Organizing an event on telecentre.org

The telecentre.org community site is a not only a great place to publicize news and results, but also a space for your participants to collaborate online before, during, and after an event.

If you'd like to use the telecentre.org community site to promote or document an event, please contact a Community Facilitator to let them know of what you are planning, discuss how to best use the tools and features on this site, and get help to reach out participants. 

Some ideas are below. Do you have more? Contact us or blog about it!

• Publicize — Add your event to the events section and ask a Community Facilitator to feature it.
• Track and reach out to attendees — Ask members to RSVP so they can see who else is going and you can send them updates.
  
• Gather collaborators — Create a group where the participants can collaborate before, during, and after the event. Include members that are not going to the event but would like to be included in what's happening.
  
• Organize an online event — Start and moderate forum discussions with the whole telecentre.org community or with a small group of participants.
  
• Get participants to blog — Promoting live blogging during your event is one of the BEST ways to document your good work and demonstrate the power of bringing people together. In the long-term, you will contribute to building a culture of online knowledge sharing. And in the short term you'll be better able to prepare proceedings and communicate compelling results to your supporters. We suggest that you give all participants a copy of Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani's Tips for Conference Bloggers. You may also want to have a blogging contest or engage facilitators to help participants. Contact a telecentre.org Community Facilitator to learn more.

And here's a quick overview of how you can use this site's features.

Upload your event

• Upload your event following our tips — Remember that if you make the event private, only invited members will see any content you include in the description.
• Use the event page like a website! — Use the description box to link to organizations, people, blogs, or other content. You can also include widgets for RSS feeds or use an external service like Sproutbuilder to create an event widget.
  

Use one tag for all event content

• Gather related content — Tags are very useful ways to gather all the event content (blogs, discussions, photos, videos) shared on the site. You can link to content with certain tags and you can also gather them in an RSS feed.
  
• Choose a tag — Select a unique tag for your event and make sure everyone uploading content uses it. A Community Facilitator can help you by adding tags if members forget.
• Create a feed — We can help you create a special RSS feed that pulls together all of the content you've tagged so that your can add it to your event pages and use it as part of your promotion efforts.
  

Use groups

• Create a group — Groups allow participants and organizers to collaborate before, during, or after an event. Read our guide to creating a group for help with this.
  
• Launch a group forum — The group forum allows you to host discussions about the event online so that others can see or join in. You can ink to specific forum discussions from your event page.

Emphasize blogging

• Blog about your event — Inform participants and build excitement. Share related articles and resources. You can also use blogs to communicate logistical information and add them to the event page or in a group forum. But remember that blogs are public, so everyone will be able to read them.
  
• Promote live blogging — As mentioned above, this is key to documenting event outcomes. Ask a Community Facilitator for help.

Take lots of photos and video clips

• Rich documentation — Multimedia documentation brings event blogs and proceedings to life.  Encourage participants to upload their photos and videos and tag them with a pre-determined event tag.
  
• Find a champion — Appoint someone from your team to pull all the pictures of the event into one album. The album can be featured by telecentre.org, and shared as a slideshow on other websites or blogs.

Think of ways to reach across languages

• Think beyond your community — Consider promoting your event to other parts of the telecentre.org community. Contact a Community Facilitator to get help developing a strategy to bridge languages.
• Multilingual event group — If you create a group for the event, you can make it a multilingual space to accommodate other languages.
  
• Blog on the appropriate community site — telecentre.org maintains community websites in Arabic, English, French, and Spanish. Ask members to blog on the site that corresponds to the language they're writing in — blogs are available to all members and community norms apply. A Community Facilitator can help you pull together all blogs into a single RSS feed, making it easy to see  content across all sites.

Share your successes!

• Tell us how it went — Remember to share your results with the broader telecentre.org community. Blog about highlights, post photos, make a video. And keep sharing — we all want to know if an event solidified a relationship that led to a partnership which resulted in a better way of helping communities.
  
• Upload, archive, promote — You can upload documents and links to blogs and groups on the event page description so that there is always a permanent link and record of your event within this community. Promoting your event after it's over helps others to learn from your experience.