The Roosevelt Institution

About the RooseveltInstitution.org Website

http://rooseveltinstitution.org/about/website

Why the website

Roosevelt's mission is to connect students and their policy ideas to people who can act on them. A mature Roosevelt chapter is likely to have perhaps five to ten policy centers comprising ten to thirty members each. If the entire Roosevelt organization were composed of five chapters, an individual person could telephone each center director once a week and ask for an update on what people were working on and what had been produced. That individual would then have a relatively hazy idea of what about six hundred students in about thirty-five policy centers were working on. That person could then be the go-to for any politician, media source, or outside organization who wanted to know what the Roosevelt Institution had to say about topic X.

In fact, we have scores of chapters of that size, and more chapters getting organized every day. It would be reasonable to estimate that our membership is doubling every two or three months, and has been consistently doing so since the November 2004 elections. This explosive growth of membership and productivity also means an explosive growth of information. It not possible for a single individual to know what each policy center is producing, what its fellows are interested in, how many members it has, or who it should be working with.

Therefore, we need some sort of central repository for information about our organization. For the individual member, this will mean they can find other people who are working on similar projects at other schools or find past projects on the same topic. For the center director, it will mean good organizational memory about who their members are and what they have produced, so the center doesn't have to start from scratch every year. For the chapter leadership, this means easy diagnostics about which centers are functioning well and which are not, information about individual members, the ability to look at other schools for ideas about projects and about how to organize a chapter, and the ability to keep track of contacts (alumni, professors, etc) even as individuals join and leave the chapter. And for the national office, it means when we network with leaders in the progressive community, these networks will reach the individual members of our organization, rather than remaining our own personal contacts.

Website Key Concepts

The core of the website is a series of groups and subgroups. You can think of them as concentric circles in a Venn diagram. The Roosevelt Institution is everybody. Within the Roosevelt Institution are chapters, and within chapters are policy centers. You can set up groups as far down as you want -- policy centers can have subcommittees, subcommittees can have working groups, whatever. Roosevelt Institution members might be represented as dots. If a member is in a policy center, they're also a member of the chapter and of the national organization.

The website is maintained by group administrators. If you're an administrator of a group you can manage everything within that circle. You can admit new members, kick members out, create subgroups, and designate administrators for the group and modify the group's public presence. It's probably bad management to do this with subgroups -- better to add administrators for the subgroups and help them learn how to administer the groups themselves.

Within the website, each group is represented by a directory. So the Stanford chapter is /stanford, for example, and its subgroup, the Center on Health and Human Services, is at /stanford/health. Group administrators can also create pages within their directories, which display information but aren't groups with membership, etc. So, for example, /about/roosevelts is a page that just displays information about our institution's name and its connection to the Roosevelts.

Website Feature Overview

The core of the website is the services it offers to our members at chapters across the country to help them organize their chapters and produce policy documents. Each subgroup comes built-in with a number of useful user-collaboration features:

Email List

The email list is accessible in two ways. On the website, users can view the email list archives and post to the list (especially useful to bring new members up to speed). Second, as is traditional, you can send emails to the list, which is of the form stanford-events-members@rooseveltinstitution.org or stanford-scitech-members@rooseveltinstitution.org (look at the URL of the group on the website if you're not sure what the name of the list is). These lists are automatically updated as people join and leave the group. (Incidentally, if you take off the -members, it's an email address that goes to the group leaders. So stanford@ will email the stanford chapter president, for example. Great for business cards -- even after you graduate they'll still have a contact at Roosevelt.)

Bulletin Boards

Each group, as well as the Stanford chapter as a whole, has a bulletin board discussion section. Group admins can create forums within the bulletin boards and determine who can post to them. For example, you could create a forum in the Stanford BBs for any Stanford member or for the Stanford center and administrative directors. A center could create a bulletin board for its leaders or one open to its members. Once a forum is created by an admin, anyone who has permissions can post new topics for discussion or reply to existing topics.

Wikis

Wikis are collaborative writing pages. Any member of the center can edit the page or create new wiki pages. An example of wikis in action is wikipedia.org's online user-created encyclopedia. This would be a good way to write short policy pieces collaboratively, revise documents, or post notes on meetings.

File-Sharing

Members of a center can upload project-related files which are viewable only by members of the same center.

Action Item Tracking

Each group comes with "action item" tracking. You can make lists of tasks and subtasks, assign tasks to other members of the group, mark them completed or uncompleted, and post status messages (e.g. "should be done by the weekend"). When a member logs into the website it will give them a link to a list of all of the to-do items assigned to them. During meetings one person could keep this section of the website open in a browser and whenever someone agrees to do something it could get posted there, as a structured way of taking notes and making sure follow-up happens.

Meeting Scheduler

In order to invite people to meetings and find a time that works for everyone, the website features a built-in meeting scheduler. Members can schedule meetings of their groups, directors can schedule cross-group sessions, or collections of individuals working on a project can use the tool to find a time that works for everyone.

Help Using the Website

Once you're logged in as a Roosevelt member, the things you can do are organized into a menubar just below the navigation menus. Most of the core features are under the "Participate" menu. If you hover your mouse over any link in the menu, a helpful message will pop up that should give you some idea of what it does.

For more in-depth information about how any tool works, at the top-right of the page there's likely to be a "Documentation" link that explains what each text box and checkmark does and how to use them.

Website Facts and Figures

As of May 2006, our site gets about 4000 page-views a day (not counting most internal traffic). Our approximately 3000 users take an average of over 300 "actions" (posting to a bulletin board, sending an email to a list, registering for the website, joining a group, editing a page) every day.