A couple of interesting posts from Nathan Wallace on his organization's experiences in implementing a wiki and then a year later, a customized microblogging platform called Jitter. You need to read both, but here are some key points: The organizational wiki seems to have been adopted more quickly and used more extensively than the Jitter solution. This is in part, Nathan says, because the wiki was responding to a need,... Read more →

Nathan reports on the success of a wiki as a company-wide intranet. Don't be scared away their price tag --a wiki solution can be had for much less money. Wetpaint has many of the features most nonprofits would need to use a wiki as an intranet and these are available for free. Wikispaces is another option, although it's $50/year to keep your space private. Aside from the obvious success of... Read more →

Today is the last day in our series on how to build a nonprofit website using Wetpaint. In this screencast I give a brief overview of the administrative settings, including adding Google Analytics and setting up a domain name. As with the past screencasts, you may want to visit the version I have at Screencastomatic, where I've added notes to mark the different segments of the screencast. I hope that... Read more →

We're back this week with the final two posts on how to build a nonprofit website using Wetpaint. Last week, I showed you how to get started with your site. Today we're going to actually start adding content. A Few Key Points Before you take a look at today's screencast, (expect some jumpy audio like in the first screencast) a couple of points I wanted to make: In the screencast,... Read more →

This week I'm showing you how you can use Wetpaint to set up a free nonprofit website. Monday we looked at why it makes sense to use a Wetpaint wiki to set up a site. Tuesday we looked at a couple of examples of organizations that are using Wetpaint as a website. Now I'm going to start showing you how to set up your own Wetpaint site. In today's 6... Read more →

Continuing this week's series on how you can build a free website for your nonprofit using Wetpaint, today's post is going to give you a guided tour of some sites that other organizations have created. I'm hoping that by showing you how it's already being done, you'll start to see the possibilities for your own site. Before we get started, though, in case you need convincing that your website is... Read more →

This week I'm helping Sallie Owen and her intrepid group of small nonprofits look at how to use Wetpaint to build a free website. Today I'm going to start by exploring why I think a wiki can work as an organizational website and why I think Wetpaint is a good option for nonprofits that want to go this route. Let me first say, though, that there are other options that... Read more →

A few weeks ago, Sallie Owen, Communications Director for the A+ Education Foundation, e-mailed me: Saturday I was a presenter for the Alabama Organizing Project, a year-long leadership training program for grassroots organizers. I mentioned wikis as a sidenote about Web 2.0 and the idea of free or very cheap websites that were easy to update, which turned out to spark a lot of questions. Sallie went on to tell... Read more →

I've been using Wikispaces for a lot of my work, but I'm thinking I may need to switch over to PBWiki, especially after looking at some of these new features: Now you can add a YackPack "walkie-talkie" module to any wiki page. This means you can talk to up to 20 people through your wiki, making collaboration much easier. Installation is simple--just insert a plug-in through the page. And there's... Read more →

Thinking more about wikis . . . After my post yesterday and in light of my recent meanderings about personal learning environments, I've been thinking a little differently about wikis than most people. We tend to see wikis as social spaces, because they allow multiple people to work on a single document and because they can be great tools for a cumulative gathering of knowledge. But getting to large-scale adoption... Read more →