Get Involved!

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Revision as of 09:02, 19 January 2007 by AVENguy (talk | contribs) (Before You Do Anything Else!)
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Welcome to ASEX, a little experiment in wiki-based online community organizing. Use this system to see what's going on here on AVEN and how you can help.

If you want you can jump straight to the ASEX Project List.

The Big Picture

We do two things here on AVEN: build asexual community and create open, honest public discussion about asexuality. Lucky for us these two goals compliment one another well. Creating public discussion helps more people find AVEN, and having a bigger, better organized community on AVEN lets us participate more meaningfully in public discussion.

AVEN is an online community located on the website http://www.asexuality.org. Members of the community actively organize to maintain AVEN and pursue its mission. AVEN has no paid staff and a very small budget which comes entirely from donations within the community. This budget is used for server costs and to fund community projects.

Since its founding in 2001, AVEN has grown exponentially and created a dramatic impact on public awareness of asexuality. In a few short years we have gone from complete isolation to a community numbering in the tens of thousands and from complete invisibility to the world's largest media outlets. But there is still considerable work to be done. Most people have still never heard of asexuality, including millions of people struggling to understand how to live their lives without an interest in sexuality. Our community is still in its infancy, we are still exploring how to describe ourselves, think about our relationships and communicate with the world. We welcome you to join us.

Note: This wiki refers almost exclusively to activity taking place on English Language AVEN, one of 12 separate asexual communities. Though most of these communities are hosted on the AVEN server there is currently little coordination between them.

Before You Do Anything Else!

Have you:

Good, just checkin'.

Where We're At

Visibility

Overview

Great news : sexual people like talking about asexuality almost as much as asexual people do. So much as whisper the word “asexual” at a cocktail party and the conversation will take a tire-screeching turn. Compared to most sexual identities we're noncontroversial, but we still raise enough unanswered questions about the nature of sexuality that scientists, doctors, LGBT rights organizers, newspaper editors, TV producers and regular sexual folks find us endlessly fascinating.

This means that anyone who can speak articulately about asexuality can have a huge impact by just going out and seeding discussion. It also means that we reliably get millions of dollars worth of [press coverage] for free without lifting a finger.

What We're Doing

Media Response

AVENguy is currently responsible for responding to press requests and connecting reporters with AVEN members. He tries to connect each reporter both with an experienced AVEN representative and with a member who has not yet been in the press. This adds depth to each story and grows the number of AVEN members with press experience. Media volunteers are recruited through posts in the Announcements area, through direct e-mail and on the [AVEN Frappr]. New volunteers are given a copy of the AVEN Media Guidebook and encouraged to contact AVENguy or another media veteran with any questions.

Ideas

Visibility Materials

As much as we all like giving 40 minute lectures about asexuality to friends, family and perfect strangers it's sometimes nice to just have something to hand out. That's why we're working to produce handy dandy visibility materials, so that anyone who wants to do visibility work can easily stock up on resources to help illustrate what our community is all about.

Check out the Available Visibility Materials and help with the ones currently in the works:

Projects

Campus Outreach

Because they are focused on exploring new ideas, college and university campuses make excellent sites for visibility work. AVEN members both on and off campus can create a dramatic impact by targeting campus [LGBT] groups and psychology, sexology and gender studies departments . AVEN members regularly give lectures, one of which is available for download. Several members are also in the process of designing pamphlets. Because campuses are sites of scientific research, campus outreach is also strategically important for Scientific Outreach.

Ideas

  • There is currently no formal system for coordinating campus visibility efforts or supporting student organizers.

Internet Outreach

As an online community we are uniquely situated to create dialogue about asexuality on the internet. AVEN members have created groups in leading social networking sites, as well as creating a zine and a podcast focused on asexuality.

Ideas

  • Hypothetically, AVEN members could organize to actively create discussion in key forums and blogs, or [|lobby major sites] to include information about asexuality. Currently no such organizing is taking place.


Scientific Outreach

It is in our interests to spur and support scientific research on the topic of asexuality. Research can help asexual people understand ourselves better, and can serve an important role in establishing our legitimacy both in to the general public and to medical professionals. Scientific outreach allows us to work with doctors and medical professionals to answer questions about Asexual Health, so that we have a clear understanding of when a lack of interest in sex might indicate a medical problem and so that doctors and psychotherapists have a clear set of guidelines and best practices for treating asexual patients.

AVEN members regularly participate in scientific surveys advertised in the forum, on a few occasions AVEN members have presented on AVEN at scientific conferences or to professional organizations. AVENguy maintains relationships with several academic experts on human sexuality, including Dr. Anthony Bogaert.

Ideas

What You Can Do:

Community

Overview

The community on AVEN has around 10,000 registered members, though it is difficult to determine how many are active at any given time. Thanks to a respectful culture and to the hard work of the Admod Team the community is free of many of the disrespectful attitudes and flame wars which plague most communities on the internet, and remains an effective safe space for people to explore their identities and relationships. Discussion in the community ranges from personal to philosophical to inane, and the forum is actively used as an arena to build relationships or all types. Though the majority of forum participants identify as asexual, many active members also identify as sexual or questioning.

Like most online social networks, AVEN has a high rate of member turnover and the majority of member accounts on AVEN have not been active for some time, though efforts are being made to keep AVEN members engaged. Several major cities have reached a critical mass of AVEN members and have begun to hold regular meetups, though the overwhelming majority of the community still communicates exclusively online.

What We're Doing

Community Engagement

Not everyone has time to keep up with discussions on the forums. An important part of building community is creating an easy way for members to stay updated and involved. Media targeted at the AVEN community serves a vital role in keeping users engaged, creating a sense of common culture and driving discussion within the community.

Projects

Local Meetups

As AVEN's membership grows, meetups have begun to occur regularly in a few major cities around the world. These meetups are largely social, though local groups in Berlin and San Francisco have begun taking local actions. Meetups are arranged ad hoc in the [Meetup Mart] in the AVEN forum, here in the wiki, on the [AVEN Frappr] and through local e-mail lists. There is currently no system for connecting these different planning systems, or for coordinating meetups in general.

Ideas

  • Do some Meetup Coordination so that we can support the formation of local groups and track where local communities are growing.

Data Collection

The [SQL] database which runs AVEN provides basic statistical information about our membership, such as the number of registered members. The [Census Forum] provides interesting but largely unscientific polls aimed at the AVEN membership.

An effort is underway in the Project Team to create an AVEN Survey to track more in-depth data about AVEN's active membership.

Ideas

  • It might be possible to create a system to track the number of current active members on AVEN using the SQL database. This could potentially feed into a live AVEN Stats Page

Projects

Events

We are not currently planning any regional or online events, if you want to post one here!

What You Can Do

Organization

Overview

AVEN is divided into two organizational bodies, the Admod Team (or Administrator/Moderator Team), which oversees discussion taking place in the forums and the Project Team which oversees visibility projects, AVEN resources and everything else outside of the forums. Both teams are elected by the general membership.

Budget

AVEN's web hosting costs are currently funded entirely by its founder, AVENguy. Efforts are underway to build a secure donations tool into the site so that hosting costs can be shared and so that money can be more efficiently raised for other projects.

Projects

  • Setting up the Donations Tool and figuring out how donations will work.

Tax Status

AVEN is not currently incorporated as an organization. This makes processing donations more difficult (since AVENguy has to pay taxes on all of them) and creates liability issues. We should work to file as a [501c(4)] organization within the US.

International Coordination

There is currently no formal system to coordinate between English language AVEN and the other AVENs.

Ideas

  • Anyone want to help create one? Creating a section of the Wiki and getting the different language admins to help would be a start. Contact AVENguy for their info.


What You Can Do

Site

Overview

AVEN is hosted on [[1]], and consists of a hodgepodge of open source software installed and occasionally modified by AVENguy. There is currently no formal Tech Team for AVEN, most of the work for maintaining the site falls on AVENguy and whatever tech-savvy members happen to be around on IM. Site content is managed by AVEN members on the Admod and Project Teams, and the site consists primarily of user-generated content.

Tech Spechs: AVEN is hosted by a company called [[2]] on a dedicated server. It runs on [Mambo] (for the front page), [phpbb] (for the forum), [MediaWiki](for the wiki) and [Flashchat] (for the chat room.)

Site Stats: Access statistics for AVEN are publicly visible through Google Analytics. Just go to [[3]] and log in using
username:avenstats@asexuality.org
password:avenrules

The Front Page

Static content on the front page is maintained by [Hu] under the auspices of the Project Team. Hu updates the Post of the Week and adds new issues of AVENues.

Ideas

  • Can we get some more integration between the frontpage and the wiki?

The Wiki

The AVEN Wiki is maintained by [Hallucigenia] under the auspices of the Project Team. She encourages AVEN members to populate the wiki and keeps information in the Wiki in presentable and orderly. The wiki is a new tool, and we have only begun to explore the possible uses for it.

Projects

Forums

Content on the forums is posted by the general membership and managed by the Admod Team. The phpBB software running our forums has been lightly modified to provide additional functionality.

The forums currently suffer from a high number of spam accounts, which the Admod team diligently cleans up. Several of the antispam measures available with our software are broken.

Projects

Tech Team

It would be hugely beneficial to put together a Tech Team to troubleshoot technical issues on AVEN and to implement software upgrades.

Projects