Web 2.0 tools have changed the bound­ary lines between techies and pro­gram staff in many non­prof­its over the past few years. At least, they should have, though I know of var­i­ous orga­ni­za­tions that haven’t made the con­cep­tual leap to the new roles.

OLD SCHOOL: Webmaster

Let me explain by talk­ing about my own chang­ing work role. Even a few years ago, I was a paid staff web­mas­ter. You could divide my work into two large cat­e­gories. The first was techie: I man­aged server accounts, set up required data­bases, designed sites. I got into the HTML code, the PHP, the Javascript, CSS, etc.

The other was con­tent: when program-oriented staff had new mate­r­ial they wanted on the web­site they would email it to me or walk it over. I would put in my work queue, where it might sit for weeks if it wasn’t an orga­ni­za­tional pri­or­ity. When it came time to add the mate­r­ial I would boot up Dreamweaver, a rel­a­tively expen­sive pro­gram that was only acces­si­ble from my lap­top and I would put the mate­r­ial onto the web­site. Need­less to say, with a process like this some parts of the web­site never got very much attention.

At some point I start sneak­ing in a con­tent man­age­ment sys­tem for frequently-changed pages. This seemed very hack­ish and not good at first but over time I real­ized it greatly speeded up my turn-around time for basic text con­tent. But the orga­ni­za­tions I worked for still relied on the old model, where staff give the web­mas­ter con­tent to put up.

NEW SCHOOL: Web Developer

Nowa­days I’m a web devel­oper, a free­lancer with an ever chang­ing list of clients. I typ­i­cally spend about a month putting together a site based on a con­tent man­age­ment (like this) or auto­matic feed sys­tem (like I did for Philadelphia’s William Penn Char­ter School). I do a cer­tain amount of train­ing and while I might add a lit­tle con­tent for test­ing pur­poses, I step back at the end of the process to let the client put the mate­r­ial up them­selves. I’m avail­able for ques­tions but I’m sur­prised about how rarely I’m called.

Here’s two exam­ples. Steady­foot­steps is a blog by an Amer­i­can phys­i­cal ther­a­pist in Viet­nam. When we started, she didn’t even have a dig­i­tal cam­era! I gave her advice on cam­eras, started her on a Flickr account, set up a fairly generic Mov­able Type blog with some cus­tom design ele­ments and answered all the ques­tions she had along the way. She went to town. She’s put tons of pic­tures and embed­ded Youtube videos right in posts. Here’s a non-techie who has con­tributed a lot to the web’s content!

Penn Char­ter is a school that was already on Flickr and Youtube but wanted to dis­play the con­tent on their web­site in an attrac­tive way. I pulled together all the magic of feeds and javascripts to have a media page that show­cases the newest material.

They’re very dif­fer­ent sites, but in nei­ther instance does the client con­tact me to add con­tent. They rely on easy-to-use Web 2.0 ser­vices: no spe­cial­ized HTML knowl­edge required.

NEW TOOLS, OLD MODEL

I got an email not so long ago from an old boss who man­ages a monthly mag­a­zine. Her site has been rad­i­cally rebuilt over the years. Dreamweaver is out and con­tent man­age­ment is in. They use Dru­pal, which my friend Thomas T. of the Philadel­phia Cul­tural Alliance tells me won the recent pop­u­lar­ity con­test among non­profit techies. This is great, a def­i­nite step for­ward, but what con­fused me is that my old boss was ask­ing me whether I would be inter­ested in return­ing to my old job (the suc­ces­sor who over­saw the Dru­pal upgrade is leaving).

They still have a web­mas­ter? They still want to fun­nel web­site mate­r­ial through a sin­gle per­son? Every staff­per­son there is adept at com­put­ers. If a phys­i­cal ther­a­pist can fig­ure out Flickr and Mov­able Type and Youtube, why can’t pro­fes­sional print design­ers and editors?

My hourly rate ranges from two to five times what she’d be likely to pay, so I turned her down. But I did ask why she wanted a web­mas­ter. Now that they’re on Dru­pal it seems to me that they’d be bet­ter off switch­ing from the web­mas­ter to the web devel­oper staffing model: hire me as a free­lance con­sul­tant to do trou­bleshoot­ing, staff train­ing and the occas­sional spe­cial project but have the reg­u­lar full­time staff do the bulk of the con­tent man­age­ment. I’d think you’d end up with a site that’s more lively and updated and that the cost would about the same, despite my higher hourly rates.

I’ve heard enough sto­ries of places where sec­re­taries have come out of the shad­ows to embrace con­tent man­age­ment and have helped trans­form web­sites. I’m the son of a for­mer sec­re­tary so I know that they’re often the smartest employ­ees at any firm (if you walk into an office look­ing for the expert on advanced Excel fea­tures you’ll surely find them sit­ting right there behind the recep­tion­ist desk).

FINALLY: WHAT’S UP WITH DRUPAL?

I’m try­ing to join the band­wagon and use Dru­pal for a upcom­ing site that will have about a dozen edi­tors. But there’s no built-in WYSIWYG edi­tor, no lit­tle for­mat­ting icons. Sure, I myself could eas­ily hand-code the HTML and make it look nice. But I don’t want to do that. And it’s unre­al­is­tic to think I’m going to teach a dozen over­worked sec­re­taries how to write in HTML. The inter­face needs to work more or less like Microsoft Word (as it does in Mov­able Type, Cushy­CMS, Google Docs, etc.)

Most Dru­pal sites I see seems from the out­side like they’re still old school: staff web­mas­ter through whom most con­tent fun­nels. Is this right? Because if so, this is really just an insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of the con­tent hack I did six years ago. Can any­one point me to lively, active Dru­pal sites whose con­tent is being directly added by non-techie office staff? If so, how is it set up?

This morn­ing I’m work­ing on the “Pete Seeger”:http://www.quakersong.org/pete_seeger/ sec­tion of Quak​er​song​.org, the web­site of Annie Pater­son and Peter Blood (I’m their web­mas­ter). Parts of their site are amazing–the “Quak­ers and Music”:http://www.quakersong.org/quakers_and_music/ page has become a direc­tory of sorts for all the many Quaker musi­cians out there (who knew there were so many!). But the Pete Seeger is still mostly a col­lec­tion of CDs that Peter & Annie have for sale.
So I was won­der­ing what a good Pete Seeger page might look like and start­ing surf­ing around. There’s a great “fan page”:http://www.peteseeger.net/ which is reg­u­larly updated but has bravely decided to main­tain its orig­i­nal design since it was founded eleven years ago. And “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_seeger does its usual fine job at a biog­ra­phy. But the “gold mine is YouTube”:http://youtube.com/results?search_query=pete+seeger&search=Search.
A year ago a user uploaded three clips from _Rainbow Quest_, a short-lived TV pro­gram Pete put together for a low-wattage UHF sta­tion out of Newark in the mid-60s (it’s now a Tele­mu­ndo affil­i­ate broad­cast­ing recy­cled Mex­i­can soaps for its prime time sched­ule). I don’t know what kind of copy­right issues there are on some­thing like this but it’s great fun to see these old clips. Mak­ing this mate­r­ial widely avail­able is one of the joys of YouTube (well, that and watch­ing “recap­tur­ing the inno­cence of our over-commercialized youth”:http://ofthebest.blogspot.com/2007/02/how-to-shed-20-years-in-20-seconds.html). I’ll leave you with this, a clip of Pete singing with June Carter and Johnny “I’m soooo stoooned” Cash a few years before they mar­ried.

Over on Beppe­blog Joe dreams of “daily web cov­er­age of the FGC Gathering”:http://beppeblog.blogspot.com/2005/07/FGC-gathering-website-coverage.html. Well, FGC’s not pay­ing its web­mas­ter (me, “for now”:/martink/resume.php) for such ser­vice but I’ll try to sneak in a few posts between book­store cus­tomers. The book­store set-up was remark­ably easy. There was no truck cri­sis, no com­puter cri­sis, no get­ting lost on high­ways.
As reg­u­lar read­ers will know, I’m lead­ing a work­shop called “Strangers to the Covenant”:/Quaker/strangers/ with Zachary Moon and this morn­ing was the first work­shop. Although it was billed as a work­shop for high school stu­dents and adult young Friend (so 15–35 years old), though almost all of the par­tic­i­pants are high school­ers (what does that mean?). It seems like a great bunch. I arrived about fif­teen min­utes early to cen­ter in wor­ship; two of the atten­ders came in the room and sat with me and one by one every­one came in and joined the wor­ship. I had to won­der if a group of older Friends would have been able to resist the temp­ta­tion to ask about each other’s jew­elry, com­plain about the air con­di­tion­ing, etc.
Julie reports that the cafe­te­ria food is good. We’ve also been happy patrons of “Gillie’s and Bollo’s Cafe”:http://athena.english.vt.edu/~nquesinb/Nq/Gillies/extra/gbhome.html.

Quak­ers Unit­ing in Pub­li­ca­tions, bet­ter known as “QUIP”, is a col­lec­tion of 50 Quaker pub­lish­ers, book­sellers and authors com­mit­ted to the “min­istry of the writ­ten word.” I often think of QUIP as a sup­port group of sorts for those of us who really believe that pub­lish­ing can make a dif­fer­ence. It’s also one of those places where dif­fer­ent branches of Friends come together to work and tell sto­ries. QUIP ses­sions strike a nice bal­ance between work and unstruc­tured time, it’s has its own nice cul­ture of friend­li­ness and coop­er­a­tion that are the real rea­son many of us go every year.

Con­tinue…