🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings Devmedia list subscribers...

[if you are receiving this and not a subscriber, info on the list is
below]

In our efforts to improve our ability to share information and enhance
communication among advocates and practitioners of communication for
development and democracy, the Don Snowden Program for Development
Communication (the organization that maintains the Devmedia list and the
Devmedia web site) is embarking upon a project to radically improve the
Devmedia web site.  We welcome your input on features that we can add to
the web site!

The current web site is an old "first generation" html coded site that
is becoming cumbersome and very time consuming to maintain.  It is
located at: http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~drichard/devmedia.

Over the next few weeks we will be transforming the Devmedia web site
into a dynamic, database driven site that will be easier for us to
manage, and much more functional for you to use.  It will be modelled
after sites we helped develop for Canadian Agriculture:
http://www.caffeine.ca, and Canadian students of international
development: http://www.idsnet.org

The site will include:
1) A dynamic calendar that you can easily update to link to information
on your events, conferences, etc.;
2) Easy to use fill in forms to enable you to quickly and easily add new
web sites;
3) Mirrors to both the devmedia listserv and the sister list for rural
development through ICTs - (rural-ict-dev@listserv.uoguelph.ca) so that
you can choose to read the posted messages without actually having to
subscribe to the lists;
4) A "what's new" section that will automatically archive and announce
the latest web site additions to devmedia each week;
5) A "Development Communication Reports" section that will enable you to
submit short papers and reports on your activities so that we can create
a newsletter style service that people can read on the web (and
hopefully one day in print too if we can find some money for this).

Dynamic, database driven web sites are amazingly easy to use and
manage.  This initiative will save us countless hours of tedious labour
and provide us with some very effective resource and information sharing
functions.  As soon as the site is ready, we'll send out announcements.

We are extremely grateful to the TeleCommons Development Group
(http://www.tdg.ca) for their financial and in-kind support for this
initiative.  The TeleCommons Development group is donating over $12,000
in financial and in-kind support, and as such is very unique as a
private sector organization that supports development communication
objectives.  We are also grateful for the continuing support of the
family of Don Snowden, an Canadian early pioneer in the field of
development communication and community development who, in 1967 helped
to catalyze the use of a participatory development communication
approach using film & video which is now known as the "Fogo Process"
(http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~drichard/snowden/index.html).

If you have any specific suggestions for features that we should
consider adding to the web site, please let us know as soon as
possible.  Send your suggestions to Don Richardson at
drichard@uoguelph.ca

The new site will be developed in English only, however we would also
appreciate funding, or suggestions on how to obtain funding, to enable
us to run the site in Spanish, French, Portuguese or other languages.
We are especially looking for Canadian funding sources to enable us to
run the site in French.

[if you are receiving this and are not a current devmedia list
subscriber, all information on how to subscribe can be found on the
current web site at: http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~drichard/devmedia   in the
"how to subscribe section" at:
http://tdg.uoguelph.ca/~drichard/devmedia/subscribe.html]

Cheers,
Don Richardson
Director
Don Snowden Program for Development Communication
Department of Rural Extension Studies
University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada
N1G 2W1
drichard@uoguelph.ca
Tel: 519-824-4120 ext. 3811  Fax: 519-836-9941