, Wikispaces.com (we’re currently using a private wiki internally for our department), Jot.com (just bought out by Google), and Socialtext.com (just learned of it today).

Not sure what the best fit for us will be, but I’d love to test it out…like this blog, it’s somewhat of an experiment.