Exploring Social Network Sites for HIV/AIDS communication: online forum
A while back I worked on a report for AIDS2031 with Pete Cranston about the potential for Social Network Sites to play a role in HIV/AIDS education. As a follow up from that, Ann Kao, from the Southeast Asia, Frontier Foundation has been running a number of workshops in Asia on Social Networking and HIV/AIDS education, and today we launched an online forum – running between now and the end of June, to host dialogue around the issue.
You can find more information on the forum and how to take part over on the Communications Initiative site where it is hosted.
If you know anyone specialising in work on HIV/AIDS education or sexual health education who might be interested in taking part, then do pass them the link.
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Tim’s Blog
This is the personal blog of Tim Davies, an independent consultant and researcher from the UK.
Hi Tim – this looks good!
I’m interested in the technicalities of running online events.
This site looks Drupally to me… how are the discussions and things going to work – mainly forum based?
Hey Dave
The site is indeed Drupal. Alas, tbh, the comminit drupal isn’t the best execution of drupal for an online event I’ve ever seen, so sometimes it takes a bit of working around, rather than working with.
The discussions in this case are going to be mainly forum based – although there are some face-to-face workshops taking place which will feed into the online discussions even though the participants in those face-to-face discussions will not necessarily be online participants as well.
I’m not sure at this stage of the kit that participants have access to, or the tools they are familiar with, given this is an international dialogue – so I’m planning to stick to mainly text, with some hyperlinking out to other resources, to avoid embedding big downloads in individual pages.
Remind me and I’ll share some reflections at the end on how it goes… as it’s a bit of an unknown to me too…
Thanks Tim!
I’ve been wanting to run a virtual govcamp for a while, and for once it;s the tech that has been holding me back – just not sure of the best way to do it…
Hey Dave
Interesting. Perhaps the best ‘low tech’ online event I think I’ve taken part in was a ‘Knowledge Jam’.
The basic premise is about 48 hours intense online discussion in some sort of forum environment.
I wrote up the one I took part in here: http://www.timdavies.org.uk/2007/07/20/knowledge-jam-session/
I think the 48 hour focus works quite well for giving people the ability to drop in around other work and meetings taking place, but keeps it tight enough to make sure it’s fairly dynamic dialogue.
Technically, I would guess a social media age knowledge jam might want to integrate Twitter more intimately, perhaps by each thread having a hash-tag and some-how aggregating discussions on that hash-tag into the thread, and having a moderator for each thread actively sharing discussions back out onto Twitter.
As much as I’d build anything for something like this in Drupal, sounds a bit like a Buddypress with groups and feeds coming in to me…
Buddypress – good idea! That’s my weekend sorted…