Posts tagged with "Online Communities"
RH Reality Check Honored for Its Online News Hub
RHRealityCheck.org Named the Best Electronic Forum in the Global Media Awards
A big congratulations to RH Reality Check for winning a Global Media Award from the Population Institute! I’ve been lucky enough to work on both ends of this project, first working to get this publication off the ground with RH Reality Check and then working to improve the website and the technology that drives it with Development Seed. I know the team at RH Reality Check works hard to gather and put out great information on sexual and reproductive health and rights and works to stay on the cutting edge. The work they have done to build a dynamic, issue-specific news hub is really impressive.
From the Population Institute:
“RH Reality Check will receive the Best Electronic Forum award for its commitment to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. The website is an easily accessible online resource for evidence-based information, provocative commentary and interactive dialogue on these issues.”
It’s great to see the website get this recognition for accomplishing its goals. RH Reality Check was started back in 2006 with the aim to make credible information more accessible to people in the reproductive health community and to become an online hub for people in this community.
Development Seed teamed up with them to help them do this. When RH Reality Check came together, the format was a relatively simple blog layout. Within six months, they had brought together close to 100 authors and were posting content several times a day – ranging from breaking news stories and political commentary to stories about the real-world impact of different policies on women and children around the world. The website underwent a dramatic transformation to better feature the wide variety of content and turned from a blog into a newspaper-style website designed to showcase their content, make it easy to find related information and blog posts, and highlight the well-known experts that blog for RH Reality Check. The layout was made easy for their team to update by using Drupal’s panels module, nodequeue, and node as block.
We also set RH Reality Check up with a version of Managing News to help them track all the news that was being published in their field and easily republish the stories they found most relevant to their readers. We continue to work with their team to maintain the website and keep improving it.
But this technology wouldn’t matter without the great editors and contributors at RH Reality Check who make sure the publication puts out excellent information that its supporters want to read. Congrats again to the whole team, and nice work.
SXSW is over (at least for most of us geeks…it’s still going strong for the rock stars). The ends of things always seem worth recapping, so that’s what I thought I would do here.
What was the biggest thing that everyone was talking about at SXSW this year? At least at the sessions I went to, I’d say it was the disappearance of the internet from our lives and what it will mean for everyone. Not that it will cease to have a presence in our lives, but exactly the opposite — that the web’s pervasiveness and its full integration with other technology is nearing a crucial point, after which we will gradually start forgetting it is there. With the internet having been a novelty for the past decade, this paradigm shift will have a huge impact on advocacy organizations and campaigns (and everyone else). Like the telephone and TV before it, simple use of the media will not establish anything special. Using the internet well will increasingly have more to do with being clever and with serving constituents, and it will have less to do with buying the fanciest new tools.
Television was it in 1960, talk radio was it in 1992, and the internet was it in 2004. But what will be the breakout technology in this year’s election and in the 2008 presidential election? The internet will likely play an even bigger role but new technology will replace the communication and outreach tools that were deemed so revolutionary just a few years ago. A lot of people are betting that this new technology will be online social communities led by MySpace and YouTube.
Yesterday George Washington University’s Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet hosted a discussion on politics, online social networks, and their connection. Everyone agreed that politicians – and nonprofits and advocacy groups – should be on these websites.
A Nigerian gem dealer just signed up on NextBillion.net, a progressive international development online community. I'm still stumped as to why he is on the site and what he expects to get out it. And I am really interested to know how he got there. The community now consists of World Bank, USAID, Chemonics, Freedom from Hunger... and there is a lot of discussion on socially responsible investing. What does a community do with an outsider, especially one like this?
It's going to be neat to see what happens. One of the founding principles of the site is to bring non-profit leaders together with business leaders. But who will reach across to this person who is working in a sector that has caused so much pain and suffering in Africa?
Why do you go out with your friends on Friday night? How did you meet? These answers all lie in network theory 'stuff' that we never need to think about because it just happens. But how does it happen online?