Davis Community Network (www.dcn.org) was one of the first community networks tocome online in 1994. DCN is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization serving Davis and Yolo County (Yolo Area Regional Network, www.yarn.org/about.html) and helps
organizations better deliver services and meet their missions by using internet and web-based tools and applications.
In the last couple of years, DCN has shifted its focus in response to the emergence of new web-based tools (2.0) and increasing options and opportunities for nonprofits and communities at large.
DCN’s first year CTC VISTA project (2007-08) was the first stage along this path, with our “NPO Digital Literacy project.” With our VISTA, Rian Graves, we developed an NPO Internet Toolkit and Resource website, and are conducting three-month pilot tests (February-April, 2008) for six nonprofits at three levels of technology readiness. The toolkit includes tools, case studies and effective practices for website maintenance (using a content management system with templates instead of static html), online organizational calendar, RSS news feed, blogs, wikis, videocasting, databases (constituent relations management, volunteer management system),electronic newsletter, online collaborative work (document sharing, internal scheduling, project planning, real-time online communications), media making and sharing, and social networking.
A second aspect of the first year project was the Virtual Volunteer Initiative; following the workplan, our VISTA developed and documented volunteer procedures and systems that could be generalized to other community organizations, an online guide for volunteer management for use by local nonprofits, the template for an online volunteer handbook,
and a train-the-trainer curriculum for the Nonprofit Internet Toolkit.
DCN’s 2008-2009 CTC VISTA project builds upon this work. DCN has entered a 3-way partnership with the Center for Media and Democracy in Burlington, VT (Lauren-Glenn Davitian) and Grand Rapids Community Media Center (Laurie Cirivello) to collaborate and share best practices in
the realm of nonprofit technology capacity building and support. The Surdna Foundation (surdna.org) is underwriting a portion of this effort. We are working with the University of California, Davis, and with the Yolo Community Foundation, a relatively young foundation very committed to
strengthening the region’s nonprofit sector. With our second year VISTA and these new partners, we are planning several initiatives and projects (described in detail in the application and workplan) that increase the accessibility of our Nonprofit Internet Toolkit and Virtual Volunteer Program for use by other nonprofits in our community.
A key focus of our second year VISTA project is the development of “a community of practice service,” which provides for its participants an environment for support, learning and professional development, in an effective collaborative work environment. (A community of practice is a group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or interest in a topic. They deepen their knowledge and expertise by interacting on an ongoing basis. To make things even more convenient and advance the goal of organizational capacity building, participants work primarily online, using tools from the NPO Internet Toolkit to carry out their interactions. For an online community of practice, meetings and training sessions are mostly online, with occasional face-to-face sessions for activities that need that particular type of interaction.) DCN's job will be to provide this collaborative work environment, and the infrastructure and framework for the professional development. The “community of practice,” in turn, takes on maintenance and further development of internet tools and resources for the community. We’re very anxious to test communities of practice (CoPs), which have been so successful in the business and university environments, as an ongoing sustainable strategy for technical support and furthering capacity building for nonprofit organizations.
We’ll start with a core group from the six pilot organizations from our first year. Our big kick-off recruitment will be the university’s community services fair in the fall, which involves many of the community’s volunteer nonprofit organizations. This event will lead into our first ever, “NPO 2.0" event.
NPO 2.0 will be a one-day conference on technology readiness, and Internet capacity building for nonprofits, and will include strategic communications planning and needs assessment for participating organizations, and dissemination and training in the use of Nonprofit Internet Toolkit.
Finally, in the coming year, we are turning our attention to community generated content. We are envisioning and re-defining “community space” in the 2.0 era, particularly as traditional media platforms give way to web-based platforms. We will be promoting our Internet Toolkit, particularly its media generating tools (blogging, photosharing, audio and video blogging, digital stories, and so on), and facilitating, aggregating, hosting and archiving community-generated content. Community-generated content can be an empowering way to involve otherwise marginalized people in the activities and issues of their community.