Annual Report 2011

Annual Report 2011

Kidlink Association
Established 2011/12/30

 

AofA Art 5 says: "The Board's Annual Report and Financial Statement must be sent to the members together with the notice to the Annual Meeting." Once approved by the Annual Meeting 2012, the Document will be made public from the Kidlink Association main page at http://www.kidlink.org/drupal/AR-2011

The Annual Report reports to the Kidlink Association members about activities during 2011 and how the Board has worked to realize the plans for 2011 as documented in http://www.kidlink.org/kidspace/start.php?HoldNode=28260

Kidlink Association Financial Report 2011

  • Kidlink Association Financial Report 2011 is sent as a separate document.

Board Meetings

  • The Board had 6 ordinary Board meetings during 2011 and the minutes have been shared with the members in the Kidlink Association Google group.
  • The Board had also several informal meetings in Skype.

Kidlink Association Membership and sponsorship

  • We have not succeeded to get more KA members and individual sponsors. During 2011 we had 20 members.
  • We had 740 SEK, donated by members.

Kidlink Dialog and documentation

  • We used Google groups to promote the dialogue between leaders and teachers.
  • The Board used https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-board for its email dialog. 
  • All Kidlink Association members are registered to https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink-association. All the Board meeting minutes were shared through this group.
  • When a teacher registers to Kidlink he/she is registered to https://groups.google.com/group/kidlink. There are now 488 adult members in this group (29/12 2011). At least two projects were launched by this group. 
  • Kidmails:
  • There are 4360 subscribers in the Kidlink Official Announcement Listserv list (29/12 2011). We have sent 13 announcement emails to our Kidlink listserv list advertising about projects and formerly others about becoming members, sponsors and volunteers.
  • We had two chat rooms open in Skype: “KA-BOARD” for the Board and “Kidlink Project Dialog” for project dialogs.
  • Kidlink has an official email, info (at) kidlink.org maintained previously at www.networksolutions.com. Since 28/12 2011 the new provider is www.webmasters.com. Info (at) kidlink.org has been used by people for cooperation requests. 
  • Kidlink Conference:  We are looking for opportunities to met in Chicago 2012. 
  • All key documentation like login and pw is kept by the Chairman and the Deputy Chairman.
  • Our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/29537164537 has been quite active since June and we have now 50 members, some of them are Kidlink youth.

The Kidlink Site

  • The Kidlink domain www.kidlink.org registrar was previously www.networksolutions.com. Since 28/12 2011 the new registrar is www.webmasters.com.
  • For our server we had a 512 account at www.linode.com.  Due to lack of hard disc memory, the account has been upgraded to account 786, 23 of December 2011. The operative system is Ubuntu 10.10 LTS.
  • The Drupal Content Management System (CMS) (www.drupal.org) is working well on http://www.kidlink.org/drupal. All About-information pages have been migrated to the Drupal CMS. Some Project information has also been migrated.
  • Systeam:  Stellan Kinberg and Andrea Simonetti have taken care of the system. Programming work is actually done by Stellan to hash our user passwords. 
  • Visibility online: We have used Google Adwords free no cost offers to analyze the behavior of people looking for school projects. We have done efforts to improve the site rank, changing among others, meta titles and descriptions as well as adapting content with valuable keywords.
  • According to Webmaster tools, the four most clicked pages during November and December were: "what does my name mean", "dibujo de escuela", "escuela dibujo" and "what's my number"

Privacy and Security

Some students around the world are not allowed to tell their family name. A student who have a teacher, that is known by the Kidlink community, may use the name "Protected" as family name. The board approved the proposal as long as computer  generates different nicknames for students with same first names and want “Protected” as their last name. It is of course important that the student use their real name and tells about the teacher's nickname.

Registration

  • Registration Handbook:  We have not done revisions to our Registration Handbook.
  • Since 1/1 2011 we got 101 adults.
  • Since 1/1 2011 we got 1345 new students.

Language areas

  • We have decided to abandon the work to get language areas translated. Only the Catalan area has been updated now and then.
  • We have instead inserted in all pages the Google translate service. We check that the English used, is well translated in other languages by Google translate.

Youth Engagement

  • 4160 comments have been approved this year. (28/12 2011) Most of them are youth comments written on the main page and in the different project nodes.
  • The Board has had a good cooperation with our Youth Committee leader about how to get more youth engaged. We are building the new Drupal CMS out of this cooperation. 
  • To further improve the youth engagement, we suggest having two youth representatives in the Board.

Collaborations

  • We are collaborating with ICollaboratory. Through this collaboration we have now got new US teachers into the Kidlink Project. The project "Moon over us" is a successful result of this collaboration.

Projects

  • About participation to the projects during 2010/2011: a large number of students and teachers took part in Kidlink projects during 2010-11. They have been involved in "ECards", "WAI", "Landmark Game", "I describe me, you draw me", "Ecolife", "Moon over us" and in "Stat for Cool Math Cats". 
    Students shared very significant pages with images and texts and they developed good relationship with their pairs writing many and many comments.
  • Working Projects are: Moon over us (400+ students and 12 teachers). Stats for Cool Math Cats, E-cards, Acrostics (Català), GeoQuiz (Italiano), Landmark Game and D/D are ready to start again in 2012 February. 
  • Volunteers:  Joyce Fischer and Theresa Allen, new members Board are working as projects coordinators. Terri Smith is "Landmark Game" coordinator, Graziella Seveso is "GeoQuiz" coordinator.
  • Kidcom chat rooms:  Many students, once registered to Kidlink, try to use our chat but there is a few people inside and so they leave. Despite various urgings and suggestions, kids go on writing nonsense in Kidcom chat. This behavior does not help them rise and increase a mutual dialogue. Domenico and Joyce control the chat regularly. 
  • Cooperation with ICollaboratory: We continue to develop the successful cooperation with ICollaboration, a good example of this cooperation is "The moon over us" project
  • Cooperation with other organizations:  Kidlink is not a project referral service. We cannot control what other organizations are publishing. But the Kidlink Board shall not close doors and should therefore carefully consider each cooperation request.