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!]

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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/

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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..

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Having the items you bookmark show up in your minifeed (old Facebook) or on your Wall (new Facebook) is a quick way to share your interests with your Facebook friends. There are del.icio.us applications, but they end up putting the links on the “boxes” tab — they can be found by someone poking around for information about you, but they won’t (I think) show up on your friends’ news feeds.

It turns out that the new Facebook interface (http://new.facebook.com if you haven’t tried it yet) has a built in way to put del.icio.us links on your wall.

• Click your name in the upper left to get to your profile
• Find the menu item “Settings” near the top (to the right of the menu items “All Posts”, “Posts by You”, “Posts by Others”
• Click the del.icio.us icon in the “Imported Stories” section.
• Enter your user name, and you’re done.

Note that there’s no need to enter your password - only your public links will be pulled into your Facebook profile.

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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”.

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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.

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Notes:

• You can get the list of all members from the “edit officers” page.
• My version of Excel (2002) isn’t working too well with non ASCII characters in names. If anyone knows a UTF-8 converter that could be used here (to, say, remove diacritical marks and such — we’re not dealing with huge amounts of non-ASCII data), please let me know.
• There’s nothing but name and network here. But if you’ve got another list of stakeholders, it might be able to match your Facebook supporters with that.
• Networks don’t show for some folks. It may be a problem with people who are in more than one network — haven’t really investigated.


# convert list of members (most recent to earliest) from a facebook group
# format
# First{additional} Last {(Network)}
# to the format
# Number:First{additional}:Last{:Network}
# where number is earliest to most recent

sed 's/make officer//' | # delete cruft
sed 's/^ *\* //' | # delete more cruft
awk '{printf "%s\t%s\n", NR,$0}' | # number lines
sort -nr | sed 's/^[0-9]*.//’ | # print in order of last to first then delete numbers
awk ‘{printf “%s:%s\n”, NR, $0}’ | # renumber in the order folks joined the group, with number as first field
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][^ ]*\) (/:\1:/’ | # if a network, put separators before last name and network
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][a-z]*\)$/:\1/’ | # if no network, put separator before last name
sed ’s/)//’ # delete trailing ) for lines with a network


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Dear AAUW Webmanagers and AAUW Newsletter Editors:

I am pleased to announce the release of the second paper in the series “Facebook for AAUW”.

The links for these papers are:

#1: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddzhjjgr_41fmk9jr
#2: http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dg5fnwtg_0c7srw2wx

The first document addresses “what is Facebook” and gives brief instructions on how to get started. The second document is a more in depth discussion of why AAUW members are finding Facebook a good platform for connecting with each other and how they are using it to advance the mission.

The documents have been authored collaboratively by a completely unofficial group of members from across the country who came together in Facebook. Many of them have found Facebook a comfortable place to exchange information on a wide range of topics — personal and professional as well as AAUW. We invite you to join us to find out if Facebook would be a way to expand your network and amplify your voice.

The documents are written for the “digital immigrants” — those of us over a certain age who may want some background information before jumping into this new environment. However, if you’d rather just explore on your own, feel free to skip the papers and go straight to exploring Facebook. Once you’ve joined, please do also join the AAUW group that you’ll find at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2419848109

At least one state convention will be using this information as part of one of their workshops. You may wish to use the link to the AAUW group or these documents on your web sites or in your newsletters to let your members know that there is an AAUW presence there.

Thanks, all.

-Nancy

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