Rumble: Are you an aidworker? Join our Newsvine Group!

You can see the Xmas holidays gave me some spare time... :-) [Tine would say: "He can't be bored, always looks for a new kick!"]...

I have been playing around with an idea to share news articles of interest to aidworkers more easily. Articles about our lifes are aidworkers, but also about stuff we pick up in the news which would be of general interest to us, either personal or professionally.

True, I have been posting some on this site, The Road. And we have the automated humanitarian news aggregator running on The Other World News... But I looked for a way to make a more collaborative effort. Whatever tool used, it had to be hassle-free to post and share articles we (and that includes you!) find in the news, or on blogs, or on no- matter-what-Internet-resource. The tool should have an easy way to comment, and to filter out the key articles from the 'noise'.

Well, I think I found the right formula. Have a look at The Newsvine International Aidworkers Group/ . You don't have to be registered to read the articles posted there. But you need to register to post new articles and to comment. And I would encourage you to join the aidworkers network on Netvine:
Either go to the International Aidworkers Group and click on 'JOIN GROUP' in the left box,
or register as a new Newsvine user directly.
So how does it work when you have joined this new network? What can you do?

1. The main purpose of the Newsvine International Aid Workers Group is to share "Internet finds" of interest to us. Either to "us", as in people often working in remote areas, or "us" as in professionals, in the "line of business we do. So the most important feature is to post items you find on the Internet. Anything that contains a URL link: News items, interesting blog posts, documents, utilities etc... You post it simply by clicking 'Seed Link', copy/pasting the URL, filling in a title and a short optional summary for the post... Click some publication options and you are done in one minute.


2. Once a post is published, others can vote on how much they liked the article you posted, they can comment on it, or go into a discussion about it.

If you need more details, here is the Newsvine FAQ.

See you on Newsvine!