Quick guide to features

The best way to learn how to participate is to explore, explore, explore! But there’s nothing wrong with a helping hand, so we've collected some helpful tips, listed below. You can also browse through our help & feedback section. This community is based on the Ning platform, which has a great set of FAQs.

Web Features	Tools	Special Topics
About	Badges & Widgets	Getting started
Blogs	Friends	Migrating blogs from old website
Events	Invite	Creating a group
Forum	Latest Activity	Organizing an event
Groups	Messages	Library
Members	My Settings	Knowledge Wiki
My Page	RSS	Bridging languages
Photos	Share	Organization profiles
Videos	Search	Leaving the community
	Tags

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About
Here you will find information on telecentre.org programming and initiatives, links to knowledge resources and the Community Guide to participating on the website. Use this section as your reference point for all things telecentre.org.

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Blogs (more...)
Blogs are great ways to communicate news about projects, write articles about topics of interest and share ideas. All blogposts are added to the home page as Community News, as well as the telecentre.org RSS feed.

• Add a blogpost and share with the community! You can customize the appearance of your blog by changing your profile theme. And don't forget to add keyword tags to make it easy to search.
• Add images to your blogpost to make it more visually interesting!
  
• If you already blog about telecentre issues on an external website and do not want to cut and paste it here, you still have options for sharing your news with the community. Simple send us the URL and we will include it on the home page as Community News, as well as the telecentre.org RSS feed. Please note that external blogposts are not searchable within telecentre.org yet - we are currently working on a tool for this, so stay tuned!
• Remember that all members are responsible for ensuring they have the appropriate permission to upload any content on the site (see the Terms of Service). If you are not sure about copyright permissions, a good rule of thumb is to simply summarize the content and provide a weblink or let people know where to find the orginal material. 

Feel free to contact our Community Facilitators who are all experienced bloggers and can share a lot of resources and tips to get you started.
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Events (more...)
Members of the global telecentre community connect often through online and face-to-face events. Share your event and find out who's going by inviting members of the community to RSVP.

• When you fill out the event form it asks you upload an event image. This is required (we are working on making this optional). Please ensure the image is a square (about 30x30 pixels) in order to show up correctly.
  
• Note that a few details (title, date location) for private events are are visible to everyone but only invited members can view the content and RSVP.
• If your event will likely be of interest to those in other language communities we encourage you to share it in those sites or contact the appropriate Facilitator to translate and post it for you.
  

If you are an event organizer and are thinking of communicating and sharing results online find out how we can help you!
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Forum (more...)
The forum is the best place to discuss issues of interest with the whole community. Here you can contribute to and search for discussions on Telecentre Sustainability, Research and Networks and Knowledge-sharing Tools & Practices, as well as publicize research, travel or grant Opportunities. It is also the best place for Website Help & Feedback.

If you would like to be notified by email of new discussions, follow these steps:

• Go to the Forum and click on 'View all' then scroll to the bottom and select "Notify" to receive an email whenever a new discussion is added (like a listserv).
• If you reply to any discussion, you will automatically be subscribed to receive emails whenever there is a new reply (you can change this by editing your email notifications). If you don't reply but the discussion interests you, you can scroll to the bottom of the discussion and select "Follow" to receive an email whenever there is a new reply.
  
• You can also subscribe to discussions with specific tags.
  

If you prefer not to receive an email every time there is a new discussion, check out other ways you can stay updated with what's happening in the forums.
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Groups (more...)
Groups are created to help community members collaborate on projects, events or networks. Groups can be public or private, and members must join the group to participate in discussions and get updates.

• If you are a member of a group and want to be notified by email when there are new discussions, go to the Discussion Forum of your group and click on 'View all' then scroll to the bottom and select "Notify" to receive an email whenever a new discussion is added (like a listserv).
• If you reply to any discussion, you will automatically be subscribed to receive emails whenever there is a new reply (you can change this by editing your email notifications). If you don't reply but the discussion interests you, you can scroll to the bottom of the discussion and select "Follow" to receive an email whenever there is a new reply.
• If you want to start a group, take a look at the special guide on Creating a group.

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Members
Anyone can view the telecentre.org community website but to upload content or make comments you need to join as a member. Each member page contains links to all their uploaded content, friends and blog, as well as a comment wall.

• Members can customize their own page so you may notice a difference in layout and appearance as you click through different profiles.

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My Page (more...)
This is your personal page on the website. Here you can customize your layout and design, share your bio and links, and add RSS feeds.

• To change the layout just click on the subheader boxes and drag it to where you want it to appear.
• If you want to add more than one RSS feed, you can do so by adding Spring Widgets to the "Text box" on your page (see forum post).
• Note that this is a public website. Any contact information you add can be viewed and searched by anyone on the internet.

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Photos (more...)
Upload photos from your computer or Flickr! The photos section shows the vibrant diversity of telecentres around the world and the members that contribute

• Let people know what you think of a photo by rating it! You can also add it to your Favourites (only you can see this collection) and share it with others.
• The photos page shows you albums by default. Community facilitators often help to organize collections of photos into albums and we encourage members to create and share their own as well.

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Videos (more...)
Videos can be uploaded directly from your computer or any popular video site, such as Youtube. Videos can be rated, shared with others and added to your favourites much like photos.
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Badges & Widgets (more...)
Embed telecentre.org badges & widgets on other sites on the web. Or spice up your profile page by adding widgets for news, maps, Quote of the day, etc.

• To add telecentre.org badges and widgets to your websites, just click on the "Get More Badges" link on the home page (bottom left side).
• To add widgets on your own profile page, find "Your Box" on your profile page and click on the link to "third-party widgets" for instructions and examples.

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Friends (more...)
You can add any member as a 'Friend'. Only your friends and the Community Facilitators can send you private messages. You can also set your content—videos, photos, blog posts—to be viewable by 'Just My Friends' rather than by the network at large.

• Note that if you join different telecentre.org language communities you can keep the same friends across all your networks if you sign up using the same Ning ID.

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Invite (more...)
The telecentre.org community is open to anyone and we encourage you to send invitations to your friends and contacts.

• You can invite others by following this link or by selecting 'Invite' from your adminstration box on the top right side of this page. From there you will the option of filling in emails or importing your email contact list, and you can invite friends from other telecentre.org communities.

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Latest Activity (more...)
The Latest Activity shows you what members have been doing on the site. You will find it in the lower half of the right-hand column.

• You can control what information appears in Latest Activity by editing your Privacy settings.
  
• Find other ways to stay updated on what's happening on telecentre.org.

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Messages (more...)
Send private messages to your friends on telecentre.org (only your friends and the Community Facilitators can send and receive messages with you). Currently, you can access your messages by clicking on 'Inbox' from your administration box on the top-right corner. Our web service, Ning, will soon be updating this feature to make it easier to use.
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My Settings
In the top corner of the right side you will find your personal administration box where you can link to all your friends, visit your inbox and change your settings. My settings gives you access to changing:

• Account settings - email, name and profile photo
• About me - profile information
• Privacy - who can see your content or comment, what to display in Latest Activity 
• Email - select what notification are sent to you by email (telecentre.org will only send messages to the whole network on the rare occasion we have important information that may impact your participation on the website. We recommend you do not deselect this option).

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RSS (more...)
Throughout the website there are a number of RSS feeds you can grab to stay in touch with what's happening on telecentre.org. You can even subscribe to content from specific members or with specific tags. (Don't know what RSS is? Here's a video that explains it. And a description on Wikipedia.)

• Check out our colletion of key RSS feeds and other ways to stay updated on what's happening on telecentre.org.

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Share (more...)
It is easy to share content with others outside of the telecentre.org community. You can select any page on the website to send to your friends or publish on other social networks such as MySpace, Twitter, del.icio.us, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Digg.

• The easiest way to share a page is to click on the Quick Add drop-down menu from the Administration box at the top right corner and select "Share this page."
  
• At the bottom of each photo album or video you will find a link to "Get embed code" that can be cut and paste into another site. In addition, you can also click on "Share" to add them to Facebook, MySpace and fifteen other popular sites.

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Search (more...)
Every section of the website gives you a box to search for content. You can also search across the whole website by entering keywords in the top right side box.

• If you see a photo, video, or discussion with a tag you want to follow, click on the tag's link to see all of the like objects with that tag.

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Tags (more...)
Each time you upload content or start a discussion you can tag it with relevant keywords to ensure it turns up in searches. Community facilitators can also add tags to any content on the site.

• We are working on creating a list of commonly used tags as a guide. We encourage you to remember to tag content with at least:
• • country and/or region
  • name of the event or type of telecentre
    
  • knowledge theme, such as sustainability, research, training, applications, web2.0, etc...
• Most effective tags are created with one word, however, if you would like to write two or more words you must enter the words in parentheses as in the example "knowledge sharing".

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