Over the last month or so I’ve been doing some work with a group from the Aboriginal Government Employees Network (AGEN) – a fantastic group set up in NSW to to increase the support, networking, and opportunities for collaboration between Aboriginal workers in NSW Government agencies. We’ve been working on an online community presence for them, which will be launched at their Annual Gathering this week.
The approach I’ve taken with this is to look for really simple solutions that a small, and ever changing team of volunteers can manage without too much ‘geek intervention’.
In the end, I went with Wordpress as the content management solution. As much as Joomla is cool, and I love Mediawiki – the simplicity of the Wordpress interface and structure is what works here.
Here’s the Vanilla install of Wordpress we started with…
and here’s the re-skinned AGEN design we’ve ended up with:
There isn’t much to learn now that the pages are all setup and we’ve got the blogging functionality working as a News section that can be updated quickly and easily by the team.
I’ve added a few other bits and pieces- a groovy form from Wufoo – and of course we’ll have a Flickr stream (would it be a jokay design without one? LOL!) and a Frappr map as a way of connecting people and locations.
The other key component I’ve setup is an install of PHPBB – a free bulletin board tool which is pretty easy to install and configure. This is your basic run of the mill discussion forum, which will allow the community to share info together quickly and easily.
We decided to go with this as it allows the team to manage the environment effectively to ensure that it is a positive and supportive environment for AGEN members to meet and collaborate in. All AGEN members will be provided with access to the discussions, with the space used for both official AGEN projects and social networking and sharing.
I’m hoping that this structure will work well for the AGEN team. They were certainly a very positive group to work with at our first training session.
Many of them had been through the experience of trying to learn some Dreamweaver skills, and were obviously worried about how hard it was going to be at the beginning of the day – but I think after having the opportunity to play with a sandbox version of their site they are feeling positive about this new foray into community web publishing.
It’s going to be great to hear the feedback from the community as the site goes forward!
You can check out the new AGEN website at: http://www.agen.org.au.
