CISV from the Balcony.

How to easily create a multiple users news area for your CISV website.

Some, maybe even all CISV websites are pretty static. Really, content changes most of the time only when a new design is applied to the site. A number of NAs have adopted the OpenCMS system - which is a "content management system" enabling CISVers without in-depth knowledge of HTML to make changes to the website. But even those websites really only rarely make an up-to-date appearance. Now here's a suggestion to make your website even more interesting using Twitter:

Twitter provides users with a detailed intstruction to create a Twitter widget. What's that, you say? Scroll down this page and you will find a new Twitter Widget in the right column - I chose to display all Tweets that  contain the word "cisv". I'm not 100% happy with the layout - for some reason it's very long but narrow, even if I specified otherwise. But it does display the tweets fine.

I could imagine using a Twitter widget to rapidly make news updates to your CISV website. The good thing, is that 1. setting up a Twitter account and posting is really easy, 2. you can collaborate in adding news posts and 3. you can use all of Twitter's functionality like posting by e-mail or phone.


 

I know I'm preaching to the choir here on this issue, but the extraordinary interesting special report on social networking in the latest issue of The Economist ends with the following paragraph (after dealing with privacy and "waste-of-time" concerns):

But arguably the most important contribution that the sites have made is to offer a free and immensely powerful set of communication and collaboration tools to everyone on Earth who has access to a broadband internet connection. This democratisation of technology is driving the socialisation of the web and fundamentally changing the way that people interact with one another, as well as with businesses and governments.

It has also made it easy for anyone to form a globe-spanning discussion group of their own with just a few clicks of a mouse. Not so long ago that would have been the preserve of an elite group of companies and institutions which had the necessary financial and technical clout to perform such feats. Now, thanks to the technology created by Facebook and its peers, millions of these conversations can take place simultaneously with the greatest of ease. The world is better off for it.

I believe CISV is profitting increadibly from these technological developments. People who share the same area code with most of their friends and co-workers might never grasp this.

(My post on Google Wave goes in a similar direction...)

CISV from the Balcony exists for a year now, and I've been enjoying writing posts, reading your comments and following the discussions. Today I spent some time picking out the best posts of 2009 - I chose from most comments, most viewed and personal favourites. It may be a bit of self-adulation, but some of you may not have checked this blog regularly or just disovered it recently, so with this list, you can cherry-pick the most interesting stuff:

- Two retrospecitves on logos: The CISV logo and the AIM logo.
- A book that describes the story of a boy discovering his homosexuality after being a JC.
- Lot's of graphs can be found here, but the bubble ones are the best: Here and here.
- IJR statistics that shed an interesting light on JB Canada and Sweden.
- A visit to the websites of Great Britain (that still looks the same) and Uruguay.
- An attempt to quantify the "motivational effect" of hosting an AIM.
- Discussion on the regions here and here.
- Doris Allen's original proposal to UNESCO.
- On issuing certificates and the overall value of volunteer work.
- A look back into CISV Argentina's devastating development after the economic crisis in 2001 - with an excellent comment explaining the details and recent events by Maru/ARG.
- Starfish or Spider - an artictle that was also published in IJB thinks.
- Debating "Social Entrepreneurship" on the basis of lemonade.
- Has CISV secretely rebranded?
- An interview with Adam/SWE, formerly national secretary.
- Discussion on whether it's ok or not that CISV USA aren't hosting Youth Meetings (much).
- A suggestion to measure an NAs strength by a Balcony Index (BI) - which received more than 25 comments to date, including a series of formulas to calculate an even more refined one.
- A guest post by Sarah on how her CISV education doesn't always support her professional career.

All of the posts are still open for comments - so if you have something to add, please do so: You will be noticed - on the front page ("Recent Comments") and through the comments feed (RSS).

Thanks for everybody that contributed to this site in 2009 - you make the Balcony alive!

I'm almost back in cold, cold Europe from exile, so you can expect some new juicy content from next week on. Until then, please consider Martha's suggestion for a new CISV tagline:

How can CISV use this new (overhyped?) communication tool?

In a much-covered move, Google presented Wave last autumn as a brand-new communication tool. As a mix of e-mail, Wiki, Facebook and Chat it may have the chance of becoming the next big internet tool. In my experience CISV has often been fast in embracing new communication tools - no wonder: The organization is world-wide and money is scarce, but almost everybody is well-connected.

If you're not sure, what I'm talking about, please check out this longish video, it is actually quite fun watching.

As a first step, I would like to invite everybody to get an account. It's not open yet, but I have a ton of invites left, so please send me an e-mail (nick.trautmann@de.cisv.org), if you haven't been invited yet. If others have invites left, please leave a comment below.

Then I would like to invite everybody to discuss, how CISV could use Google Wave. Please post suggestions in the comments section. If people already have experiences (I know people at the Writeshop a week ago in Newcastle tried it), I would be curious to learn about how it worked for you.

Some of you may have been wondering, why your comments haven't been posted straight away - it's because I had to confirm them one by one in order to spare you the flood of about 10 spam comments a day. Sitting in a Wifi cafe today, I managed to set up a Captcha-system, that will make commenting a little bit more annoying but save me a whole lot of work. Hope things work fine now.

Karo/GER ran From The Balcony through the Worlde application. This is the result, depicting the most common used words:

I've switched location from our balcony-less appartment to a wonderful wifi-less appartment in Valle Grand Rey, La Gomera for the rest of the month. I hope you all had a good start into the new year, but don't don't expect too many exciting posts in January. Be sure to check back in February - until then my focus is on the sunsets...

Louisa/POR tells us this funny story:

This weekend we hosted a mini camp with more than 300 participants! (divided in 3 different sites- village- interchange- summercamp). That is a great number and a big fuss for our only chapter of course. But the funny part is that we had 300 participants, their parents and 6 buses at the same place in central Lisbon so the police gave us a ticket for a non-declared demonstration!!!! We will have to pay from 700 to 3500 euros for this big- non reported to the authorities- event!!!! I guess now it sounds funny and we are proud to be this big but the pay-day will hurt...

Are 9 pounds per day per participant enough or too much?

During our national board meeting in Germany we recently discussed the new international fee structure for our programmes. At the AIM, a standard fee of 9 GBP per day per participant was introduced for the Village, Summer Camp, Seminar Camp and Youth Meeting programme. 3 out of the 9 GBP are used for international administration. The other 6 GBP are transferred to the hosting chapter as a "hosting bonus".



I was wondering: why did we chose these 6 pounds? Obviously we have to strike a balance between participation fees that are to high so that nobody can afford to take part in our programmes. On the other side the "hosting bonus" must be high enough to help and motivate chapters. I guess that the 6 pounds were chosen as a compromise between existing hosting fees.

The other question is, why 3 GBP for administration? This number easier to explain, because it simply has to cover our international expenses: IO rent and salaries as well as the costs of our international committees (which have been fairly stable during the last years) have to be covered by the 3 pounds per participant. It's nice that the amount we spend on administration is so transparent now, but also shocking to see that we are spending 33% of our participation fees on international administration! Funds spent on national or chapter level isn't even part of the discussion.

So what to make out of all this?

- My feeling is that 33% of participation fee for administration are quite high. Hence,  a major goal should be to reduce the percentage of international administration. The best solution would be to increase the number of programmes we host. Assuming that international administration remains the same, no matter how many programmes we have (which is only partly true), we could easily reduce the 3 GBP administration fee. (See also my post about quality and quantity.) The other alternative, of course, is cutting costs by firing IO personel and killing costly comittees. (Why this may not be as bad as is sounds is covered in the starfish vs. spider post)
- We need some kind of a monitor system to measure, whether the 6 GBP host fee are right: Are we lacking hosts (because chapters can't pay to host) or are we lacking participants (because participants can't afford the fees)? Somebody should be keeping track!

A few more thoughts on the fee structure in general:

- Mosaic is excluded, of course. But IPPs and Interchange should be included: Not for the host fee, but for the administration fee: Every participant should pay the exact same 3 GBP per day per participant.
- Seminar camps are also a bit odd: From the 6 GBP host fee only 3 go to the hosting chapter: Comparing Summer Camps and Seminar Camps from the chapters perspective, you only get half the hosting bonus for the latter.
- Personally, whereas I like the ideas of transparency and alignment o the participation fees, I would still favor getting rid of the host fee altogether: Check out my reasoning on the original motion.