CTC VISTA Project

Organization: The Community Technology Center's AmeriCorps VISTA Project (recently rebranded the Transmission Project). The CTC VISTA Project places AmeriCorps VISTA members in community media and technology centers across the country to help bridge the digital divide.

Challenge: Create a thriving online community for geographically disparate VISTAs and their supervisors.

Solution: With over 40 VISTA members stationed across the country, the CTC VISTA website required several avenues for user-generated content as well as an organization-wide directory. Over a period of a couple of years I implemented blogs (Movable Type), photo galleries (gallery), discussion forums (phpBB2), a calendar (WebCalendar), wiki (pmwiki), and mailing list manager (mailman). An LDAP directory (courtesy of OpenLDAP) provided VISTAs, VISTA alumni, and supervisors one username and password to access these services, and custom scripts allowed users to update their profiles via the web.

Developers: Paul Hansen (designer), Saul Baizman (web programmer, systems administrator).

The CTC VISTA Project homepage as of August 2006.