ASTDHouston.ORG is Web 2.0

The objective of the ASTDHouston.ORG is to create a global Web platform where professional trainers, educators, and communicators can come together in community to enhance their careers and support our industry. Our website is designed to support this objective by enabling and encouraging open communication through networking, sharing resources, and collaborating in a creative environment. It's more than that. It is created in the spirit of Web 2.0. To adopt a new meaningful term being used by the thought leaders of the evolving Internet, the Website is a "Conversation." 

ASTDHouston.ORG is Social Software

Extending the concept of "conversation", ASTDHouston.ORG integrates the latest social software applications to provide a technically open design, allowing any Member to contribute content and collaborate. Articles, Press Releases, Calendar Events, and Content Management pages are enabled with the functionality of:

• Weblogs (Blog) - Users can post comments in response to your content. Comments and Replies are shown at the bottom of your content page.
• Wiki features - The author can open the document to multi-user editing, inclusion of graphic images and attachment of various file formats.
• Podcasting - Most modules facilitate insertion and attachments of audio or video or Flash files for syndication through RSS.

Community Building and Project Management:

• User Groups - Think of user groups as the "organizational glue" for specific selection from the entire database of users and members. For example, creating a group for your chapter members, directs syndication of specific Articles, Press Releases, Events to defined members of the group, and allows you to do everything from track your referral sources on contact forms, to sending targeted e-mails through the Marketing Actions module (Newsletters). See My User Groups
• User Connections - Put simply, User Connections lets you find friends and colleagues and makes it easy for you to follow their online activity and contributions such as their Articles, Events, even who their Connections are.
• Study Groups, Forums, and Committees provide ways to manage shared content and communication with specific members interested in specific topic such as software for editing video or managing a production crew or organizing workshops and events.

Marketing and Search Engine Optimization

Once content is created, our website empowers our members with advanced tools for creating visibility: publishing and marketing to the World Wide Web.

• RSS Really Simple Syndication is nothing more than presenting your Web site files in a very basic format so that other sites can easily interact with your data. By subscribing to specific "feeds," members and the public can read ASTDHouston.ORG content on their desktop whenever they want.
• Categories - Once content is created in any of the modules of our website, it is enabled with advanced tools for creating "visibility": publishing and marketing to the World Wide Web. Category is just one of the more traditional ontological tools for organizing information.
• Key Words - The most important search engine objective is to analyse the actual content of your web page to determine the relevance and value of your page.
• Tagging is assigning "keywords" to categorize content, such as the photos on Flickr or bookmarks on del.icio.us. Consumers of the content -- and not just the originator -- participate in defining how the content is described. Both the author and Web users assign the tags by what makes sense to them with more popular content being displayed more prominently based on user interaction and feedback.

The Learning Curve

It's more than a tool for personal productivity, it is a platform for increasing your "social capital."

The Information Architecture (For Geeks Only :-)

The Tendenci architecture is built on relational databases, XML standards, and ASP (active server pages). There is a complex set of database tables (Directory, Articles, Press Releases, Calendar of Events, Surveys, Polls, Ballots, Marketing Actions, Newsletter Generator, Committees, Study Groups, Forums, and even online Courses) woven together in a network of permission-based access (Anonymous visitors, Site Users, Members, Administrators) further refined by User Groups to provide multiple paths or "threads of relevance" in a web of processes/tasks like finding what you want or publishing information to a specific group of people. You can search, filter, assign categories, and use other database manipulation tools to apply your own sense of order or needs. (For advanced studies, visit Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.)