Appropedia:Communications internships/Tasks: Difference between revisions

Your goals as an intern should be discussed with your mentor(s), and will be reviewed and updated every month or two.

Below are some of the tasks that communications interns engage in:

Develop material for newcomers

Video/text help pages. See Wikigender's page for ideas.

Develop material for publicity

• Press releases
• Blog posts - for our blog and guest posts elsewhere. Do the post yourself, or as a joint post with a mentor.
• Find good pages and use them to make Books. Note that conventional books are common topics for radio interviews - let's try with Appropedia books.
• If you're very experienced with MediaWiki markup, you could try making a Portal on a new topic. Warning: this is complex!

Updating the frontpage

The front page (Welcome to Appropedia) has four sections that need to be manually updated often to show our activity and keep repeat visitors engaged. The four sections are:

Highlighted projects

• • There are many awesome projects on Appropedia to highlight. Finding them is a great way to learn about Appropedia content.
  • We would like to update this at least weekly.
  • This is a little difficult to update (it is done at Template:Highlighted project and here Appropedia:Highlighted Projects). Your mentor can lead you through the process.

Announcements

• These are often just links to the most recent couple of announcement blog posts. (Check first - these should be automatic, but the software that does this sometimes has a problem).
• These could also include links to news about Appropedia.

Hot topics / In the news

These are appropedia pages that have recently been covered by other media, or are about topics currently in the news (e.g. burning man, natural disasters, natural building, etc.)

Popular pages

These are pages that are currently popular.

You can get current information from google analytics and longterm information from [Special:PopularPages http://www.appropedia.org/Special:PopularPages]. For the first few weeks, just pick pages from that Special page. After that we can set you up on Google Analytics or have a report emailed to you weekly.

Social media presence

Give us a Facebook page something like CSIRO's! A nice welcome and an easy-to-view tour showing facets of our community.

Promoting existing content

There is a lot of exciting content on Appropedia suitable for promotion. So far, we mostly do this through Appropedia's social media channels (Twitter, Identica, FB, G+, and to some extent Flickr and Youtube).

We need to identify the most influential channels in terms of our desired outcomes - in particular, attracting likeminded people who will use and contribute to Appropedia. And having greater energy for this through your help, we can have a greater impact.

Possible methods are listed below. Feel free to dive straight in, but keep in touch with your mentor, who has some experience and can point out some dead-ends time sinks to avoid.

• Contacting suitable blogs and sites online.
• Posting to relevant communities. Be sure you're adding value and keeping the communities happy. This could include:
  • Sustainability forums, of which Permies is probably the most relevant and Appropedia-friendly (and it's very active).
  • Joint blog/news sites such as Green Pages Australia. Keep it relevant - look for the site's area of focus.
• Contacting publishers of newsletters, with content of relevance to their focus. This involves identifying the best and/or most popular content, and the most interesting new content each month. (Use Special:PopularPages; Facebook Likes & G+ "+1's" (how do we find the top pages this way? there's a small socmed research project); shares on socmed (search Twitter, FB, G+); and see what recent service learning classes have created.
• Pick a new page each week to promote. Start with the mainpage. I would love to talk with you Daniel about various methods to do this. You can start seeing the current buzz about appropedia with the following tools:
• Facebook. Note that building a community on Facebook itself isn't practical, and isn't our aim. We just aim to raise Appropedia's profile and let people know what we're doing, and where to come to find more cool stuff.
  • Search appropedia on facebook looking through posts by everyone. Where possible, affirm that enthusiasm and share extra info that might be of interest. Maybe point them to the Appropedia page on FB.
• Search appropediaand appropedia.org on twitter.
• Search appropedia -site:appropedia.org on google with the time set to past week or past 24 hours to get an idea of what people are talking about.
• Set a Google alert for appropedia -site: appropedia.org or try subscribing to the this RSS feed.
• Engage with existing sites where Appropedia is often mentioned - e.g. builditsolar.com and permies.com.
• Look for more sites - any sustainability forum could be a place to start threads.

Community-building

This is perhaps the most valuable thing you can do with Appropedia. It is the community that creates Appropedia.

Ideas to help engagement:

• Appropedia:Newsletter
• We could put something engaging in confirmation emails, and possibly in other notification emails. [1] Step 1: choose what to add (hot new pages? Or take ideas from recent newsletters (once we have a newsletter). Related pages? Once we have a concept, we can ask the tech team about how we can get it done.

Create a new initiative

What's your inspiration?

Editing

Editing and other Appropedia related tasks are at your discretion. These are valuable in getting a feeling for how Appropedia works and. what challenges editors face. This also helps you to get to know the community.