Check back here often as I cover Cambridge, CCTV, and community media-making at large. This is a brand new project at Cambridge Community Television, so I encourage you to add comments, send ideas, and make this an interactive process.
Eli Kao is CCTV's Membership Coordinator and Online Community Developer, working to build connections between the CCTV community, city residents and other stakeholders at cctvcambridge.org
Agassiz Baldwin Community (ABC), also known as Agassiz Neighborhood Council, is a non-profit corporation that provides programs, services and events with a focus on children and the arts, and provides a forum for community discussion and participation.
Check out the latest issue of the Agassiz Baldwin Community's newsletter, The Whistler, to find out what's new!
These are some brief notes in advance of a meeting discussing the redesign of CCTV's website.
Some priorities (from my point of view)-
* Consider breaking out different functions: station, video, user community, "town square"
* Reduce the TMI effect, simplify, user-friendlyize
* Video, video, video. Show up front, emphasize it!
(push webchannel subscriptions, miro, itunes)
* Encourage more conversation around posted media
* Make user community more visible, vibrant
* Consistent tagging/categories schema to open up more user-friendly organization
* Develop how-to, "distance/online learning" component
* Think about future needs (mobile devices)
Some sites to consider-
video player layout organization
http://www.cnn.com/video/
http://blip.tv/
http://scantv.org/
http://www.nortontv.org/ (brightcove)
http://www.accessf.org/guide/watch/index.php
http://turnhere.com/ourwork.html (very visual)
http://www.getmiro.com/ (player, not site)
new ways to view/display vid
http://current.com/tv
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/specials/wp/onbeing/
Drupal-like CMS etc
http://www.nymapexchange.net/
http://mefeedia.com/channels/ read more...
The responses to the open ended questions on the survey yielded some great stuff! I've compiled and categorized in the docs linked to here.
This report analyzes survey responses relevant to website navigation and layout issues, as well as offers some opinions and recommendations.
Download a Word doc of the report by clicking HERE.
Margaret, one of the citizen journalists in the NeighborMedia program, drew up a really great layout focusing on the different zip codes in Cambridge.
NeighborMedia in general, along with the Media Map, is an effort to get hyperlocal and to use the website as a way to gather news, info, experience from all parts of the city.
Margaret's layout is very interesting, and can be thought of as one potential way of organizing a section of the site, perhaps a "news and info" or more interactive, community-based section.
At the very least, the main concept is to be able to filter content by neighborhood or zip code, whether that's built into the layout or can be done on a per search basis. Good tagging of content would be required. Another great thing is the additional functionality suggested: forums, bulletin boards, polls, event calendar, and other useful links.
For members of the MAO Committee and any other interested folks, I'm posting results of the survey on the CCTV website, community involvement, and internet use in general.
DOWNLOAD a .zip'd folder (232 KB) containing the following-
FOLDER CONTENTS
--- Text documents with survey results ---
1_MAOSurvey07TOTALS.doc (numerical summary)
2_CambOrgs.doc (Other organizational involvement)
3_CCTVsitelike.doc (What people like most about site)
4_CCTVsiteimprove.doc (What people would like to be improved on site)
5_CCTVsiteaddl.doc (Add'l comments on website)
6_CCTVgenlcomments.doc (Add'l general comments)
--- Graphs & charts illustrating selected results ---
8_UsedCCTVsiteBW.png
9_SiteSectionsBW.png
10_BlogBW.png
11_PostMediaBW.png
12_CambNewsInfoBW.png