Building a widget response network
As I was coming to terms with the harsh reality of being awake at the end of last week, I caught an appeal on behalf of the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) on the radio. It set me to thinking again (with the aid of coffee) how they could benefit from building a badge/widget response network.
The typical patterns for badges/widgets are either to provide ongoing functionality (e.g. Flickr badges or Google Adsense) or to offer something time-limited for a specific campaign. For someone like the DEC where the timescales are compressed the second option isn’t really worth pursuing. They do have a Rapid Response Network for more traditional media outlets, e.g the main television and radio networks, the national newspapers, etc.
I think they could benefit enormously from providing a badge/widget that is available all the time. If there’s an appeal happening then content connected with that is delivered, otherwise it’s empty. This would allow the ongoing development of a network that could be brought into play (more or less) instantly that a new appeal is launched.
In the main this would mean that it would need to be designed to appear along with other small elements of a page (e.g. in the sidebar of a blog). It would be difficult to make allowances for a large banner ad to appear & disappear in the look and feel of most sites. However this obstacle could be overcome with a simple API (e.g. providing people with a web address that either said “yes, there’s an appeal on now” or “no, there isn’t”) so that with some additional programming the DEC banner could be added onto the page or something else put in its place.
Inevitably new technologies and ideas will spring up over time, which means that you will have different versions operating at the same time. So a few years down the road you will have meetings to decide what content/functionality to deliver to everyone left on version 1 compared to the whizzy new version 2, etc.
At some stage that will become too complicated to deal with effectively, so thinking about a support structure would be very beneficial. This could be as simple as expanding the web content from a single page of buttons/widgets to keep your network informed, along with an RSS feed so that you can push updates out to them.
disasters emergency committee, nptech, widget response network, Widgets