Webmasters and communicators explore IT challenges
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By Teresia Mutuku, Communications Officer and Web Manager, WACC
Webmasters and communicators from faith-based organisations from Toronto met at the WACC offices, February 20, to share experiences and challenges related to the use of websites and information technologies for effective communication.
Participants discussed a wide-range of challenges and experiences including the question of how to adopt rapidly-evolving information technologies (ITs) and use them effectively for advocacy and promotion of faith-based activities. Understanding the effectiveness of information disseminated to audiences was identified as another shared challenge as were the technical issues of poor interconnectivity and lack of widespread IT skills.
Participants emphasized the need to fully utilize growing technology to communicate with their audiences and proposed holding training workshops on topics such as podcasting, blogging and content management systems as means of responding to these challenges.
They further underlined the need to reinforce networking and support each other in addressing these IT challenges and proposed the creation of a communicators’ blog to serve as a forum for learning and for exchanging experiences.
The coordinator of Congress 2008, the fourth world conference for communicators sponsored by WACC, made a presentation about the conference and invited the webmasters to attend and to extend the invitation to their colleagues in communication or peace portfolios.
In introducing Congress 2008, Kristine Greenaway explained that religious communicators, peace advocates and rights activists will be gathering in Cape Town, South Africa (October 6-10, 2008) to explore the theme "Communication is Peace: Building viable communities."
She noted that WACC will run an on-site news room which will be staffed by seconded journalists from denominations and agencies affiliated with WACC.The news room team will produce stories in French, English and Spanish for the web and wire services as well as publishing a daily news bulletin in print and electronic format. The news room team will also support the work of journalists covering Congress 2008 for television, radio, prints and electronic media.
The faith- based organizations represented at the meeting included; AfricaFiles, KAIROS, FluidIT Solutions, WACC, Volunteers in Mission, Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian World Service and Development, United Church of Canada, and the Primate’s World Relief & Development Fund.
Listen to highlights of the meeting (mp3 628Kb).
(Highlights reported by Ali Symons, Communications Assistant and Web Writer, Anglican Church of Canada.)
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