Many Fieldhands Make Light Work

[Susan Kitchens]

This Fieldhands network came into being two weeks ago. Read the highlights of the last two weeks. Watch a funny movie. Please keep reading, because I need your help. Many Fieldhands make light work.

A brief (two-week) history of Time Fieldhands

• Friday, June 6.
  In a discussion thread at The Field, several of us brainstormed possibilities. Groups organized through my.barackobama.com? Meetups? Facebook Groups? I'd heard of Ning before-- I'm on a geek women mailing list that Ning's CEO is also on; another friend mentioned how Ning was good for keeping in touch with classmates at a high school reunion... so I quick, lickety split-like, bopped to ning.com and signed up a test site. Once it became obvious that any member could start a group-- making it possible for us to have regional groups, we took off.
  
  It was an amazingly productive 15 minutes. Yay Ning. yay us.
  
  I knew I was going to be away a lot [I travel often into the Family Health Care Time Space Continuum--related backstory [to come]], so I put out a call for people to share site admin duties. Patrick Sears, Rules committee meeting liveblogger, and soon-to-be Obama Organizing Fellow, stepped up.
• Saturday, June 7.
  More people joined. More regional groups formed. Hillary conceded the race for primary. Patrick did some tweaks to this site, and so did I. Mostly I looked at the growing numbers and laughed with glee. I mean, hey, it was my birthday after all. Patrick did lots to get people to upload profile photos, ask for comments, feedback, input, ideas.
• Tuesday, June 10.
  I formed a new group for Group Creators, to help us get through some of the technicalities of this site, and to work around Ning's lack of direct communication from site administrators to Group Creators.
• Wednesday, June 11.
  Al wrote a post at Rural Votes' The Field tying together Mr. Alinsky's work and the way in which Mr. Obama is or is not running his campaign. Many comments later, the post mysteriously disappeared.
• Saturday, June 14.
  Obama Organizing Fellows begins training.
  Word came out about Al moving his site from Rural Votes dot com to Narconews dot com.
• Monday, June 16.
  All Fieldhands members receive notice of Al's move.
  I begin work on the new site banner.
• Tuesday, June 17.
  New Fieldhands header image goes up. This place starting to look more like itself, and less like its progenitors.
• Wednesday June 18.
  Patrick Sears, Obama Organizing Fellow, resigned from the Fieldhands ning network. Now that he has an official role in the Obama presidential campaign, he cannot take an active part in online presence. No blogging, no online community work. Sadly, all his posts & comments went with him, including the great discussion threads with helpful tips about how to post to the site, upload photos, and more.
  
  Also, that day, we experienced something funky with our Discussion forums. They all appeared to be deleted. I got some of them back, and messaged back and forth with Ning Support about the others. Our discussions are fixed. Turns out we mighta uncovered a bug in Ning.
• Friday, June 20.
  Two weeks later. Membership is north of 400 people, we have 43 groups. Some basic "how-to" material about using Ning and photos has appeared (or re-appeared), in the Notes section of the menu.

The Life and Times of a Network Creator

What started out as a lark -- a highly productive 15 minute exploration -- has grown tremendously over the last two weeks. Since that time, I've put in quite a number of hours onto this site.

This is a problem.

People who've lately not been able to fully do their day jobs because they're spending great swaths of time attending to ill family members (including time in hospital ICU rooms-- happily the patient is back home and that stage is ovah!) should not be taking on brand news jobs as system administrator for a community of 400+ people.

I need to focus on some life+work. I'm operating on a deficit (of time, of resources, of billable hours worked-- you get the idea), and I need to correct that. But I dont want this network to go away. I see it as something that belongs to this group of people; I don't see it as solely mine. But when it comes to tasks for this site, and some deep-down architectural matters between my login and Ning, well, it turns out this network IS mine.

People, I need help. I need for more people to step up and help run this lovely place. We need more admins. We lost an extremely fine one to the Obama campaign.

I've discovered that the way Ning works, the ID of the Network Creator is intimately tied to the Network itself. This network. It's near impossible to hand over ultimate ownership to another person.

But I can add Administrators who can take on the bulk of duties to keep things running smoothly while I work to get back on track in the rest of my life and work.

And there are other tasks that don't require techy-Admin level expertise.

Many Fieldhands make light work, or,
What's needed to keep this site humming smoothly?

Here are a number of things that can be done to make the site run more smoothly. Not all of these require tech know-how or becoming an Administrator.

Tasks that do not need tech know-how. Anyone can do these.

Hospitality
Welcome people, answer questions, point the way to resources (help.ning.com for basic tech support). Also, if you look around in discussion threads and identify a tech problem, you can bring it to the attention of the more techy admins.

Brainstorming Ideas for Improvement
I started a suggestion thread where anyone can offer suggestions or ideas to improve Fieldhands (Turns out that two weeks ago, so did Patrick. Start a thread, that is. But it went away when he did, boo). Go visit some of the other Ning sites here and find out if they're doing something cool. Come back and tell us about it in that thread.

What does an admin do?

Arrange (or rearrange) the Real Estate on the front page: Which sections (latest activity, blogs, forums) go where. How are they displayed (title? Full post? In what order?). We'll need to change and adjust this from time to time. Only an Admin can do so.

Write text blurbs that go on the front page. Announcements that happen for now but can go away in a shortish time (a day? a week?). Admin only

Write Notes. Right now I'm trying to move the Tips and Tricks and basic tech questions into the Notes area. Admin only.

If you're willing to become an Admin, please send me a message. I'd like to have a small handful, and arrange a group conference call in the near future to go over site Admin tasks.

Geeky Tasks

If you have know-how with HTML, CSS, RSS, PHP, we've got access to a back-end here where we can do stuff to improve and customize the site. One drawback to the backend -- only the Network Creator (that would be me) has server access. So if you want to help here, we'll have to do a hand-off of file transfers. I've done it before in other circumstances; it's why I love IM.

RSS: Pipes.Yahoo.com is a mashup tool for combining feeds and such. Patrick used that to create the feed on the right hand column to make the discussions in our various groups rise up to the surface. Is there more we can do with that on this site? I'd love it if someone could find out.

Two most excellent resources along these lines:

The Network Creators Group. Has lots to do with administering and running a site.

The Ning Developer Group Here's info about HTML, CSS, PHP, and RSS and deeper tech stuff.

Just for reference: Some of the official Ning network roles.

Network Creator -- The person who made the place. This network is tied to my user ID. And, as a bonus (or not), my smiling face is on the sidebar at right. Tho I may figure out how to make that go away.

Administrator (or Admin) -- Have many of the same privileges as Network Creator, but not all (Can't delete the network, can't delete the Network Creator, can't upload files to the server.)

Group Creators -- If you create a group, there are certain tasks that only the Group Creator can handle. Since we're divided up in to regions, we've got lots of groups, and lots of Group Creators [By the way, I originally made the Group Creators Group oinable by invite only. But I've fallen down on finding and inviting people. So if you're a group creator, please request an invite to that group.]

Group Administrators -- Group creators can add additional administrators to the group, to perform nearly identical functions.

So, where to now, Fieldhands?

We've made progress, we've experienced some turbulence at the outset as we take flight. What's this group doing? Where are we going? Most of what I've written about is the meta-work the behind the scene work to run this site.

But there's also the work-work, the work we are organizing ourselves to do, the work of this site as a whole. During the period of turbulence over the last week or so, I've been inspired by this comment posted by Ajai at Marc Ambinder's site in response to a post about the Obama Organizing Fellows:

Hi! I am one of the Obama organizing fellows and will be starting my training in the coming weeks. You have no idea how well organized this campaign is and it should impress everyone to say the least. I have worked with the campaign ever since it began and the level of excitement keeps growing and not waning. While, we were dispirited by the wright affair, there were people within the campaign that had such focus and did not let us feel down even during those trying times. What I found impressive is the fact that not ONE WORD IS SPOKEN about Hillary- good or bad. Especially bad. The focus is on getting Senator Obama elected and that's it. I believe books should be written about how senator Obama pulled the greatest upsets in the history of American politics and somehow I feel that no one is really addressing that aspect of the story. It is phenomenally historic. I am however, peeved by the manner in which some of the delegates assigned to Mrs. clinton are behaving. He won fairly whether anyone likes it or not.

That's some amazing focus. As we make a transition from "Hey! Brand new!" to "Huh? What the heck's going on?" to "Now we're back on track--What next?" I think it's good if we can set our sights on what we want to focus on, and keep the discipline tthat was described by Ajai.

Thanks, Fieldhands, for reading this long discussion. Thanks, too, for your help so far, and thanks in advance for your help making this a place of Community Organizing You can Believe In.

—Susan

[amy]

Hi Susan,

I just wanted to say thanks so much for all you've done to make this site and to create a place where we can all get together. I'm glad to read your family member is doing better! This is an amazing group and one to which I'm very pleased to participate.

I'm not overly techy (I know basic HTML but that's about it). I don't have consistent time but end up catching up in blocks but I'm happy to be hospitable, of course, but if there are small tasks I can help with, just let me know. You can send me mail at: amyvdh at gmail.com.

regards,
amyvdh

[Jess]

Hi Susan,

I too wanted to say thank you. It was fantastic of you to create the site and to do all the work you've been doing!!

I hope your ill family members are doing better soon or are at least stable.

I am sporadic on how much online time I have and am not overly techy but I am happy to help out as I can (and my keyboard has gone wonky on me again as usual so I"ll stop here since punctuation keys get usless when it does this>) - Jess

[Christi Demuth]

Hi Susan,
I am not good at tech stuff, but will help out any way I can. I happened to have a hour or two per day that I can help. I might be able to admin. I will send you a message.

[Oregon Sage]

Susan,

I also have modest tech skills and am willing to pitch in. I did try to use my Oregon group admin status to notify members of Al's move, however it is unclear if that worked. They are a quiet bunch. It seems that many are here primarily to read Al's posts and joined Fieldhands as part of that experience. We have a structure now in search of a purpose.

BTW, Thanks for taking the steps to get this off the ground.

[Susan Kitchens]

amy, Jess, Christi, Oregon Sage--

Thank you for reading that long tome! ;) And thanks for your comments and willingness to assist.

When it comes to practical ideas, I'm trying to toss them into the Suggestion Thread. It's notes to self, and notes to and from others. maybe one we get a buncha stuff there, if you see something you can do, you can (like volleyball) shout "Mine!" and hit that ball.

Oh, and Jess, yes, things w/ Dad are better than before. Enough so that I can try to get back on track. :)

[Jess]

Glad to hear your dad is doing better Susan! I hope it continues>