| Client: The International Rescue Committee (IRC). The IRC has offices across the country and provides a range of assistance aimed at helping refugees, who have been afforded sanctuary in the United States, to adjust and acquire the skills to become self-sufficient. |
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Challenge:
The IRC supports many programs/organizations (e.g., Ethnic Community Based Organizations, ECBOs) and wanted to build a strong community of practice (COP) among these organizations that would better facilitate helping new refugees. This community of practice needed to empower the ECBOs by fostering sharing of ideas and best practices as well as disseminating training materials. Specifically the COP needed to :
- Be distributed--accessible from any place
- Enable capture and tracking of communications
- Allow best practices and information sharing while maintaining a searchable archive with no additional effort from the user, and
- Support hosting of training materials.
In addition, The IRC wished to measure the factors that both contribute to the success and hinder this multi-cultural information-sharing and collaboration initiative. The customer had limited funds and required that the solution not be too “high-tech” as it would be accessed by users with a whole range of computer expertise and potentially very old computers.
Objective:
Develop a low cost, ‘mid-tech' distributed (online) forum to allow the IRC to track and encourage multi-cultural information sharing as well as provide the ability to measure the success of this medium for training and collaboration.
ThoughtLink Solution:
ThoughtLink developed a new website and integrated it with a discussion board. To keep the project affordable ThoughtLink utilized open source software and customized it to suit the client's needs. This included:
- Modifying access to the materials and discussion board (e.g., customized privatization via member log in of certain parts of the discussion board while allowing non-members and visitors to access certain materials)
- Adding the ability for administrators to upload multi-media, flash based training materials (See sample on the discussion board home page)
- Measuring success factors for a community of practice made up of and aimed at assisting diverse cultures and nationalities, and
- Password protecting html content (e.g., training materials) by embedding it in the discussion board.
Value Added:
Prior to this new community of practice web site, the IRC relied on email (a list serve) to communicate with their stakeholders and had no way of tracking information sharing, dissemination of training materials and no organized way to assess the effectiveness of this media. ThoughtLink enabled the IRC to capture information sharing at an affordable price by utilizing an open source tool and customizing it to suit client needs and provided the capability to measure success factors by defining the appropriate metrics and analyzing the technologies use and effectiveness.
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*Refers to technologies that are affordable by the average small client and that can be used by people with basic computer knowledge.
