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April 13, 2004

expanding a community website

Working mainly with high school students, we have begun building a community website. Our ultimate goal is more ambitious: to make the website part of a whole independent, non-profit association called an "Information Commons." The Commons would cooperate with peer associations in other communities, sharing software and ideas.

One of our latest ideas is to provide web hosting and design services to selected nonprofits that want to be nested within the Prince George’s Information Commons website. We would also offer several features to these local nonprofits--and to others that prefer to maintain independent websites.

Each feature would come in the form of an icon and some explanatory text that organizations would include on their own sites. The icon would incorporate our logo. Thus “The Prince George’s Information Commons” would include all sites that use these icons.

The available features might include:

  • A user survey. Information collected on each site would be deposited in a single database, accessible to all participating organizations. We would be especially interested in collecting voluntary data about residents' civic and social interests, so that individuals could be recruited for civic work.

  • An events calendar. The full version would appear only on www.princegeorges.org, but any participating organization could contribute events. The icon on their sites would link to the calendar on the main Commons site.

  • A group blog, with posts contributed by leaders of the participating nonprofits; anyone could contribute comments.

  • A map, with clickable icons showing the geographical location of all the participating groups.
  • April 13, 2004 3:15 PM | category: Internet and public issues | Comments

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