For the past five years I have been managing the website of Americans for UNESCO. AU is a small organization, and I am the member of the Board of Directors with the most Internet experience, so I volunteered. I have used blogger to produce occassional highlights for the homepage of the website and to hold the biographical information on the members of the Board of Directors.I also manage, with the help of volunteers, two blogs linked to Americans for UNESCO:
The purpose of Americans for UNESCO is to support UNESCO and American knowledge of and involvement in UNESCO. The fundamental purpose of AU's presence on the web is to provide basic information on the organization and to make its occassional publications available online. I have also tried to provide information on the blogs
- on UNESCO that would interest Americans, and
- on American involvement in UNESCO.
I think this is in keeping with the purposes of AU.
Over the years the volunteers and I have added more than 3000 postings on the blogs. They are generally short, and designed to encourage the reader to click on through to the original site from which the information was extracted. Occassionally I report on something related to the organization which I attended, and very occassionally I write an editoral piece, clearly labeling the piece as personal opinion rather than Organizational policy. Given that the site is designed to provide information to Americans, I tend to limit postings to English, although there have been a few in Spanish.
I had started the blogs in the realization that there would be a great deal of content generated over time if I did my job well. Rather than put all that information on the AU website, which would have required updating it, I put most on the blogs. Blog entries are dated, and it is recognized that the links for old postings may no longer be adequate; updating the links is not necessary.
I don't have a way to monitor the use of the AU website, but there have been a couple of thousand visits to the highlights from that website. The blogs get about one hundred visits a day, with a total of more than 100,000 visits to date.
A few months ago I started a Twitter feed under the AmUNESCO name and logo. The tweets, limited to 140 characters or less, are much less informative but also much easier to produce. I emphasize tweets with links to more complete information, and most of mine are retweets of things related to UNESCO initiated by others. There are now more than 1500 followers of the Twitter account, and scattered results suggest that it is generating visits to the sites that it advertizes. (Virginia Lawrence, a comanager of UNESCO's Friends, also runs a Twitter feed on UNESCO under the name UNESCOoer, which currently has more than 900 followers.)
I am a member of LinkedIn, the social networking site, and some months ago I joined a LinkedIn group focusing on UNESCO. Three of us were made managers of the group by its owner, and I have been very active in posting news and discussions for the group. At the request of a UNESCO web manager I renamed the group "UNESCO's Friends". There are now more than 500 members of the group, drawn from all over the world. As a result I have felt free to post content in French, Spanish, Portuguese and German as well as English. I have been posting information on the election of a new Director General of UNESCO and on controversial issues related to UNESCO's programs, feeling that there should be a site facilitating access to such information.
I had been thinking of creating a website with information on the election of the Director General when another interested person encouraged me to do so. Again, using a blogging platform which is free and user friendly, I have created Election of the UNESCO Director General with information on the process of selection of the Director General and the candidates. My idea was to collect information from the web, present it in a common form, making it available to what I hope is a large number of people interested in the governance of UNESCO.
I have been conttributing to Zunia and its predecessor, the Development Gateway, for some eight years as a volunteer. (I suppose there are some 20,000 contributions in its resource base that I contributed,) . Zunia is a portal on international development, providing communities of interest with links and descriptions of resources which may be of use. I have submitted many UNESCO resources to the collection, and indeed will sometimes submit Americans for UNESCO materials to the portal. While the primary purpose of these contributions is to point out potentially useful resources to development practioners, I also want to build usage of the sites that I submit.
And of course this posting is on my personal blog, Thoughts About K4D, which allows me to write what I think without concern for the censorship of others. The theme of this blog is knowledge for development, and I occassionally post things relevant to UNESCO (given its many efforts related to that theme). I also sometimes post things on this blog simply because I want to write about them, as is the case with this posting.
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