Help:Tips for Student Leaders

from the Macalester Public Knowledge Base

The Macalester Public Knowledge Base is an open long-term project. Although it was started at Macalester and it's being used predominantly by Macalester students, my hope is that many student organizations at any colleges in the Twin Cities and Minnesota will eventually use this site as their base of operations.

No matter what your relationship might be with the operators of the project, you can create your own spaces at mpkb.net and control it to channel you and your student group's organizing needs and network with other schools. No one has the right to decide whether or not you belong here, unless, uh, your organization operated from Baltimore or San Francisco and had no ongoing relationships with people in Minnesota.

The project is set to at least go until May of 2007, and if it proves to be beneficial/useful for the organizations and peoples involved, it will most likely to get support for more years, in a semi-permanent basis.

Here are some start-up suggestions on how to get started:

[edit] Describe your organization

Is your organization not listed yet? Make a link from a pertinent category page, and introduce a brief description. Useful items are name, short description, email, mailing list, phone, current leaders, history of former leaders, history of organization, budget size, membership, usual events, current campaigns, etc

Browse listed student organizations at:

[edit] Create a in-site portal

Create a portal it can be anywhere inside MPKB. What I've been using is Org abbreviation/Home (ala QU/Home) but it can really be anythinhg. You can use that portion as your org-specific springboard ofr other links. See Adelante/Home for an example. Once it's made, you can use this template:

{{portal|ORGNAME (will be linked)}}

to create a box letting people know that there is anothe rpage with the description. e.g.

{{portal|Bridges}}

will create:

[edit] Request a mailing list

Mailing lists are not DIY. They need to be created by a Category:Server operators. Contact any of them and request it. MPKB will be happy to host mailing lists for any organizations in Minnesota. Should there be the need, multiple lists can be created as well. Your mailing list will not be archived to save disk space, but we'll set it up so that the archiving is done through http://www.mail-archive.com/

Currently mpkb.net hosts 14/100 Project:mailing lists