To properly be able to manage this kind of thing, it’s my feeling that you have to be fairly clued up on the techy side, hence the fairly onerous job spec.

Just from dabbling, I’ve been able to build a decent wordpress portal with polls, RSS feeds, and simple flickr, Twitter and social network plugins – and I have had no IT training or programming experience. Granted, this is a long way from a big interdependent system with custom databases and APIs all over the place, but I’m confident that there are loads of existing tools out there in open source land that could be combined by a smart new media person, a gang of techy volunteers, and a bit of contract coding for the really specialist stuff. I got upbraided for talking about convergence (“so last century” apparently) so I’ll not repeat that, but I’m sure that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel to do most of the stuff you’ve suggested above.

We already have a really talented designer inhouse, so the graphics stuff will be more of a support role – lending a hand with spillover stuff as we get closer to the elections. We’re also lucky enough to have a few graphic designers amongst our membership who might help out with a bit of project work here and there.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. And thanks too, Joy. Flexitimers is definitely an interesting project, but again, resources are a major constraint, so for the meantime we have to do recruitment also on a shoestring.

But if we can get the fundraising machine going and it begins to pay dividends, who knows we might be recruiting again…