Blog+Twiki

I'm experimenting with one site where they have trouble getting content up in a timely manner. It's a non-profit with a number of subcommittees. Right now each left-hand menu item takes you to an area for each subcommittee. They rarely get updated.

We're going to replace the whole thing with a blog on the front page that shows all articles posted by the system, and the subcommittee pages will be a mission statement & contact info, then the blog entries where "category == subcommittee_name". That is, the subcommittee pages will be a subset of the main blog.

It's a little scary because it isn't automating what they have, it's changing what they have. What they have doesn't work: updates never happen. Committee chairs are too busy to write anything, so each committee has their mission statement, out of date contact info, and a "more info coming soon". That's pretty lame. The last revamp of the web site tried to make it easier to update this kind of site in hopes that new content would come once it was easier to get it up on the web. This was solving the wrong problem. Committee chairs weren't the ones that put new content up, they emailed the new content to the webmaster. It wasn't any work for them and there was no content being generated. How would better automation of the same system improve things?

My theory is that they were fixing the wrong problem.

The problem is that people need to be able to post their own messages, or at least write their own message and let someone else edit it and do the final posting. Yes, there are some fancy CMS systems out there, but they are difficult to set up.

My theory is that if people have a blog then every time there is a committee meeting, bit of news, etc. they can post it with the right category and content flows to the committee subpages. Sure people reading the first page will only see the last 5-6 articles, but if you go to a subcommittee page you will see the last 5-6 articles related to that topic. The more active committees will have the more active subpage, and the inactive committees will have their inactivity reflected in their not-so-updated subpage.

Combine this with a Wiki and committees would be able to update their own contact info, mission statement, etc. They could create file repositories to share documents.

Now while I'm dreaming I have one more request. I'd like the system to be hosted by LiveJournal.com so that all the user account, service SLA, and other issues are taken care of for us. But while I'm waiting, I think I can do 99% of this in MovableType plus TWiki.