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The CommunityNet Aotearoa monthly newsletter.
"News and views on community networking throughout Aotearoa."
The Social Services Committee has now finished its consideration of the Charities Bill and presented it back to Parliament. A copy of the bill with the Committee's commentary and the recommended amendments is on-line.
Thousands more at-risk school leavers will be assisted in the transition from school to work with the $7.9 million expansion of the government's Youth Transition Service into five new areas.
Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand is intended to become a complete and authoritative web-based source of information on all aspects of New Zealand — its land and its peoples.
Latest community news, events, jobs and ads.
Community sites linked this month:
Residential Respite Care on a small farm for children (5–17 years) and families. Programmes include interaction with animals and horticultural therapy.
Kidpower Teenpower Fullpower teaches people of all ages and abilities self-protection, self-confidence and violence protection skills.
Living Streets Aotearoa promotes walking as a healthy, environmentally-friendly and universal means of transport and recreation; and the social and economic benefits of pedestrian-friendly communities.
Arts Access Aotearoa works to provide access to the arts for people and communities that traditionally do not have this access. They can provide practical support to organisations in a number of ways.
The largest database of online volunteering opportunities anywhere in the world. (This database was formerly run by NetAid).
Pipers New Zealand Pages is one of the oldest (and best) independent New Zealand Web Directories. "Here are several thousand web sites that provide all manner of information about the land in which we live, and which we love to be in."
More links.
In last month's Panui #36 we looked at the advantages of mailing lists. Now we'll look at how to set one up.
First choice: your mailing list 'package'. If you don't care for the ad-supported Yahoo Groups then you may be able to use the Mailman mailing list package. Check if your web hosting service provides it.
Mailman is very popular and comparatively easy to set up and use. The thing is to take it slowly, start with only a few email addresses (your own and those of a couple of willing friends) and to test it out thoroughly before using it for real.
You can find full documentation and help at the official website (http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/).
Here's what the official site says:
Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.
That's a lot of features, many of them extremely useful. Set aside an afternoon for initial setup and keep pen and notebook handy for noting important items such as passwords, and for keeping tabs on the bits of information you'll be filling in. Keep in mind that if you leave your organisation, someone else will need to know all this information. Write passwords with extreme care.
There are a dozen screens where you need to set up how your mailing list will work. Before you start you should get two things clear. Note them down in your notebook:
information@community.net.nz
miraz@myisp.co.nz
Now go to Mailman (ask your web hosting service how to do that part) and fill in the first, General Options, screen. That screen may give you the heebie-jeebies, but don't panic. Fill in what you can, as best you can and accept any suggestions Mailman makes for you. Click the Submit Your Changes button. Nothing much seems to happen, but you've completed Step One.
Now go to the Membership Management screen and click on the Mass Subscription link. Subscribe your own email address. If you have several email addresses belonging to you then subscribe several of them. At this stage don't involve anyone else. Now you've completed Step Two.
Now go to the general list information page and read it carefully. Try sending an email to the list (that page tells you the address) and see what happens. It should go to all the addresses you subscribed earlier. Keep the test emails short and clean as they will most likely end up in an archive the world can read.
For more extensive testing click the Archiving Options link and turn off archiving until the list is ready to go live.
That's enough to get you started. From here you can experiment, send yourself messages, subscribe and unsubscribe. Test it out with just a couple of other willing participants. Read the online documentation.
Keep notes as you go along. Once you're sure it's all working you can invite others to subscribe by pasting your current circulation list into the Mass Subscription form. Send out a welcoming email to your list, telling them what the purpose of the list is, why they've been added (in general terms) and — most importantly — how to confirm or decline the subscription.
Now your mailing list is ready to use. If you follow good practice as outlined in last month's TIP, your list will be relatively trouble free, though there is always some administration needed.
Then, once it's all done, hire yourself out to local community groups to help them set up their own Mailman mailing lists!
[February 2005] You've designed a conference programme with photos, explanations of the workshops, a registration form, extra information. What's the best way to distribute this?
Imagine it's your annual conference. It's a big event with speakers and workshops, conference strands and a fundraiser dinner. You've designed a programme with a list of all the presenters, photos, fancy headings, explanations of the workshops, a registration form, map of the venue, extra information. Now you need to persuade people to sign up.
You're tempted to email the programme out to all the members of your group, other groups in your area and people all over the country who will be interested. Even supposing you've taken to heart the information in Panui #36 about mailing lists, is email the best way to do this? And what format should you use: Word, PDF, something else?
The minute you add pictures to anything the file size gets bigger. Send an ordinary text-only email to a friend and it takes a second to get through. Add a picture and it can take minutes. Put the picture and text into an attached Word document and you can multiply the time it takes.
If you have large documents, such as a conference programme, fact sheets or newsletters, especially if they have pictures, then email is a poor choice for distributing them. All too often email gets clogged up, attachments are removed or they can't be opened when they arrive. Then there's the whole question of viruses and worms in attachments, and spam filters blocking the message.
Don't spend half the day emailing out a 2 Megabyte Publisher file to all your members only to find that three quarters of them didn't get it or couldn't open it. You're wasting time, money and effort and creating ill will at worst and confusion at best.
Here's the trick: you write a short email, with at most two paragraphs, containing the most important information. Along with that you put the full document on your website. Your email includes a link to the web page (not directly to the document itself) so visitors can go to read and download what they want.
This approach not only saves problems with attachments but also avoids tying up phone lines and clogging up mailboxes.
You can also offer in the email to send a printed copy to anyone who wants it. Remember to remind them to provide their name and address so you know where to send it.
If you want someone else to advertise your conference (such as CommunityNet Aotearoa) don't just email all the guff and ask them to run an ad. You'll find your message lands at the bottom of a list of priorities. First see if there's an online form you can fill in. If not then craft an ad containing the key information and a web address and email it as text only in the body of a message. Provide contact details for any further information the advertiser might need (eg querying a spelling or a date).
www.community.net.nz/About/Submit
In the next issues we'll look at what format you should use for documents — Word, PDF, HTML, plain text, rtf, Publisher, AppleWorks. There are so many to choose from and each has its advantages and disadvantages. We'll also look at a free service for those who don't have a website but still need to distribute large files.
Earlier Sites and Tips are available online.
Great new and good resources:
We felt it worth highlighting this Kit developed some time ago by Hutt City Council, so we've added it to the CD Resource Kit page.
These have been added to the Funding How-to Guide by Dylan Packman.
This guide was added by Karen Davies in November, and expanded in December.
Coming soon:
A comprehensive Community Research How-to Guide has been crafted by Garth Nowland-Foreman, a community consultant and tutor in the Unitec Graduate Diploma in Not for Profit Management. It is going through its pre-publication checklist now, and will be published this month.
If you're an expert on a subject vital to community and voluntary organisations, and would like to select, advise on or review resources for a How-to Guide, please email bill.dashfield@dia.govt.nz.
In January 2005 there were:
Currently, the most popular pages are:
The most popular file download was:
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