TECHNOLOGY: WE'RE SLACK AS

At CYC, we don't claim to have all the answers, but we do have to work quite hard to make our little organisation...happen. We've learned a lot since becoming an Incorporated Society last February, so this blog post is about sharing some of those learnings.

It used to be that we'd all meet up in a room, look over some sheets of paper, and say some words and then afterwards go and do related stuff within agreed timeframes. We still do, but if we want to keep up with the way the world's turning...we're going to have to work smarter not harder. 

Like most Youth Councils, CYC has a private Facebook group that we share stuff on - this is constantly bubbling throughout the day. We also email, use phone calls and all the rest of it. However, this has seen a massive rise in web traffic, data use in our phones and general stress levels rising because we just couldn't get our phones to stop flashing and beeping.

So how do you integrate technology carefully into your organisation? Well, again, we're still learning. When we started Passion Projects, we used Basecamp, and thought it was the bees knees. Until we didn't think that. And no one used it. And it fell by the wayside. Indeed, we now use our own in-house spreadsheet which is just like a mini message board version of Basecamp - thank you Google Docs. 

If not Basecamp for project management, what will we use? We already use Skype meetings to get around the fact that it takes us (and we've timed it) around 3 hours to get from Aranui to Papanui on a winter's night with no buses around. But what will we use in 2016 to undertake the work we want to do, in a way that is meaningful and engaging and safe for our members? 

Well, we've hit upon Slack - a chat-based messaging tool which is a bit like those old chat room forums of yesteryear with a few flashy add-ons (more than just a few). We're going to try it, and see how it goes, but we'd better follow our own advice (see below!)...

PS - Take a look at the other services we use to keep Christchurch Youth Council firing on all cylinders!