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Details on the Human Ecology Forum Online Community

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Human Ecology Forum Online Community Website access (leads to an external site)

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We have set up a Human Ecology Forum online community website experiment at humanecology.possumpalace.org/blog/. The site is external to the Human Ecology notifications site, as we have both technical and support issues that have not yet been resolved. The idea is to have a space for discussing and following up on the weekly presentations, as well as over time to make the work, research and opinions of the members of the Human Ecology Forum community more accessible.

The Human Ecology Forum Online Community website and this page is being run by Kim Williamson, and the website itself is being kindly hosted by Dan McKinley.

For any queries or issues about the Online Community site, or if you have anything that Kim can put up on the site, Kim can be contacted online. Her email follows, although it is an image and so you will need to copy it into your email client or webmail address bar. Kim's e-mail is:

Purpose of the Human Ecology Forum online community website

To remind you of previous discussions by the Human Ecology Forum in late 2007 about developing an online community, the Human Ecology Forum suggested that the website should:

serve as a repository of human ecology (and allied) information/knowledge towards improving our understanding of each others activities (past and present) and serving as a seed bed for potentially more involved activities/discussions in the future;

expand the output of the forum onto a virtual platform (especially for those who would like to come to the Forum but cannot for one reason or another);

give a capacity for discussions to continue on a topic beyond the two hours on Friday;

potentially improve the linkages between each of us in terms of the work that we do;

capture some of the knowledge/information that flows through the forum space; and,

in all of this we might hope to encourage students in their exploration of human ecology, of living in this complex world and of taking over/ partaking of the forum in the future.

Desired features of a website were:

• a bulletin board (so discussion threads on interesting topics and issues can be created);
• a file repository (incorporating works we have generated and material - audio and visual - from the Human Ecology Forum presentations);
• and some kind of personal profile capacity so that we can stay in touch with each others work.

About the current experimental website

This website is a magazine-style WordPress blog. Information is put up as individual blog posts which are sorted by category:

• Weekly presentations (information about the weekly presentations with space for comments and discussion);
• Calendar (any posts relating to events of interest to the Human Ecology Forum );
• People (profiling people from the Human Ecology Forum community);
• Snippets (short comments, asides, links to the wider web);
• General interest (longer posts on other topics).

There are three ways to navigate the website:

• The static pages of the website are up the top right hand side (the About page, a Guestbook page, subscribe to RSS feed, contact page, etc);
• The categories are accessible by the revolving images gallery on the right hand side above the Welcome box;
• The categories are also accessible in the sidebar on the left hand side.

What you can do on the website

• Leave comments or suggestions in the Guestbook;
• Read posts (e.g about the weekly presentations, general topics, snippets and asides);
• After clicking through to a post, you can print off or email any post through the "Email this Post" or "Print this Post" button (under the title, next to the date):
• You can leave a comment on any post page.

You are also welcome to send us more material to put up on the website, or to post material yourself (by asking us to give you a user name and login).

How you can help

Right now, we're developing the part of the website that highlights people from the Human Ecology Forum community. We'd like to put up information such as:

• information about yourself such as who you are, where you work or study or what you do;
• summary about the research you're working on;
• links to websites that are related to you and your work, websites you contribute to, websites you find useful to your work;
• images relating to all of the above, not just text!!

We'd also like to invite short pieces about your opinion on current trends and issues that you see as important; what gets you worked up at the moment; what's out there in the world that you think is amazing and what things are being done that you think is changing the world. This is a place for your thoughts and ideas outside of the weekly Forum two hour slot.

New material that gets put on the website is put up as a post, so you can contribute several times, or on several topics, ongoing. There are no static personal webpages (although there can be if that's what you want). The latest post will appear on the front page on the left hand side, the recent posts appear in the "Recent Posts" column in the middle, and then get archived. Archived posts can be accessed by category, or by tags. Because of this system of organising and accessing material, it is better to have several posts focused on separate topics, rather than one long post with several different topics and information.

You don't need to post material directly onto the website, but if you'd like to get involved with that, you're welcome to. It's not hard and you'd get more control over what you put up and how it looks.

Online open access community of change

We'd like to see a Human Ecology Forum website that promotes open access scholarship, opportunities for collaborative work, and a way to open up the Human Ecology Forum community to the wider (world). So we really encourage you to send us material to put up that is usually harder to access - published articles you've written (that you have copyright over), reports, theses, presentations, slideshows, and even informal debates or ideas that you've written up in emails. The idea is to gather some of the ideas and energy that passes through the Human Ecology Forum into a stimulating, creative space that is shared and accessible by everyone. A related website that might give you some inspiration is http://www.createchange.org/

Please send me an email if you have any suggestions, comments or ideas about the website.

Cheers, Kim

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Photography courtesy of Alan Fox