From Wikiprogress.org

Friends of the Wiki are an informal advisory board of experts from different areas in the progress community. Friends receive monthly updates on the developments of wikiprogress and wikiprogress.stat, and are asked for feedback, comments and suggestions. Friends provide the wiki with guidance for the overall objectives of wikiprogress and foster the development of articles, databases, funds and interactive communication tools. For further information, please contact the wikiprogress team.

Latest on the Wiki

See what has been happening on the wiki in April. We also need your help and feedback on a few important topics.Thanks so much for all of your help and support thus far.

Fundraising

We are about to embark upon a fundraising campaign for the wiki and would really appreciate your assistance. If you know an organisation that would be interested in supporting wikiprogress or if you would like to offer your expertise to assist with the proposal please contact angela.hariche@oecd.org.

New Design for the Homepage

We will be upgrading the design of the wiki as well as improving the functionality and interactive capabilities. See proposed designs below. 

As part of the new design, the wiki will have a collection of rotating images that represent progress on the main page. If you have a photograph that represents progress (yes, we know it is hard to capture) or have a camera and an idea, please send your photos to Fulgencio.Sanmartin@oecd.org See more details the community notice board and a selection of progress photographs from wikiprogress community members on our flickr site.

We would very much appreciate some feedback on these designs: what you like, what you don’t like, what needs to be added and what needs to be removed. 

E-learning Students Contribute Article to Wikiprogress

The OECD, UNITAR and STATEC e-learning course on Statistics, Knowledge and Policy: Understanding Societal Change was completed by 30 students from across the world. An exercise on wikiprogress was part of their assessment. Students were required to select a dimension of progress in a particular country and to write a short article about it, supported by relevant data. Examples of the students work include: Security and Violence in Italy, Monitoring Civic and Political Participation in California and Ecosystems in Algeria.

Monthly Stats

March 2010 was the most successful in wikiprogress’ life: 15,861 pageviews from 2650 visits, who spent just under 6 minutes on average browsing the site. This means an increase of almost the double compared to February, and four times more than January! 

Latest on Data

The wikiprogress.stat team is days away from completing phase 1 of the data loader. We will be sending the link to each of you and would very much appreciate your feedback in terms of the functionality. The data loader is one of the key tools on wikiprogress. With our new data outreach campaign we hope to have around many datasets on wikiprogress.stat by the end of the summer. With the new data loader, we hope these data sets will be uploaded quickly and efficiently.

 
OECD Statistics Newsletter

Wikiprogress had a full page feature in this month’s OECD Statistics newsletter. Friends of the Wiki, Gene Shackman, Ruut Veenhoven and Anat Itay were mentioned. See newsletter here, the wikiprogress article is on page 9.

Follow Up on Last Friends of the Wiki email

In our last email, we invited you (or a member of your team) to write an article on the wiki about your organization or progress initiative. We recently added a new category to the wiki, Progress Initiatives, so you can now see initiatives by country or by topic. A member of the wikiprogress team will create a page for each of your initiatives and will send it to you for approval before publishing it on the wiki. Alternatively, you can email a description of your organisation or progress initiative to Philippa.Lysaght@oecd.org along with your logo and any relevant links and she will create the article for you.