 | Re: Guiding Research Questions - MyK-Net.org's History |
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Adam ... Dan Pellerin and I were talking about the KNEWS item I posted the other day and trying to remember the circumstances surrounding the initial work (and steps) that was done to get MyKnet started. It was fun recalling some of our early discussions about this environment. Dan was the innovator and I was the septic [smiles]. Throughout 1997-98, we were working on migrating the K-Net Service from a DOS-based Bulletin Board environment to a Windows NT, web-based environment. Over the Christmas break that year, Dan found a script that supported users to create their own web page. We talked about providing people with this resource and seeing what happened. As well, Dan decided to register the MyKnet.org domain for this application. At the time, I doubted that we would see 30 people using this feature but Dan predicted 300. As it turned out, Dan was right on this one and we quickly witnessed the numbers growing beyond the 300 mark. So we ended up having to spend time planning how this application could best be supported and developed. Dan worked first worked with Derek Kenny, who was a youth worker with us, to develop the initial front end that included the feather images as the "buttons" to access this service. Then in 2000 and 2001, Jesse Fiddler decided he would add more features and further develop this environment to make it that much more 'user friendly'. Throughout this development process, the issues around site management and supervision were always being discussed. We always tried to keep the environment as a peer-to-peer sharing and development space where the members would be pointed to each other so everyone was helping each other rather than always coming to the K-Net team for assistance. This sharing and communication helped make this environment grow among the K-Net users but it also helped increase the skills and usage of this medium among the young people across the north. I believe the growth and sharing on myknet is still happening today. There is not a lot of documentation about the early days of MyKnet because it was one of those services that the K-Net team supported without any direct program funding from outside sources, so there is little reporting and recording on the activities that were happening on MyKnet during these early days. As we started introducing online activity monitoring tools around 2000 and 2001, I started watching the numbers of new myknet users rapidly increasing. As soon as broadband infrastructure and local connections were introduced into any community, we immediately saw the myknet.org usage increasing in that community. In 2001 we began using KNEWS (http://knews.knet.ca) to report on the different K-Net activities. Everyone can use the KNEWS search feature to check on the growth of myknet over the years. In June 2002, I posted the first KNEWS story about the number of hits in one month ... K-Net Server Receives 2 MILLION Hits in one month I just went and checked the montly usage stats for the myknet server in January, 2007 ... Daily Average Visits: 21,659 Brian |
MyKnet.org |
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