Additional functions for your website
Forms: downloadable or interactive
The Australian government’s guide to online forms http://www.agimo.gov.au/practice/delivery/checklists/forms
Useful articles in SitePoint http://www.sitepoint.com/article/accessible-online-forms and on the University of Melbourne forms pages http://www.unimelb.edu.au/webcentre/tools/howto/forms.html
Usability guru Jakob Nielsen discusses online forms v separate applications
E-commerce
Specialist credit card processing websites e.g. http://www.paypal.com.
Multimedia Victoria has an e-commerce section that contains many resources.
The TechSoup site for US nonprofits also has a range of articles on e-commerce.
eParticipation
Queensland government site information on ‘getting involved’ has guides, case studies and other resources on effective community engagement.
Surveys
Zoomerang offers customisable survey templates and a fee service is available for those who need more detailed analysis of survey results.
An example of a free site is http://freeonlinesurveys.com/.
A search for ‘surveys online’ will get a host of pay sites.
Use the service of www.surveymonkey.com to build complex surveys – a free and easy-to-use basic service, with extras available for a fee.
E-consultations
For an example of e-consultation see the NSW Public Education Inquiry http://www.pub-ed-inquiry.org/ and its public submission form http://pub-ed-inquiry.org/cgi-bin/public/item.pl?RESOURCE=submissions&ACTION=submit
Discussion forums
Examples of sites that have successfully combined web-based communication with email-list technology are: Groupserver and the communitybuilders.nsw discussion forum.
Publishing video or audio
Video editing software e.g. Quicktime or Adobe Premie r
Publishing event photos – e.g. http://www.flickr.com/ , http://www.pbase.com/ , http://www.photosite.com/ or http://www.smugmug.com
Webcasting
Examples of Australian companies providing specialist skills and tools for webcasting are:
Podcasting
Wikipedia’s discussion of podcasting.
ABC Radio podcasting info
Directories of podcasts can be found at a variety of websites, such as Podcast , PodcastingNews and also the BBC . Search for ‘Podcast directories’.
Guides to how to publish podcasts can be found at websites such as iPodder and at PodWagon .
Blogs
To understand blogs see theWikipedia entry.
A range of US websites publish directories of nonprofit blogs. For example NPOBlogs and Omidyar. Broader collections of blogs can be found by doing a web search for ‘blog directory’.
TechSoup has useful articles on how four nonprofit blogs got started , the promise for nonprofits and the benefits of blogs for nonprofits. The ‘Floating Eyeball’ blog carries an interesting paper on why nonprofits should blog.
Useful guide to legal issues for bloggers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Articles about how to create blogs can be found at Blogger.com and on the BBC website.
Create your own blog at MSN Spaces and Bloglines.
If you want to get an idea of the global conversation of the web, which bloggers are getting attention and what issues are rising in prominence in the blog world, then see technorati which tracks over 16 million blog sites.
Feedster.com and Newsgator index and makes available feeds from blogs tailored to your needs.
Google offers a specific blogsearch engine.
Wikis
See entry in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki
An article on the great global Wikipedia enterprise
RSS feeds
The BBC has a good simple description of RSS.
Wikipedia entry on RSS.
Some commentators see RSS as a fundamental change in the way content is delivered online. See http://news.com.com/While+Web+publishers+slept/2010-1071_3-5813384.html?part=rss&tag=5813384&subj=news
An article that sees RSS as symbolising a growing democratisation of the web
An example of how to use RSS feeds – from the ACTU site.
Micro-sites for specific issues and campaigns
Good article on the advantages (and some pitfalls) of advocacy through micro-sites from US nonprofits IT services company Convio: http://www.convio.com/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=2602271
Open source software
The Australian government recommends an open source product (MySource Matrix) as a content management system for government and not-for-profit websites.
Freshmeat a large index of open source software arranged into categories
A collection of ready-to-run open source software for Windows computers http://gnuwin.epfl.ch/en/index.html
opensouceCMS allows you to ‘try out’ a wide variety of open source CMS software before deciding which one to choose to install and use.
The Australian government recommends an open source product (MySource Matrix) as a content management system for government and not-for-profit websites.
Open source software for Apple's Unix-based Mac OS X operating system: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unix_open_source/
One-stop reference site for the local OSS industry http://www.osia.net.au
Sourceforge, a large repository of open source software and development tools
Federal government approach to use of OSS http://www.agimo.gov.au/infrastructure/oss
An ‘anti-hype’ site that provides a critical perspective on OSS http://www.softpanorama.org
Open Source Software Institute (OSSI) a nonprofit organisation promoting open source software solutions with US federal and state government agencies and academic entities
Slashdot an online news and discussion site with an emphasis on OSS issues
Free Software Foundation which promotes the concept of freeware: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Home page for the GNU operating system, Free Software Foundation and the GNU General Public Library http://www.gnu.org