The Next Step: Building a community

In the last couple of weeks the Team and I have been working endlessly to create systems, partnerships and legal frameworks for the project aiming at achieving our mission of teaching high school kids how to use social media and other forms of technology to make a positive impact in their own communities.

While this work is on going, we are moving ahead into what we believe is the next fundamental step towards achieving our mission: building a community.

A community is important to this project because it helps us organize ourselves and focus on the key objectives that will help us achieve our mission. The community is very timely because we’ve got an overwhelming number of people and organizations who have requested to be a part of the project. The community will help these people interact, share and contribute their ideas in an open way which will be valuable in accomplishing our mission.

The community will be an online interaction site built using WordPress and BuddyPress where people will be organized into groups that discuss various ideas in different niches. For example, we plan to have groups based on each of the five social media themes for the wiki: Create, Connect, Collaborate, Share and Learn. All these groups will discuss what content under those themes is relevant to be put on the wiki. Other ideas can be organized into both general and specialized topics which can be discussed in groups. When a consensus is reached by the community, it is submitted to the core team to be endorsed and it is then implemented.

For us to achieve this, we need people to help with cultivating the community. We are looking for  “Community Developers” who will be in charge of creating and sustaining The Kuyu Project community. We are looking for people who have experience in setting up and using WordPress and BuddyPress and/or working with online communities. The person will work in a team to build and sustain the community and to ensure that the community’s work and focus is centred on achieving our mission.

If you are interested in the voluntary position, please contact us on email community@thekuyuproject.org with your CV and a brief outline of your previous work. The deadline for submission of interest is 15th August 2010 at noon GMT +3.

The core team will go through all the submissions and those picked will be notified by 21st August 2010.

We believe that this step will assist us in mobilizing all the efforts surrounding the project. We hope that you will choose to be a part of it!

Thanks for your continued support for the project!