Yes, Virginia, Another Autism Awareness Group

"brain" by Natalia & Gabriel Sánchez-Suárez/CC-by-nc via Flickr

The recent “Smockityfrocks” brouhaha prompted a flurry of really good blog posts, and Liz Ditz has done her usual fantastic job compiling related posts on her blog.

It made me think we could use a central place to put stuff when lots of folks have things to say about an autism-related topic, so I created an Autism Awareness & Acceptance group on Diigo.

Diigo is not familiar to a lot of you, but it’s the bookmarking and web archiving program I started using when Freezepage crapped out on me. It has lots of great community features that make it a good fit for this kind of project:

1. Groups—these can be public or private, and allow members to post, tag and annotate and comment on web pages, including PDFs.
2. Archiving—each page can be archived as a snapshot as well as a bookmark to the original URL, which ensures that pages that go bye-bye in the night remain in the group’s library. (This is also helpful if you don’t want to bump traffic stats for specific websites.)
3. Annotation—Diigo has a fairly robust set of annotation tools, which allow users to append public or private sticky-notes to a bookmarked page, highlight sections, and comment on sections of the page. (Note that it’s in beta—so far it’s worked pretty well for me, but I know others have experienced bugs.)
4. Sharing—each group gets an URL that links to the library, and each bookmarked/archived page gets its own URL. There is also an easy-blog feature (that I haven’t explored.)
5. RSS—people can subscribe to the feed of a public group or individual user’s public library of pages.

There are more features, but those are the main ones for my purposes.

The group is publicly viewable, which means anyone can view the library of bookmarks/snapshots. At the moment, I have the group permissions set up to require the moderator (moi) to approve new members, in order to prevent spammers from posting crap like “Cure Your Autistic Kid With Tabasco Suppositories” and other unsuitables.

Once you’re approved, you’re free to add bookmarks/snapshots, comment, annotate, etc. to your heart’s content. You can also invite others to join the group (moderator approval still applies.)

My purpose isn’t to create another advocacy or support group—there are some great ones already out there—but to create a user-generated repository of writing, commentary and information that individuals and groups can use to support their own efforts.

This thing is still half-baked, so suggestions, comments, etc. are very much welcome.

You can request to join here.

DISCLAIMER: I’m still a Diigo novice. If you decide to join the group and use the service, I’m happy to answer any questions to the best of my meager ability, but won’t vouch for the quality of my Tech Support.

P.S. If there are any graphics gurus out there who’d like to create an avatar for this group, this graphics-challenged lady would be much obliged. Let me know in comments, or contact me privately.