By Griff Wigley, on November 3rd, 2009
 I’ve been advising Mike Tikkanen on making some changes to his blogsite, Invisible Children. It’s the blog for his book by the same name, as well as for Kids At Risk Action (KARA), “a non-profit advocacy network focusing on issues related to neglected and abused children.” I first coached Mike back in 2005.
By Griff Wigley, on October 15th, 2009
 
I’ve been working with MN Senate 25 candidate Al DeKruif, setting up a campaign website with a blog and a companion Facebook page. His blog posts automatically get published to the Wall on his Facebook page as well as to an RSS/Blog tab. And his Facebook updates automatically get posted to a Fan Box widget on his website’s sidebar.
By Griff Wigley, on September 29th, 2009
 For over a year now, I’ve teamed up with a UK-based colleague of mine, Shane McCracken (his company is Gallomanor) to work with a federal agency of the British government called the Department for International Development (DFID), now also known as UKaid. It’s “the part of the UK Government that manages Britain’s aid to poor countries and works to get rid of extreme poverty.”
We’ve been coaching a growing group of DFID staff in several countries on how to use blogs to highlight the local work their office is doing. See the DFID group blog for more. We’re about to launch a new crop of DFID bloggers this fall.
 Although we work with several DFID staff at their headquarters in London, our primary colleague there is Simon Davis.
Simon and Shane had a meeting last Monday in the plaza outside the DFID office and I convinced them to take a photo and send it to me. Splendid!
By Griff Wigley, on September 2nd, 2009
 I’ve set up a blogsite for Re-Pete’s Saloon & Grill in Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
Co-owner Jen Gunning will be blogging Real Soon Now. Her co-owner husband, Jerel Gunning, has been blogging at the Club 95 website for their other restaurant in Hixton, Wisconsin. That site will soon be getting a makeover and Jen expects to take on blogging/site maintenance duties there, too.
By Griff Wigley, on August 27th, 2009
As I noted in a May, 2007 blog post, the Citizens League contracted with me to set up, launch, and run the Students Speak Out (SSO) social network, part of their MAP 150 Project. Over the 5 months of my involvement, Erin Sapp, Lars Johnson, Stacy Becker, Kim Farris-Berg, Sean Kershaw and others working on the project gradually assumed more and more responsibilities for the social network until my work on it ended in the fall.
 The project flourished, including an expansion to Students Speak Out: Milwaukee. Much of this is chronicled in several articles in the July/August 2009 issue of MN Journal, the Citizens League’s newsletter.
 SSO is featured in a paper by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute professor Satish Nambisan titled Platforms for Collaboration (PDF), published in the summer 2009 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review. The RPI press release on the paper, A New Way to Look at Innovation: Rensselaer Professor Outlines Blueprint for Social Change, summarized SSO:
 Nambisan cited Minnesota’s nonprofit Citizens League and its successful use of exploration platforms for its Students Speak Out project, which was launched in 2007 to identify and tackle student issues. The Citizens League invited students to participate in a Web-based forum where bullying emerged as a key concern. The discussion quickly expanded beyond the Web and the students. Parents, journalists, education researchers, school board members, legislators, and city government officials all came together, both online and in offline venues including teacher training programs, student workshops, student video contests, and an annual convention.
The Citizens League developed an issue brief and white paper, and the Minneapolis city government incorporated the students’ feedback in policies to reduce youth violence. In perhaps the greatest indication of SSO’s success, Milwaukee launched a similar initiative in 2008.
By Griff Wigley, on August 3rd, 2009
 Back in Feb. of 2007, I worked with Winds of Peace Foundation CEO Steve Sheppard in launching his leadership blog.
This past month, working with foundation’s do-everything staff person and webmaster Bobbie Jones, we’ve now converted the entire Winds of Peace Foundation site over to WordPress. And we have merged Steve’s blog with the Winds of Peace Foundation news blog. Steve Sheppard’s blog posts are assigned a category by that name within that news blog.
By Griff Wigley, on July 9th, 2009
 The National Civic Summit is being held in downtown Minneapolis next week, July 15-17. The two-day conference is free and open to the public, though there is a charge for the pre-conference party and National Tweetup at the Mill City Museum on Wed. night. I’ll be attending all three days. The key questions for the conference:
- “How can we increase civic imagination and capacity to solve today’s challenges in ways that serve the public interest?”
- “How do we use technology to move from isolation and overload to effective collaboration and solutions?”
The folks at the Citizens League, one of the event’s co-sponsors, will be unveiling CitiZing!, their new online civic collaboration utility, at the Summit.
By Griff Wigley, on June 30th, 2009
 I’ve been building a series of “How to Ride Motorcycle Trials” tutorial pages for the Trials Training Center (TTC) in Sequatchie, TN.
Many of the pages have video clips and I’ve created a TTC YouTube Channel to house them all.
Each video has a description, several tags, and a link back to the specific how-to page to help drive traffic from the TTC YouTube Channel to the TTC’s site.
By Griff Wigley, on June 28th, 2009
 Several months ago, I created a blog site for the 2nd Annual JuneBug Festival of Music in Northfield, Minnesota.
During the recently completed 4-day festival, I posted Northfield JuneBug Twitter updates 30 minutes prior to each performance on the upcoming act’s venue and scheduled starting time.
I also blogged photos of each musical act’s performance.
By Griff Wigley, on June 9th, 2009
 I helped Jim and Joan Spaulding get set up with a coffeehouse blogsite back in July, 2004. They opened a second location in May, 2006 and sold their original location in January, 2008 to focus on the newly-named HideAway Coffeehouse and Wine Bar in downtown Northfield. While Jim is focusing on his new Just Trikes business, Joan, among her myriad other tasks, is learning to post to the HideAway blog.
By Griff Wigley, on May 20th, 2009
 I first met Gunnar Swanson and Dina Fesler of War Kids Relief back in January when they made a presentation in Northfield. (We later hosted them on our Locally Grown podcast/radio show.)
They hired me to help them get set up with a WordPress-based website and to think about how social media could be used for the variety of initiatives they were planning. Their marketing and communications firm, Neuger Communications Group, then took on the design of the website.
By Griff Wigley, on May 6th, 2009
 Back in January, I posted about the internal staff blog for the Laura Baker Services Association (LBSA). Lately, I’ve been working with them on an update to their main website. Most of this has been behind-the-scenes coaching with Jane Fenton, Director of Community Relations, and her staff, particularly Ashley Dinzey.
By Griff Wigley, on March 11th, 2009
  I’ve been working with (L to R) Bill Carlson, Ray Eng, and Ed Lufkin to convert the Cannon Valley Elder Collegium website (CVEC) to a WordPress-based blog site. It went live last week, with the CVEC blog on a separate page.
By Griff Wigley, on March 1st, 2009
 Last October, I blogged about the beginning of my blog coaching with the UK’s DFID Bloggers project, “staff blogs from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).” I’m part of Shane McCracken’s team at Gallomanor which has the contract, part of their CivicSurf project.
DFID was pleased with the results and expanded the project in January to include up to a dozen more bloggers in several more countries over the next few months.
Among the new bloggers in Africa who I’m coaching:
Martin Leach, Head of DFID Rwanda and Burundi
Colum Wilson, Humanitarian Adviser in West Africa for the Africa Conflict and Humanitarian Unit
Ian Attfield, Education Adviser in Nigeria
By Griff Wigley, on February 25th, 2009
 The National Civic Review, the quarterly journal of the National Civic League (“Now in its 98th year of publication”), has its Winter 2008 issue out. The issue has a 6-page article by Julie Fanselow titled Community Blogging: The New Wave of Citizen Journalism (PDF).
The article includes the Northfield projects I’m involved with, Locally Grown and RepJ, as well as my work with the Northwest Area Foundation and its use of blogs (CommunityBlogs.us) as a key component of its Horizons program which I blogged about here when I started with it.
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