BDPA Advancing Careers from the Classroom to the Boardroom

I’m brand new to CollectiveX. I’ve wathced their 3-minute video overview. I’m interested in knowing if you have any thoughts on how we can use this Groupsite to promote the vision and mission of either BDPA or BETF. I’m past national president for BDPA and current executive director for BETF. My passion remains in seeing BDPA used as a tool to advance the careers of African Americans in the IT industry from the classroom to the boardroom. My BETF passion is to raise the funds necessary to support BDPA on both national and local basis to carry out its SITES and IT Institute programs.

How can this CollectiveX Groupsite help accomplish these goals in your opinion?

I am in the process of assessing if BDPA Cleveland should form its own local discussion group on CollectiveX, or if we should join the BDPA (national) group as our CollectiveX discussion group for both local and national discussions.

Currently, I am inclined to believe that BDPA chapters can best benefit, and BDPA can best grow by promoting the sharing of a primary BDPA (national) CollectiveX forum.  For items demanding local privacy, control or group specificity, a chapter can of course use a different group or forum.  But I believe that chapters and members tend to reinvent the wheel way too often.

Then there is Yahoo Groups.  When I searched Yahoo Groups, it returned 179 BDPA groups.  While this is great on one hand, it is very disconnected on the other hand.  By contrast, there are only 6 CollectiveX BDPA Groups.  While it is still relatively new, we have an opportunity to use CollectiveX in a more consolidated (nationally) manner than we are using Yahoo Groups.  CollectiveX has some user friendliness not found on Yahoo Groups.  While probably a hand full of BDPA members juggle 100s of groups at a time, the average member is probably more comfortable managing only a few at a time.

The largest Yahoo BDPA groups (ranked by number of members) are BDPA-Jobs (1138), BDPA-Cincy (1124), BDPA-DigitalDivide (967), BDPA-NY (669), BDPA (533), BDPA-Chicago (516), BDPA-Atlanta (427).  The smallest groups have single-digit membership.  Not a problem, but are we missing out on opportunities by being disconnected?

Certainly we can benefit from some overall planning, analysis, consolidation and data mining of Yahoo Groups.

What other forums are chapters using in additon to Yahoo Groups and CollectiveX?

Ken

Hello, I think that YahooGroups are best to send out meeting mintues to the local chapter members,

as well as a once a week e-mail newsletter of upcoming meetings, prof development workshops,

etc..

I agree that the Collective X forum is great in that we can all come together, colleborate and learn

from one another. I've found the website very helpful b/c it allows a chapter which is rebuilding and trying to grow to learn from another chapter which has grown and is succesfull.

Regards,

Pablo