The Top Ten List: Tips and tools for managing a civic engagement project

More resources from the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar 2012. Here’s a very useful list of cloud-based tools:

The Top Ten List: Tips and tools for managing a civic engagement project

There are so many different tools and resources available to help plan projects, manage virtual teams, and tap into open source civic engagement projects that figuring out what’s useful for you and your projects can be an overwhelming job.To streamline the process, the Knight Community Information Challenge Circuit Rider team spoke with a number of grantees about online and virtual tools and resources that were useful to them as they thought about projects, planned projects and got started actually building projects that focused on civic engagement as a key component.

What follows is a list of some of the most useful tools out there–a Top Ten Tools list to check out and share. Each of these tools is easy to use, free or low-cost, and considered best in class by Knight KCIC grantees, Circuit Riders and staff.

• Basecamp, Easy to use project management software, http:// basecamphq.com
• Doodle, Help your group find a meeting time online, https://www.doodle.com/
• Dropbox, Send big files easily, http://www.dropbox.com/
• Freeconference.com, Phone conferencing tools, http:// freeconference.com
• Github, Software code sharing repository, https://github.com/
• Google Apps for nonprofits, free tools for site operators and project teams, http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/nonprofit/index.html

o   Google Apps Mail, Set up mail for your domain, http://www.google.com/apps

o   Google docs, Share documents and collaborate online, http://google.com/documents

o   Google Calendar, Create team and project calendars, https://www.google.com/calendar

o   Google Groups, Create a group for shared communication, http://groups.google.com/

• Google Analytics, The go-to resource for measuring traffic and engagement on your web site, http://google.com/analytics
• Google alerts: Monitor your reputation and what’s being posted, http://google.com/alerts
• Toggl, Time tracking for projects, http://www.toggl.com
• Toodledo, time and task management tool, http://toodledo.com