Category: About Internet Society

It is hard for me to believe, but it was one year ago today that we launched this new website!  On September 14, 2017, James Wood began our flow of news with a welcoming blog post – and just a few days later the site was heavily used as part of our massive 25th Anniversary celebration. It was the culmination of a rather insane several months in which a whole crew of people within the Internet Society, as well as at our partners Moving Brands and ATTCK, all burned countless hours to make this site a reality.

One year later, we’ve published over 500 news articles and blog posts; published over 120 new resources and tutorials; promoted many events, and maintained a consistent flow of content on the critical issues affecting the Internet.

We’ve built campaign pages, integrated video and graphics (ex. our GIR page), showcased the amazing work our Chapters are doing, integrated social components (ex. our IoT page and Instagram), and pushed the limits of how many links any sane person should have on a page. I continue to be impressed by the beauty of pages like our Issues page (just move your cursor over the boxes) – or pages like our 2018 Action Plan with all its different rows and backgrounds.

And… it all works great on mobile devices – and we did it all in three languages!

Now, it wasn’t all smooth sailing, of course. As I wrote in some of the posts about our website redesign, we had our share of challenges. We went through three different search solutions until we found a system that worked. We initially had hundreds of thousands of 404 errors while we got redirects in place. We had some serious speed issues that made working on the site … sooooooooo…. incredibly… sssssssssssllllllllllooooooooowwwwwwwww… until we moved to a new hosting provider in June 2018.

But at this point I can say that overall we are definitely pleased with both the front end you see as visitors – and the back end we use to administer the site.

We are NOT done yet!

Launching a site is a long journey. There are still many changes and new features we want to introduce. We have a “timeline” feature we hope to be rolling out soon. We are working on a way to add interactive maps. There are some accessibility issues we still need to address. And we’re always working on increasing speed and providing a better user experience. Plus, we want to see how we can better integrate this main site with a few of our other affiliated sites.

There is a great team of people who have helped make this happen over the past year, and I look forward to working with them and many others to see what we can do with this site over the next year.

Our goal is to deliver on that mission for the site I outlined back in June 2017:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

It demonstrates our global impact, promotes our point of view, and provides definitive resources on the news, technologies, and policies that shape the Internet – today and tomorrow.

It delivers a focused and engaging experience that connects with a breadth of individuals, organizations and influencers. It extends our reach, supports our community, and grows our membership, creating a foundation for building a stronger Internet.

We want to help you all who are reading this to work with us to help shape the future of an Internet that is open, globally connected and secure.

I welcome any comments and feedback on this site – you can email me at york@isoc.org or leave them on our issue tracker on Github.

Thank you for visiting this site, sharing our information, taking action – and helping us all to #ShapeTomorrow!

The post Celebrating One Year With Our New Website appeared first on Internet Society.

As you may have noticed, our shiny new website has some speed issues. It is slow for many visitors. Over the past few months we’ve worked on a number of potential changes to improve the site performance. One big change we’re making is to move to a different hosting provider.

That change will happen tomorrow – Tuesday, 19 June 2018 at 13:00 UTC.

Assuming all goes well, you shouldn’t really notice – except that the site should be faster! But if you happen to be browsing the site around 13:00 UTC, you might see some glitches on pages while the DNS magic happens and we change to pointing to the new server.

Once we’ve made this migration, I’ll write more about what we have done and how it has helped our site’s performance. Meanwhile, I just wanted to give a quick alert about this impending change to anyone viewing our site.

The post Alert – Web server host migration on June 19, 2018 appeared first on Internet Society.

As we built our new website, one of my own guiding principles was “POSSE“, a content publishing model from the “IndieWeb” movement. The idea is:

Publish on your
Own
Site,
Syndicate
Elsewhere

Essentially, make sure you own your own content – and then share it out onto other sites and services. (See the IndieWeb page about POSSE for more discussion.) Make your own website the “hub” for all your content, and then have spokes going out to all the other places where people might discover and learn about your content.

To me, this model is the best way to support the principles of the open Internet, while engaging people in the places where they already are.

Why does this matter?

We aren’t just publishing reports, papers, blog posts and articles for the sake of talking about what we are doing.

We are publishing content to bring about change that ensures the Internet remains open, globally connected, and secure. As we said in our vision statement for the new website:

Our website is a driving force in realizing our mission of an open Internet for everyone. It empowers all who care about a free and safe Internet and inspires action to make a positive difference.

Our website exists in support of our mission, of our 2018 Action Plan, and of our campaigns to shape the Internet of tomorrow.

But of course, once we publish content, the challenge is to get people to actually READ (and share) that content.

Sadly, we’ve not yet been able to convince everyone on the Internet to set www.internetsociety.org as their home page! (Have you done that yet? Would you consider it?)

So…. we need to share / syndicate our content out to the places where people may discover that content.

We need to go where people are.

WordPress and RSS feeds

The good news about the POSSE model is that WordPress brings many advantages. For instance, it has strong support of RSS feeds, allowing our content to be easily used by viewers – and also published on other sites. You simply add “/feed/” to the end of any URL for a category, tag, or author and… ta da… a feed of all the stories. Super easy and simple.

Unfortunately, the use of dedicated RSS readers has fallen out of style. So while this is an awesome feature, fewer and fewer people are using it.

Thankfully, WordPress also supports a variety of plugins that help with sharing our content out to other channels.

Reaching new audiences

As we reach out to those other channels, it is critical for us to reach NEW audiences. If we only talk to the technical community out of which we emerged, or if we only speak to the “Internet governance” community in which we are involved, we will not be able to fully create the change we believe needs to happen.

We need to reach far larger audiences and help them discover what we are writing about. We need to reach the people who don’t know what “IoT” is – and help them understand why we need it secure by default. We need to reach people in areas without Internet connectivity – and help them understand how community networks can help. We need to reach people who can influence policy makers – and help their regulators understand how the Internet works, and how decisions around the Internet need to involve all sectors of society.

We need many people to take action.

Our ongoing work with the news media is a key part of reaching new audiences. We have had great success in this, and we will continue to expand our efforts. This is critical to our work.

Similarly, we also reach new audiences through building relationships with other media sites to get our articles published (or re-published/syndicated) on those sites. This can bring our ideas to whole new audiences that have not seen our site or even heard of the Internet Society.

But there has also been a large shift in how people discover news and content. For example, recent reports from the Pew Research Center found that 67% of Americans get at least some of their news from social media. For some groups and demographics, the percentage is even higher. Similar research from Pew showed a median of 35%  of people globally getting news daily through social media.

Sharing out to social channels

Given these trends, it is critical for us to get our content out into the social channels where it can be found – and shared. Whenever we publish an article or blog post, we typically share it to at least:

• one or more Twitter accounts
• our Facebook page(s)
• our LinkedIn profile
• our Google+ page

(See our list of social channels.)

If we look a why we use each of these channels:

• Twitter has consistently been an excellent way to reach people across a very wide range of social segments and industries. We also find news media see our content, as do policy makers, ISOC members and more.
• Facebook gives us the potential to reach over 2 billion users (per Facebook’s Q4 2017 monthly average users) around the world. It has the largest reach of any of the currently available platforms.
• LinkedIn has been a way to share out content out to a professional and business-oriented audience.
• Google+ historically was a way to reach some elements of our technical audience, although we’ve seen the level of engagement drop there significantly over the past year or two.

The sharing aspect is a key element. As the Pew Research study showed, people are more likely to trust news and links they see from their friends and family. So enabling people to share our content with others is critical.

Now, we don’t only “broadcast” out our content into our social channels. These channels are also one way we gather feedback and comments from people about our content.

We also do use other ways to engage with people in those channels. For instance, our recent polls on Twitter related to IoT and consumer rights. But the distribution of published content remains a major reason why we use the channels.

Sharing out to other channels

Beyond these social channels, we also syndicate and share our content out to other channels on a case-by-case basis. Some of those include:

• Email lists– We have a wide range of email lists available to Internet Society members. (Membership is free – join today!) Some include Chapter leaders or Organization members. Some are for our Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Others are for open discussion such as the “Internetpolicy” list or the Connect Open Forum. Our challenge here is that with the volume of content we publish, we want to share carefully so we don’t overwhelm people’s inboxes.
• Medium– We sometimes cross-post articles to our Medium account, although increasingly we are developing specific content for the site.
• CircleID– For many of our technical and policy folks, we have found that re-publishing our posts on CircleID (under individual author’s names) has brought the information strong additional visibility

Occasionally, we will also post content to some of the sites that aggregate links and provide news listings such as:

• Hacker News – our developer-focused and very technical articles often do well here.
• Reddit – some of our content fits in well in different sub-reddits.

We also have used our Instagram account for some campaigns, too.

Future channels

We are always watching for future channels where we should be engaging with people. One of the critical threads of the Internet Invariants is:

There are no permanent favourites.

Remember MySpace? or FriendFeed? or Jaiku? or… USENET?

The channels where people discover and engage with content today are not the same channels they used five years ago – and will probably not be the same channels people use five years in the future.

Facebook and Twitter are where a significant amount of people get their social news today – but will they still be the leaders in five years? Will enough people get upset at today’s platforms that they will actually engage in using new, alternative platforms?

As I look around at where people are engaging, I wonder whether we should do more with:

• Messaging apps– Should we share content out to a WhatsApp group chat? Or into Snapchat’s Discover area? Or WeChat or Line? Or some of the apps like Wire or Telegram focusing on security?
• News apps– We are seeing that news apps/services from Apple News, Google AMP, and Facebook Instant Articles are all making the mobile user experience more convenient. I’ve avoided doing anything with these because they are more proprietary than I’d like, but should we?
• WordPress.com– Our use of WordPress enables us to also have our content flow out into the WordPress.com site to be discovered by others. Should we do more with this?

Or … whatever will be next? Will it be some blockchain mechanism? or…?

It’s hard to know. And to engage in new channels – and do it well – also involves some commitment of staff time and resources. But we will continually be watching, and evolving how we share our content.

POSSE for the open Internet

Our commitment continues to be that we will Publish our content on our Own Site in support of the open Internet. And we will Syndicate that content Elsewhere.

We will go where the people are today – and we will keep watching and explore where the people will be tomorrow.

Our goal is to continue to empower people to take action in support of an open, globally connected and secure Internet.

The future of the Internet is up to each of us. We must work together to #ShapeTomorrow.

Image credit: Tom Kelly on Flickr CC BY NC ND

The post Building Our New Website: POSSE and Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and More appeared first on Internet Society.