| Centralized Web site vs. Centralized Organization |
6/7/04 2:54 PM |
Author:
Bob Montgomery
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Excellent answer. Here's a bit more context. USCharterSchools.org was started 7 years ago with funding from the US Department of Education. At that time, the "movement" was young and the focus was helping charters to get their doors open. The site served a vibrant online community organized around key issues and by region. It was the central Web site to find school and state profiles as well as charter school artifacts and links to policy, research, and other resources.
As the movement has grown, its needs and priorities have evolved and so has the local capacity to better serve some of the above needs. Listservs and school profiles are maintained by state organizations. Wonderful chartering resources are available across the Web.
USCharterSchools.org maintains an important role in the charter community because it is catalogues vast content, creates links to it, and distributes resource updates to point people to that content. It also disseminates a weekly Charter Schools News Connection to over 10,000 subscribers. Finally, as we see today, it can host a truly national conversation.
But to be clear, USCharterSchools.org is NOT an organization. It is a capacity-building strategy of the US Department of Education. It would be interesting to hear other ideas about what kinds of centralized or decentralized "organization" the movement needs.
Posted as a reply to:
National Coordination Efforts Underway by Dan Quisenberry 
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