CommonTimes Communities: Sharing News and Information Across Networks of Related Groups

Communities may be the most powerful feature that we’ve added to CommonTimes.org but few people understand how to use them to their advantage.

For years, nonprofit, advocacy and professional organizations have wanted to find ways to share news and information with colleagues. The Web has been a great help – but mostly news sharing is done via Web sites, automated wire feeds or RSS feeds. However, this is akin to thousands of related groups pouring content into a huge information depot which everyone must wade through to pick out what’s important to them. In many cases, key information is missed. Until now.

If you’re already familiar with social software, CommonTimes is basically “del.icio.us for news stories.” For the less-techie among us, CommonTimes lets you quickly “tag” news stories on the web into its database. Your stories are combined with those of all the other users of the system to produce a news service that reflects the aggregated wisdom of its users. Simple, but very powerful. In addition, every story you tag is added to your own private channel – a news clippings folder of sorts.

When you combine the general CommonTimes capabilities with our community feature, the service becomes even more valuable. With CommonTimes, you can build a Community that leverages the shared-intelligence of your colleagues to help locate and highlight the most important headlines. Because the stories are filtered by a group of readers who share your broader experience and values, the quality of content in your community channel will be higher and more useful than that of CommonTimes’ public channels.

Here are some potential scenarios that might be appropriate uses for CommonTimes communities:

Intra-office: Employees at Acme Org. wish to share the news they feel is most important with each other.

Sector-based: Nonprofit technology consultants such as those at Circuit Riders might want to share technology news and information with members of their association.

Cause-based: Employees of organizations working for reproductive rights around the country wish to share news and information which they feel is important for their colleagues.

Research-based: Medical researchers working on stem cell issues may wish to share news and research with colleagues around the world.

Interest-based: Democratic activist readers of the blog DailyKos.com use CommonTimes to clip and share news stories before linking to them in blog entries.

News-gathering: Journalists at the Acme Tribune may want to clip and share news and information to discuss with newsroom colleagues – and to keep a trail of important stories.

Let us know if you discover other uses.

There are three easy steps to creating a community at CommonTimes:
1. Visit http://www.commontimes.org/create_user.php to register
2. Click the link in the email you receive to confirm your account
3. Visit http://www.commontimes.org/groups.php to create your community and invite others to join. You can invite up to 25 people at a time. If you need to invite more, just return to the community page and click edit.

Then just wait for people to begin clipping their favorite stories and see what bubbles up to the top on your community page at: http://www.commontimes.org/group/<your group name>. Alternately, you can follow the RSS feed of popular stories in your Community from this address: http://www.commontimes.org/rss/group/<your group name>.

When you create your community, you can decide whether to keep the group private so that it won’t be listed in our public directory of groups. You can also choose to moderate the community so that no one can join without an invitation from you.

We are especially excited to see how nonprofit and advocacy organizations begin to use CommonTimes communities. These groups are traditionally under-resourced and spend a great deal of effort gathering information to keep up with the latest changes in their focus areas. We hope that CommonTimes communities offer a new way for these organizations to share information more efficiently.

Please let us know how your experience is setting up and using our communities feature. We are extremely interested in your feedback. You can email us questions or comments.

Thanks for your continued support.