2020 Summit community site
The aim of this site is to showcase government web2.0 sites, but in this case I will make an exception because the 2020 Summit community site shows what can be done quickly and on a nonexistent budget.
On Monday morning there was a conversation on twitter between Laurel Papworth and Stephen Collins about the need to get people who understand the web into the 1000 attendees at the 2020 Summit. Within an hour 2020summit.org was created by Stephen and live.
Even if you are not interested in the 2020 Summit (and you should be), it is interesting to watch the web site evolve and see how the talented people behind the site engage the community. A lesson for anybody interested in building a site to engage a community.
Stuff like this is really easy. It amazes me that some of the other communities for the Summit didn’t or haven’t done the same - there must be technically savvy people in them that can register a domain name and upload Wordpress… Surely.
Funding costs:
US$18 - two years registration of 2020summit.org
$0 - Wordpress
$0 - Sandbox theme and skin
$0 - hosting (sits with hosting I already have)
Time costs:
5 minutes to register
5 minutes to change DNS entries
10 minutes to FTP files to server
10 minutes to install and configure Wordpress
5 minutes to write first post
1 minutes tweet it and get others helping out
It’s so simple I’d do the same for other communities for nothing. They should track me down and email me.
I’d like to point out it was even easier for me (heh): Mark Pesce told me about the Summit, I blogged about it and linked to the post on Twitter - next thing a number of awesome Twitterati were fully supporting the discussion with websites: Stephen, John Crabtree, Mick from Tangler etc.
Between the technology (cheap and easy) and the discussion (ditto) we can change the world with a word