Transcript
Welcome to the Oceans Research in Canada Alliance community platform for facilitating collaboration and communication. This series of short training videos are intended to provide users with a brief introduction to the various applications of the community platform, and to demonstrate some common functions. Open your web browser and navigate to the ORCA SharePoint platform to follow along.
This is Training Session 6: Community Consultation
The ORCA platform is the perfect forum for informal consultation with the community at large, allowing you to get feedback from multiple members, from multiple sectors at the same time. Be it comments on a strategic plan you are developing, to generating discussion on a topic of interest, the platform can help you facilitate your consultation.
Surveys
With the help of the ORCA Secretariat, you can create and administer a survey for members.
Let’s look at a test survey that was created previously. In the top right corner, click on the wheel icon and choose “site contents”. Here you can see all of the applications on the site. Click on “ORCA Symposium Survey”. At the top of the page, click on “Respond to this Survey”. This survey has been designed to only allow one response per user, and responses are anonymous, but you could change those settings in your own survey.
Go ahead and choose your responses. You can see some questions are multiple choice, some allow you to choose multiple answers and also to specify your own value, some are open answer. When you are finished, click “finish”.
You can look at the responses of your survey one by one, or you can look at a graphical summary of the responses. Click on the link for the graphs. Click the back button in your browser.
By right clicking on the title “ORCA Symposium Survey” you can copy the shortcut. You can let members know that the survey is open, by using a Partnership Wiki entry and inserting the link for it, so users can easily find and respond to the survey. Click home to return to the home page.
Discussion Board
Another simple way to consult or get feedback is to start a discussion thread. Click on the discussion board link in the left navigation bar. To create a new thread, click “new discussion”. Enter your subject, and then the details [add them]. Specify if you require an answer from other members. Click “save”.
You can right click on the title of your discussion thread and copy shortcut, to share the link with others. You can also create an alert to let you know if anyone responds to your discussion thread, by clicking the “list” menu at the top of the page and clicking “Alert me”.
Soliciting Comments on Documents
If you would like direct feedback on documents (and are brave!), you can solicit comments from the community. This can be done by creating a discussion thread, and including the link to the document. You can ask that members provide their general comments via the discussion thread, or you can ask that they comment in the document itself and save comments in tracked changes.
In the future, we may create a separate vehicle for community consultation exercises, if there is demand from users for this functionality.
This concludes the portion of the ORCA Community Platform training on community consultation. The 7th mini-training session provides instructions on how to upload, edit and save documents on the platform.