Visibility and Accessibility

Navigation Options

In fellownies, content is organized by more than one criteria and presented according to different layers of relevance. Any content can be placed under more than one topic or category without having to duplicate its entry.

• Geographical Clusters (Latin America, Africa, Asia, etc.)
• Development Issues (Health, Education, Digital Divide, etc.)
• Groups (people around a specific project, task or a group of issues)
• Content Type (events, articles, blogs, collaboration requests, etc.)

We have built a comprehensive taxonomy to organize content both by development issues and geographical clusters. This enables visitors to see all content on aspecific topic, such as digital divide, or by region, such as Middle East (/geographicalclusters/asia/middleeast), or for a combination of both.

Users can also browse content by content type, so they can see a list of all events, forum posts, blog entries, web links, polls, forms, surveys, collaboration requests, collaboration offers, etc. regardless of their topics or categories.

In addition, content can be browsed by the special interest groups that posts it (if those groups are open to the public). 

The Navigation Page gives quick access to this options.

Relevant Layers and Special Sections

Special Sections have been added to address the needs of our target audiences. These sections are available on the front page and from the tabs displayed on top of every page and provide special instructions and quick access to the features of interest to each audience.

• social entrepreneurs
• volunteers and students
• project teams

And additional section for funders and investors will be added soon.

Special content for these sections (such as getting funding, promoting your project, building a strategy, etc.) will be added during August.

Friendly URLs

All addresses in fellownies.org are easy to remember and read. For example, blogs addresses are in the form www.fellownies.org/blog/username as in www.fellownies.org/blog/jasonbanico/. Same thing with user profiles, see www.fellownies.org/user/margaritaquihuis for example.

White spaces in names and titles are erased for readability and compatibility.

This is also the case for all content and categories, so articles and sections addresses are nicer to type and achieve better rankings in search engines, such as in the categories  http://www.fellownies.org/developmentissues/humancapacity or in http://www.fellownies.org/geographicalclusters/asia or http://www.fellownies.org/developmentissues/ict/mobiletechnologies, etc.

The cool part is that users don't need to do anything, the system builds the nice web addresses for every content posted, based on the type of content, the category and the content title, so events are placed under /events/, web links under /links/, blog entries under /blog/, etc.

But users may choose to add a custom address or alias such as www.fellownies.org/events/mobilemonday/stanford or http://www.fellownies.org/dragenda to better promote their content.

RSS feeds for every section of fellownies.org

RSS feeds are generated for the entire site or for a specific part of it. All RSS feeds are easily accessible/linkeable from the syndication page. This enables other websites to reference and include content from fellownies on their pages.

Statistics

Detailed statistics are available for all content and user behaviors, so we know where people go the most, how many people have read a post or comment, etc., and learn from it.