Since a trip to Peru in ’09, I’ve been really into the idea of designing social network sites that better equip people to do grassroots community and collaboration. This started when I was trying to start an volunteer group for a spread-out volunteer community, and found it really difficult and time consuming to pull together communications solutions. I realized that I’m nerdier than most and most would have just given up. So it seems that my personal “charism” as I see it now is making spaces outside of but connected to FB & Twitter where spread-out people can gather in a more focused and well-equipped way to better do grassroots community & collaboration.

Totally recommend it to everyone.

I got to connect with the fellow who co-develops CommunityOfCommunities.info and offer to help on the project! Super excited. Also met with a church whose website I offered to help with, and so will be in touch with them as well.

Leading up to the conference I made myself a rudimentary business card, but I found myself really invested in the content I wrote on it, and so will share it here:

I’m looking forward to sharing more about the content of the conference. I have already started a bit here.

1:15 AM before the Justice Conference.

Can’t sleep.

It’s the first time in a long time that I laid awake thinking about work, and it’s all good stuff.

I’m excited thinking about who I could help with web stuff and in what ways. It’s early/preliminary, but what’s running through my head includes:

• community of communities — do they need a boost? like some social networking solutions proposals? It seems like a theme/topic that would benefit from a richly connective community/social site…
• ethicalconsumer.org — they actually have a really good thing going, and what I want is to expand their tools’ impact/reach/scope to reach A) the U.S., B) faith/belief specific organizations, etc. Perhaps I could find Christian group(s) focused on educating consumers that would want to know about and look into relationship with ethicalconsumer.org…

Possibilities are endless… must stop thinking… SO looking forward to tomorrow!

All systems go. It’s a bit stripped-down for now, because as mentioned in the last post, it still lacks A) news updates and B) clear, specific calls to action. Most of the shiny stuff from the demo site (homepage sliding images, fancy buttons) is geared towards directing people to those two things. But the staff are setup with login accounts and ready to blog, so it’s only a matter of time before the site becomes a lively and active community that networks them to the people they want to work with, namely, Child Protective Service organizations and workers.

Also, my own photography business websites are, also as of today, up and running and ready for the public: JacksonArtsPhoto.com and JacksonArtsBlog.com.

Finished up the demo version of the connected families site today; it is ready for viewing: dsjprojects.com/connectedfamilies

There is a login link; here are some accounts that you can view the admin section through the following accounts:

username: admin **if you log in as Admin… don’t touch anything.
password: (known already by some Connected Families staff)

username: practiceeditor
password: (known already by some Connected Families staff)

username: practiceauthor
password: practiceauthor

username: practicesubscriber
password: practicesubscriber

username: practicecontributor
password: practicecontributor

Next steps:

Figure out the real goal of the website. As is, it just “gives information”. The homepage has a built in “call to action” section (just below the rotating slideshow) but right now it is just a link to… the staff page. Woohoo…

We need to have 1-3 specific things we want people to do when we come to the website, and it should be easy to do them.