Building a photo history for the department is an exciting but daunting project. One way is to have members send you the photos, and then add them to the album. Getting the photos is probably the easiest part. The hard part is getting the story behind the photo. For a whole department, this could be an overwhelming task.
We love to look at photos, and share our photos. Sharing is the key word. It is the basis of such sites as Google's Picasa, or Yahoo's Flickr. What these sites lack is an easy means for creating a community album, and for that community album to be a part of the Department's Web site.
While I had the idea for awhile, I wasn't sure how to implement it. At our son's wedding last December, I floated the idea of creating a domain name for the kids wedding album and providing one place for everyone to share their pictures. Within a week after the wedding, there were almost 1,000 photos in the album. If it works for a wedding, why not a department's history?
The software is Gallery 2, and available at my price - free. Installing the software is easy, configuring all the options takes awhile. After doing the wedding album, it was much easier. If you are doing it the first time, it takes a few days of experimenting to find out how the options work.
It really helps to have a few photos to get started. Once I created the basic structure for albums, the next step is to get more people involved. For example, the Department Historian has an account, the Department Commander has an account. They have their own albums for which they are the owner and for which they are responsibile for adding photos and building their part of the history. The initial photo album is not big, but it is a start.
The next step is to get other officers, program chairmen, and posts involved. This is the part that takes more time. A project takes time and effort to build. It takes promotion, and more promotion. As it builds critical mass, it gets easier. At least, the fantasy is that it gets easier. At this point my job is to promote, administer, mentor, and more promotion.
Community projects like the photo album allow others to be involved in the Web site. It gets more visitors to the site. It becomes a community project, and not an individual project. Only time will tell how this works.
Bill Anderson
Webmaster
American Legion of Montana
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Standing Orders:
Constitutions and By-laws. The American Legion is a resolution based grassroots organization. As such, The American Legion National Commander is the only spokesperson of the organization. Although personal comments and voices of dissent are welcome, any posted messages/items, implicitly or explicitly denoting representation of the whole organization not adhering to the resolutions passed by the National Executive Committee will be removed without notification.
1 comment:
this is interesting and i will forward it accordingly...
thanks :-)
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