Here are a few things I’ve run into in the last week:

1. Don’t hit enter unless you really mean it. Word wrap is a given, and if you put in your own line breaks later edits are immeasurably harder.
2. Don’t put two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence. One is just fine now that fonts are proportional, not fixed width.
3. Learn how to set tabs. In particular, if you’re doing something like a table of contents, learn how to set a tab that will fill in the leader characters for you — like this
   Section 2. blah blah blah ………………………………………. 12
   where all the page numbers will line up nicely on the right. You can also set decimal tabs if the right-hand column is a list of decimal numbers and get the decimal points to line up.
4. LEARN HOW TO USE STYLES! This is an extremely important feature! Styles are your friend. You’ll have some built in (normal, heading 1, heading 2, etc.) and you can change the look of a chunk of text by applying a style to it. You can then change all the text with that style by changing the properties of the style itself.
5. If you use heading styles properly, things like tables of contents become much easier.
6. Learn how to use mail merge. Recent versions of Word have a wizard that makes it easy to run mailing labels, form letters, phone books and more from a structured set of data (e.g. the downloadable branch roster).
7. Use footers and headers appropriately, with particular consideration as to whether the document will be printed single-sided or double-sided. If you’re not sure, put page numbers, for instance in the center of the line.
8. If you’re preparing something that will be distributed in PDF, figure out how to generate the PDF. That’s the point. The pagination and everything that looks wonderful with your print drivers may change if you send it to someone with a different printer. PDF is the common format that ensures everyone sees the document in all its glory as you intended. Cheap/free PDF converters abound - use Google to fine one. PDF995.com and CutePDF.com have been used successfully, and I hear there’s an add on for the Vista that’ll do PDF conversions.

I’ll add to this as I bump into other things. Feel free to comment with your favorite features. There are books and classes where you can learn about this. Perhaps someday there will be an AAUW specific class where the projects (so important! cf. Tech-Savvy) have an AAUW bent, but there are probably dozens of opportunities in every community to improve skills in this area.

[Apologies if I'm ruining my open source cred by talking about Word here -- but OpenOffice just isn't there (yet?). In particular, I don't want to have to define a schema for a database just to run mailing labels. The mail merge wizard is wonderful!]

Share

Enjoy. Let me know if you have comments.

Post your own comments: http://www.aauw.org/member_center/strategicProcess/

Participate in the AAUW WA discussion: http://aauw-bylaws.blogspot.com/

Share

It’ll be interesting to see if it’s modified to handle a “state wide branch” appropriately before the NC Branch Without Borders is chartered..

Share

Section 1. Composition. Any individual or institution who supports the purpose and mission of AAUW may become a member of AAUW. The provisions set forth in this section are the sole requirement for admissibility to membership.

I’d delete the “or institution”. We’ve gone a long way to keeping it simple. Let’s do that!

I’d add a separate article that says that institutions may affiliate with AAUW (as “partners”? some other word?) and give the board the authority to define the terms of such an affiliation. [Businesses as well as educational institutions, etc.] But I’d remove institutions from any notion of “membership” except, perhaps, to say that a requirement of the affiliation is that the primary contact must be a member (in the ordinary, people, sense).

I’ve seen conflating institutions and people get us into hairy issues with how the data is stored on members. In my experience, C/U representatives  (the people) are the ones who can provide real benefit to the organization — through the branches, through their other contacts on campus, etc. — and we need to connect with them as people, not just through their institutional affiliation. For instance, it needs to be clear that C/U representatives can join branches — this gets less clear if it is “Mega State University” instead of “Professor Jane Doe” who is called the “member”.

8/18 update: Other open discussions are occurring on the web. No need to keep this “private”.

Share

While I will be making formal comments through the form, I’ll also be using this site to work through some of my questions about the new bylaws — but most of those articles will be visible only if you register for this site. All are welcome — my goal is just to keep these comments out of search engines and such.

Watch this space for more details.

Share

The AAUW PSA’s are distributed as PDFs, with a fairly large block of white space, presumably for folks to put in local information. Now, not being one to do cut and paste to merge information — and wanting to be able to send the PDF to the copy shop electronically, I needed another solution.

I finally killed off my version of Acrobat 5 (purchased in 2003; it broke when I installed v8 of Reader) and have been moderately happy with CutePDF Professional as a replacement. So here are the steps I used:

1. Download the high resolution, color version of a PSA
2. Open it with CutePDF Pro
3. Click the form editing option
4. Drop a text box into the white space
   • On appearance tab: change font size to 10
   • On options tab: change alignment to center and check the multiline box
5. Go back to viewer and save the file with a new name
6. Now open the new file with CutePDF Filler
7. Enter informational text into the box (web address, phone number, etc.)
8. Save the file with *another* name.
9. Open that file (again!) with CutePDF Filler. [Maybe I wasn't patient enough, but the text that I entered seemed to disappear on the save. When I opened the file again, it was, however, still there.]
10. Finally use the “Flatten Form” menu option to save the file one more time.

As I said, this should be easier. On the other hand, when I skipped some of the steps, after I sent the PDF to the copy center, the text I entered had disappeared. [I sometimes had the same problem with Acrobat -- and the "type onto the PDF feature."] So I’m documenting it here in case anyone else wants to try this.

If you want the PDFs with the boxes (the version created in #5 above), let me know and I’ll post them somewhere. If you’ve got a better way to do this (on the cheap), please post.

Share

Earlier today, I virtually attended four sessions from the Women Who Tech Telesummit. This free series of webinars brought together some amazing folks thinking about Women and Technology from a number of points of view. Check out the sponsors and organizers on www.womenwhotech.com, and thank those that you know!

The slides and audio will be available on the website, but here are a few highlights from the sessions I attended.

I. Build An Online Campaign And Save The World

• Graphic tip: use faces and eyes
• Lists of tools: TechSoup.org, Idealware.org, SocialSourceCommons.org
• TODO: check out networking at Care2.com
• Message rates: Encourage at least one advocacy action per month [What does this mean for the list alerts@ncwu.org which goes quiet for months at a time between sessions?]

II. Women and social capital

Tara Hunt, the moderator has an upcoming book that addesses this issue. She framed the conversation with some “big ideas”

• Mentioned Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and the distinction between “bonding capital” and “bridging capital”. Women build more of the first, while men create more of the second. [I think I missed that on reading it. But the book is one reason I'm so engaged in AAUW.]
• Pew Internet Research: Women’s use of social networking is (understandably) more anonymous. Men are more likely to be open, hosting an audience, more likely to mentor/support each other.

The session then was a conversation with Joan Blades and Arianna Huffington. I’ll need to get the podcast and relisten.

III. Women and Open Source

• Included a discussion of “hacker culture” which, though I’ve been working with Open Source since 1982, I’ve never really embraced. Developers lists tend to have blunt talk about how code can be improved — but the suggestion was to learn take criticism as encouragement. It’s when you’re being ignored that you need to think about finding a new community: if your comments aren’t worth criticizing …
• This leads to a discussion of “finding the right community”. Open Source work can be seen as participating in a “karma bank” and it’s not often obvious how to choose the right community where your contributions can be effective (and so you can repay what you’ve received from other projects). There was a suggestion that open source projects evolve and that later in their life cycles they are more accepting of work like documentation, user interface analysis, etc. If that’s your area of expertise, you might also choose “end user friendly” projects instead of those like coding the kernel. Another example was the Drupal dojo community where “newbies train newbies”. [There's been a recent discussion on the Systers list about women in open source. The recording of this session may be of interest there.]
• See FlossPols.org for information on policy issues related to open source.
• LinuxChix was mentioned in a couple of contexts. In particular their courses include “Spineful Living” (as opposed to Spineless). I think the archive for that course can be found at http://mailman.linuxchix.org/pipermail/courses/2007-April/thread.html.
• A slide with a list of resources, included PHP women, DrupalChix — see the recording for others.
• Ended with a discussion of nonprofit open source: Larger involvement in women, very friendly, respect contributions other than code. CiviCRM, Organizer’s database, were two projects that were mentioned.

IV. Web 2.0: Hot Or Not?

Beth Kanter’s slides are posted on her blog. I made the following notes.

• What’s new is ease of creating content, ease of shaping audiences
• Choose tools that match demographics and “technographics” [I think we're considering this with Facebook for AAUW.]
• Slide from Forrester Research — demographics and use of social networks gave an interesting picture of age vs. ways of participating. [Click through to the version on slideshare, then go to slide 12 and hit Full Screen in the lower right.]
• Learn techniques for listening — case study from Red Cross
• It’s about conversations
• Be careful with staff roles - need those who are familiar, but all need to understand; define a box — discussions about the downside. [Easter Seals -- written policy on social networking, code of professional behavior.]
• Thoughtful experimentation. Different messaging on different networks.
• How do we make it safe to fail? to learn?
• It takes time — 2 hrs/day minimum; Sisyphean task to see ROI

Connie Reece: Case study of the Frozen Pea Fund

• Amazing story. From first tweet to engage a community (12/5/07) to 501(c)3 formed (2/20/08).
• Dollar investment may be small. Consider ROI in terms of “return on involvement,” “return on influence”.
• Social media: intersection of sociology, media, technology. New tools to do what’s been done for some time.

Heather Holdridge, Care2.com

See the recording to her answers/comments on some of these topics:

• Web 2.0 meeting human needs
• What makes campaigns work?
• Who should try social networking campaigns?
  Lots of volunteers, huge email networks, dedicated staff, max’d e-mail marketing
  Not free - will need dedicated resources
• 1.0 vs 2.0 - Save Darfur; $415,000 in 10 days through e-mail (M&R consulting) vs. $15,000 in 6 months from 1 million “friends”
• Compare/contrast Social network, website
• Goals (success?) - Awareness and Outreach (yes), Advocacy (some), Fundraising (minimal)
• Social network ROI calculator - frogloop.com/social-network-calculator
• What metrics? Might not be money or actions taken. [For me and our small Facebook experiment, I think the key metric is the number of members moved from the periphery of the organization to real participants in significant communications projects.]
• IFAW - case study; campaign specific pages

Q&A

• Digital natives vs. digital immigrants: check Pew Internet studies, Forrester, the digital native wiki - how young people are using social media
• Go deep on one platform - allow friends to spread to other platforms

Beth: beth.typepad.com
Connie: everydotconnects.com
Allyson: www.radcampaign.com/blog/
Heather: www.care2.com/politics

Share

Hooray! [Though this does add one more thing to the TODO list: writing up the instructions for folks to run mailing labels, address lists, and more.]

Shades of my AAUW NC 2000 Convention talk on how to use your PC to improve branch efficiency and effectiveness. [Information overload in 2000? Hah!]

And I hope Betty is looking down and smiling …

Share

• Twitter Primer from Beth Kanter. Lots of info and links like the ones below.
• Twitter in Plain English from CommonCraft. A very short video that covers the basics in CommonCraft’s engaging style.
• The Big Juicy Twitter Guide from Caroline Middlebrook. Well named tutorial.

In any event, one thing I just learned about was the “favorites” option. On your twitter home page, over on the right, there’s a set of “stats.” The ones you’ll use most often will likely be the “Following” and “Followers” — how many folks you’re following and how many are getting your tweets. Next is “Favorites.” I’d assumed that was “favorite people,” like “top friends” in Facebook, and I ignored it because I just don’t do ranking that way. But it’s not. It’s favorite tweets — a way of marking messages as ones you’d want to get back to later. Just click the dim star at the end of a message and it will be listed in your “favorites.”

Share

In a recent post, Lee Lefever wrote about “Discovering the RSS Explanation Problem” based on this exchange:

Q: What is RSS?
A: RSS is an XML-based content syndication format.

Say what? A true fact that’s not at all helpful.

He generalizes the “explanation problem” to point out that when someone says “What is …?” they usually mean “Why does … matter to me?”

So here are a few stabs at what is RSS:

• a technology that changes the “pull” of visiting a web site to find its news to a “push” of the site sending you the headlines that you can collect with the headlines from other sites into your own personal “web newspaper”.
• a technology that allows you to republish news from partner web sites on your own site

But do watch RSS in Plain English, and think about answers to the questions

• what is Facebook?
• what is a blog?

and even

• what is AAUW?

Share