Google Sites 3: Using Google Sites to Simplify Processes

I had a lively conversation recently with Karol Markosky (part of which I discussed in the last post). She works at the Council of Senior Centers and Services of New York City (CSCS) and attended a presentation I did last May at NPower NY: “Could a Wiki Help Your Organization?” In the interim she has helped structure and launch various wikis for the small non-profit she works for. She showed me one of them.

Coordinating a Cross-Agency Project
She herself runs the HIV Older Adults Initiative and partners with a number of different organizations. They needed a more seamless way to communicate: 1) to track the trainings that her program coordinates; 2) to track the program goal of covering each of NYC’s 51 City Council districts each year and 3) to share up-to-date training materials and a calendar.

Using Google Sites "Pages"
After looking at a few different wiki platforms, Karol played around with Google Sites. As she did it became clear how she might simplify her work by using some of the types of pages Google Sites offers.

As noted a few posts ago, the blank page of a wiki offers a lot of flexibility, but not always a lot of functionality and structure, or direction for the user.

While other wikis offer page templates when you create a page (for example PBWiki and Socialtext), Google Sites has gone a step further. When you click “Create New Page,” it offers, what I would call, different "types" of page.

(Note: Click on images for a full screen view.)

Using a "List" Page
To fulfill the goal of covering each of NYC’s 51 City Council districts, Karol wanted an easy way to assess which council districts had already had trainings.

This is what she came up with:

Now at a glance Karol can answer such questions as “Are we a ¼ of the way done?”

How’d she do it?

She chose to create a custom list page but she also could have chosen one of the three list page templates that Google offers.

1. Action Items—“Keep track of action items from a project or meeting”
   
2. Issue List—“Track your project’s open issues”
3. Unit Status—“Track the status of individual units in your project”
   

Participants who have been added to the site as a “collaborator” or “owner” can add to and edit the list (“viewers” can simply look at it) via a simple dialogue box that pops up when you either “Add item” or click a pre-existing item to edit it. Agency partners have the responsibility to add the information as the trainings happen.

Using the "File Cabinet"


So that the project could get away from the often confusing practice of repeatedly emailing the latest version of updated paperwork such as registration forms, case studies, and other training materials, Karol used Google Site’s File Cabinet page which allows you to upload documents into folders and supports version control.


Embedding Google Docs and Calendar
When creating a page in Google Sites, if you don’t pick one of the preformatted types of pages such as a List page, or a File Cabinet page and simply pick the “webpage” (a blank wiki page), one of the things you can do is embed Google Documents and calendars in it. Karol took great advantage of this and embedded a Google Form.

Here’s why she used a form:

In their work of setting up trainings there was a “massive data collection issue.”

• Each person used to send an email to the master spreadsheet holder
• ...with information on the over 20 fields to keep track of
  
• The master spreadsheet holder would manually enter the data
• ...and then the spreadsheet would be sent around via email to be shared.
  

Now the form Karol created allows each person to add their own data and the administrators can download the spreadsheet that is automatically populated with the form data. Here’s a screenshot of the first few fields of the form.


You create the form in Google Docs and then simply hit insert on your Google Sites webpage, and it is embedded.

Blogging on Google Sites
While Karol isn’t using the blog functionality yet on this specific site, you can create as many blogs as you want inside your Google Site. One of the preformatted page types is called “Announcements,” and works exactly like a blog, with dated posts.

Putting it All Together

Finally, here’s the homepage as it stands today.
Karol used one of the “themes” Google offers and then customized it further via “Colors and Fonts” choices. She said, “Data entry is not always happy - you need a happy color.”

Nate Nash of BearingPoint, in one of my favorite case study webinars, talked about the "sheer mechanical advantage" of editing a wiki page as opposed to getting a spreadsheet in an email, downloading it, editing it, and then resending or uploading it.

It's a similar advantage in large organizations like BearingPoint or in smaller organizations like CSCS. Via list pages, a file cabinet, and a centralized, viewable form for data entry, it seems to me CSCS has streamlined some of their daily chores, allowing them to concentrate on delivering services. I'll check in with Karol in some months and see how their wiki experiment has evolved. (And actually, soon I will re-report on their sign-in issues.)

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More About CSCS’s Google Sites

Business Issues That Gave Rise to Use of Google Sites

• Coordinating many trainings across organizational boundaries
• Initial success with simply sharing a Google Calendar raised the question: “What more could we simplify?”
• Need for a way to deal with constantly re-edited documents—internally and externally- making it easier to find the latest version of a document

Caveats

• Gadgets (widgets) that one can embed are mostly “fluff,” not necessarily appropriate for a business site; “the ones that weren’t fluff were kind of funky”

How have the wiki sites been received?

• “Mix of excitement and what do I do with this?”
• First time Karol sent a link to a form-response “This is very cool—we need to do this.”
• Gradually getting used to it; it usually takes time for a change
• One colleague said, “I check it every day. Once I start setting pieces up, I can’t wait to use it.”

Lessons Learned

• Find a way to back up data you are storing on a free hosted site, in case the worst happens and you lose your data or lose access to your data
  
• Play with each piece of functionality and you’ll get ideas how you might be able to use it: “I played with the List page and an idea formed in my head.”
• Keep it simple so new users won’t be overwhelmed
• Find a way to back up data you are storing on a free hosted site
  

Looking Forward To:

• If, and when, Google adds page permissioning. (Currently users get permissions to view, collaborate, or own the whole site.)

Collaborative Document Creation: Volunteer School Committee Drafts a 300 Page Report

I sent an email to my management school list serv asking for examples of wiki usage. One of the replies was from Sanjay Patel who worked on a committee in his local school district tasked with visioning "The School of the Future."

He was enthusiastic about how the wiki had worked for them. He laughingly characterized the group as "middle-aged not technically savvy people."

"The Visioning Committee tasked with writing a report on the School of the Future was made up of middle aged not technically-savvy people. We were a diverse group: teachers, administrators, parents, business and industry representatives, companies who hired locally. The tech coordinator for our school system suggested we use a wiki to log our research and pull together the multi-hundred page document we were to create. And it worked.

The wiki built on wikispaces allowed us to work on the report at a significantly faster rate than emailing back and forth. We also used the wiki to invite students in to read and contribute. We could post when we wanted, read, and respond to others."

They surprised themselves about how well and easily it worked:

"In one hour we were trained and we structured the wiki. Our school system's tech coordinator held an hour long training/workshop. There were 20 of us. We whiteboarded the structure and learned how to use the wiki. At the beginning, people were uncomfortable with editing other people's work. They would just write something underneath another person's writing. Then a couple of us decided, 'Let's get it done,' and started commenting in the text itself and editing. Others joined in. One of the things I liked best was that I could make an important contribution to the project without attending every meeting."

He explained they used the wiki for logging research and drafting the document, then used Word to finalize it.

"It evolved that people specialized on topics or sections of the document—researching an area and then drafting content. Two or three people would work on a section.

In the end, the tech coordinator, copied everything by section out of the wiki and edited and formatted it in Word to create the final deliverable report which we submitted to the School Board."

Some of the reasons it's likely that the wiki worked so well for them was that it fulfilled a real need--easing the process of collaborative document creation, and had at least one person, the school tech coordinator, who helped guide the wiki.

Peeking Inside a Wiki: Planning A Conference

For me it’s exciting to peek inside an organization’s wiki. It’s the best way to learn about how you can use one.

The Johnson Center (that’s the Dorothy A. Johnson Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Leadership at Grand Valley State University) used a wiki to plan their NP2020 conference. (NP2020 group pictured to the right.)

The screenshots below, for me, show—very simply—the power of centralizing information for lightweight project management.

Home Page-Orienting the User
Here's the wiki's home page with the wiki's purpose, a space to enter the conference goal, a link to last year's archive, and current announcements. (Click to enlarge the screenshots in a separate window.)

On the left is the navigation bar which has two main sections: Reference and Current Info. Current Info has dynamic information about such things as marketing and logistics.


Information—with context
Here's the page you arrive at when you click Meetings on the left navigation bar. There are action items at the top and then links to archived meeting notes.

After the meeting date, the meeting is described briefly. This is one of the exceedingly useful things about a wiki: information can be contextualized.

Broadcast email becomes the announcements archive


....retained, searchable and not cluttering your inbox.

A Table is Used for a Work Checklist
Here's the marketing checklist. Of course anyone working on the conference can add tasks, change due dates, and add the date completed. You don’t have to bother your colleague asking if that bit of the work was done—you just look here.




Centralized summaries
Finally, one of my favorite summary pages.

One liners: a record of all key decisions that have been made, centralized in real time. I was told that these were often referred to.





For the public, information about and a knowledge base of the conference
It all comes full circle. There is a public facing wiki for conference attendees. And as each session transpires, notes are entered by participants in the wiki, creating a record of the conference or knowledgebase.


Thanks to Brian Satterfield’s article on TechSoup for leading me to the Johnson Center.