A toolkit for communicating
January 11, 2009
If you haven’t checked it out yet, have a good look at Message in-a-Box “A toolkit for communicating your cause”.
It’s relevant to anyone that needs to communicate in life and work.
When Nodestone was commissioned by the Tactical Tech Collective earlier in the year to help bring it together, I faced a somewhat overwhelming task as you might imagine when you see it.
What is it? A rather large online resource for learning how to communicate better, to put it simply.
More specifically, it’s an international educational platform for people in NGOs and campaigning organisations that demonstrates how to use low-tech and high-tech tools and tactics to work on some of the hardest issues of our times.
We show you how to think strategically (about goals, resources and time) and then know which tools and tactics (eg. images / print / audio / video / internet / mobiles and media) to choose to get your message across.
Here’s how Tactical Tech describe it:
“…a set of strategic guides to using communications tools for social change, together with a suite of open source tools to get you making your own media. The toolkit is designed for small and medium-sized NGOs, advocates, and citizen journalists to help them create and distribute content for their advocacy efforts while exploring the constantly evolving world of campaigning and communications.”
The feedback has been excellent around the world. A much needed resource.
Here’s an example of how it works:
This section helps you find out how others have used images effectively and creatively. It helps you learn how to find, create, edit, share great images, with an emphasis on photographs, comics, maps and simple animated images.
You will also find the power of images throughout Message in-a-Box, eg. in websites, blogs, guerilla marketing, video and animation.
Images add impact to stories, blog posts, websites, posters,brochures, email campaigns – whatever campaigning channels and tools you are using.
What do you need?
Essential: ideas, creativity, imagination, a strategy.
Extra: people to help, internet access, mobile phone and/or a camera (digital or other), source books/comics/cartoons collected from anywhere or commissioned.
Sokwanele – interactive violence map
Having worked in communications as a consultant, writer, activism and educator for (gosh!) over 20 years, it was a dream to be able to put these threads of life to good use. To make something practical and tangible.
Message-in-a-Box is about the power of PR being brought to the people who have historically had least access to it. Things were all explained in the simplest possible terms with examples and free software downloads. From human rights abuses to clean water – NGOs on little or no budget obviously need education and support. It’s an egalitarian Aussie’s delight.
In London, Botswana or Mumbai, Message-in-a-Box is now available for free, 24/7. A print version with DVD software is also being distributed. It’s actually a good resource for anyone a clear (hopefully) perspective on getting your message across.
Along the way we got to massage the words and ideas of some great folk like Becky Faith, Dr Dan McQuillan and Heleana Quartey. Hopefully to first incarnation is already being put to some good use.
Once thing I’m hoping Tactical Tech do soon is to improve collaboration and “stickiness” on the site. Feedback, registration etc… Also the use of images and stills, sound and video clips to make the resource more visual and interactive – to practice what we preach!
Over the years we have increasingly worked on projects that pass positive screens for social / eco accountability. Put another way… that feel good. Like:
- widgets for TrickleStar and the BBC
- social carbon measurement for Global Action Plan
- edu-marketing for the Guerrand Hermes Foundation for Peace
- teaching blogging to communities and companies
- setting up The Big Love Gift Guide
- running a massive campaign for TV Turn Off Week.
Client links and feedback here…
But as long as you aren’t arms dealers, we can usually find or create some positive values in just about any project. Get in touch if you want to know how Nodestone can help you feel good about your work.
Everyone’s Blogging
July 21, 2008
These slides from the training session for the Brighton & Hove Chamber of Commerce last week. Let me know if you want us to come to your event or run a bespoke event or Masterclass.
More details on our Social Media for Good course soon (looks like next date will be Oct 3 in Brighton).
Covers a bit of an introduction to social media and blogging, plus some questions to get you thinking about your own context, opportunities and challenges.
Some good thinking in the room and animated conversations. Quite a few organisations ready to get blogging and exploring integrated social media in more depth.
A few of you made pledges are you walked out the door about your goals and intentions, so let me know how you get on!
Thanks to all for your warm feedback and to those who helped make it a positive event, especially Lorraine Bell (BCP), Tania “Radiance” Fullerton (Brighton Steiner School) and Fay McDonald.
That set of faces, top left: FaceMap
June 19, 2008
For the new nodestone banner, I made a little application that goes and builds that set of faces that you see on the top-left banner of the nodestone.com. This post is all about the why and how of that.
We were looking for a way to visually represent the human nature of social media. We’ve got the nice, nodey logo, but where are the people? All the people. All the faces, so that leads us to a bunch of avatars or icons with people’s faces.
Now there is a facebook app called FriendGrid which goes some way there:
But, too big and not enough faces for what we are looking for. We needed something wide to fill that banner space. Also, those question marks send the wrong message, no?
So, then, how hard is it to get that set of avatars photos, scale em down and place them in a single image? Not hard at all, it turns out.
I turned to Twitter. Twitter users are prety good at uploading avatars, and accessing them via the API is pretty straightforward, so I wrote a quick app with Google AppEngine to accept a twitter username and password and then fetch the avatar URLs and display them in a block. It worked nicely, so I meddled with the display of the images, got them in a suitable sized block in a browser and screen captured them. I used the Gimp to manipulate the image a bit and make the fractured right hand end. Done.
Next features I’ll add:
- Add more source twitter IDs, so the starting set can be our friends, not my friends.
- Follow friends of friends until we have enough unique faces, this avoiding duplicates
- Remove the ‘no avatar’ images
- Do the actual image manipulation to build a single image from all these.
- Auto-update the nodestone banner once a week or something as friends change,
Sometime over summer I’ll tidy up and publish the app over to AppEngine and let you all know.
Bringing in the New
June 13, 2008
We are in the middle of adding redirects for authenticblogging.com and presencelabs.com over to our new home at nodestone.com.
Surprise!
Hopefully it isn’t a surprise that you’ve landed here, but if it is, let me explain. Libby Davy (of authentic blogging) and I (Graeme Sutherland of presencelabs.com) are putting our work and blogs together into nodestone.com. So, we’ve built a new blog with the content of both of them, and I’m just now cutting over to the new site.
Basically, it should be business as usual once the transfer is complete. In the meantime, there might be a few little issues wih locating your favourite pages. Bear with us for the next few hours on that.
We hope you enjoy the new site. We’ve had fun making it. (Except for the late nights and the hard bits :-)
Technical Stuff
Don’t read this unless you care about the technical details of the changeover.
We’re basically putting in permanant redirects (301s) from the old domains to nodestone.com, with a bit of special redirect magic applied to make sure that old url parts map to the new ones. This means (at least in theory) that google will still like us in the morning, and all our old paths will go somewhere relevant. Permanent redirects also mean that records get updated permanently, so things like feed readers should get the new feed address if they have half a brain.
That’s all. I’m off to arrange the nameserver changes for authenticblogging.com. Ciao.
Pros & cons of blogging – for social entrepreneurs
June 11, 2008
Some interesting analysis and discussion around this question at Social Edge – the Skoll Foundation online space for social enterpreneurs. Check it out, join in and subscribe to Social Edge is that’s your area.
See other Nodestone posts on blogging.
Social Media for the Third Sector
June 8, 2008
Learning Package: Social Media for the Third Sector
New dates coming soon…
Your chance to get > share > use radical knowledge for positive impact. More information…
Authentic Blogging Community
April 7, 2008
We’ve started up a Ning community for Authentic Blogging.
Lib pressed the button on this a few days ago and a bunch of interesting people have shown up and some very interesting discussions are taking place around authenticity, blogging and all sorts. If you are interested in the bigger questions around blogging, voice, authenticity and what it all means, then please come and join in.
Blogging for Change Agents
March 5, 2008
Libby has just started putting up info for her next series of authentic blogging courses to run this year: Blogging for Change Agents.
These are focussed on entrepreneurs, social, environmental and ethical enterprises, charities and other third sector organisations that are looking to spread their wings in the blogging and social media area.
For more info please head over to authentic blogging for the course details.
Wordpress.org links
October 16, 2007
These are my top sources for doing good and fancy things with Wordpress. I mean the wordpress dot org host-yourself version, not the free Wordpress dot com hosted version.
If starting out of for quite complex issues, the best place to begin is the Codex at codex.wordpress.org which seems to have documentation for almost every circumstance.
For example, to find out about how to host or arrange multiple wordpress blogs in many combinations, the codex entry for Installing Multiple Blogs has a great set of links to downloads and hacks of various sorts.
Developing Themes:
Plugin Development:
Really, I just end up referring to the codex mostly. But, the codex has gaps and the Wordpress support forums are often useful too.
At the end of the day, too, there’s nothing too scary going on under the hood so those with PHP experience will have no problem find out what is going on.
Adding RSS blog posts to a web page
October 15, 2007
If you have a blog and a regular website, often it is really nice to get headlines or a little bit of blog info into the regular website. You can put a news sidebar on a page, and give people links to go further into the blog.
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