Conflict gateway Blog

Thie blog has moved.. so long.. and thanks for all the fish!

2009-07-31T10:19:00.000-07:00

Conflict Gateway Blog's last Blogger post!!

Due to the release of version 3.0 of the Conflict Gateway Website, this blog is now being integrated into the main site, instead of relying on a third party host!

We will keep this blog of posterity! But in the meantime you can catch the new blog at..

http://www.conflictgateway.com/blog/

Thanks to blogger.com and all involved!!

Sebastian

Updates 25/09/08

2008-09-24T20:29:00.000-07:00

www.conflictgateway.com

Hello to everyone who reads the Conflict Gateway blog, this is just a quick message to keep you updated on the progress of the site.

*** Recent Updates ***

We have added 500+ new resources to the CG Directory. Many of these include articles, essays and free study materials.

We have now launched a new, sleeker and more importantly faster loading version of the site, which includes a new "article" section.

We have updated forum features to include popularly requested things such as avatars, and reward points.

Once again a big thank you to everyone who has helped out the first 2 months of the Conflict Gateway site, the initial seeds of the community rest were built by you! We are now appealing to members to help the site reach a greater audience, by doing one of three things..

1. Invite friends to this group who you feel may be interested in the site.

2. Join our forum.. http:www/conflictgateway.com/forum/ and become part of our community.

3. If you own or operate any websites, please include a link to us, as we are trying to improve our web presence and google rankings. All help will be greatly appriciated!!

Until the next update once again many thanks, keep checking the site for updates, network, make friends and give any feedback you feel would is needed!!

Regards,

Sebastian.

www.conflictgateway.com

We are looking for partners

2008-09-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

Conflict Gateway are currently looking for partners.

If you run or are a member of an organisation that you feel may benefit from being partners with our site, please contact us via info@conflictgateway.com.

Benefits of partnership..

Extensive exposure on our site, with a prominent logo / graphic link on EVERY page on our site. As well as sharing news, knowledge, and working together to bring the conflict / peace building and related communities together.

Increased user base of our thousands of daily readers, plus our extensive network of contacts.

Ability to launch campaigns / fund raising / awareness together, creating stronger network effects and brand presence.

The ability to grow together, and develop a mutually beneficial relationship.

If you feel you could benefit than please contact us (info@conflictgateway.com) with your contact details, information about your organisation and what you are looking to gain from this alliance.

Regards

Sebastian
Conflict Gateway

Conflict Gateway V3 launched!!

2008-09-09T12:05:00.000-07:00

The new look Conflict Gateway has been launched. We have converted to .CSS to allow faster loading times and cut down on bandwidth. Conflict Gateway is now 6 week old and we are currently averaging 2-4k hit a day, which we believe is a phenomenal achievment.

We have decided to redesign the site to give it a more professional look and easier to navigate layout.

NEW FEATURES..

ARTICLES

Our directory website has expanded and now includes article and news by members and leading industry figures. We have opened up the article submission to anyone who may be interested to give a great platform for students and practitioners to share opinions, knowledge and work.

We have also started a regular article competition so best article will win regular $100 prizes.

FORUM

Our forum has been updated and hosts a wealth of new features allowing users to reward each other, send private messages and we have also included advanced search features.

We hope you find the new site easier to navigate, any feedback would be greatly appriciated.

We look forward to seeing you on the forum!

Sebastian & the Conflict Gateway team

Update and bug fixes for August 21st

2008-08-21T05:40:00.000-07:00

We have corrected the submission error we have been hearing about from a lot of users when they were trying to add URLs to certain categories. This has now been fixed and pages can now be submitted to all areas of the site.

Resource update

2008-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone,

Just a very quick post to let you know how early development of the site is going on. We have spent the last few days working on our backlinks as obviously Google pagerank and positioning is just about the most important thing for the success of a site!!

We have also recently updated our resources on Conflict Gateway to over 500 now. This may sound tiny (and indeed is no comparison to) otehr conflict portals that are offering over 30k resources. However we have big ambitions, and are growing rapidly, and will have 1k+ by the end of the week, growing to 10K+ over the next couple of months.

We welcome any and all submission relating tot he conflict field, and also any backlinks would be greatly, greatly, greatly appriciated :-). If you'd like to let of know of your site or a back link / link exchange you have provided please feel free to email us at info@interimimago.com

I love the smell of a growing forum in the morning..

2008-08-17T10:17:00.000-07:00

Forum activity has exploded in the last few days, many thanks to all who have participated in some lively discussions, we now how 25 members, which for a 2 week old forum I think is amazing. Let's see if we can push it up to 100!! I am not sure at which point a foum reaches a tipping point where it becomes very sustainable and lively, if anyone has any ideas or thoughts I would love to hear them.

Quick feedback on the forum, some users have found it very different to any forum they have used before. We use the Vanilla forum software, which takes a radical approach and concentrates on community and discussion, and strips away many elements. As the philosophy for this site was to keep it as simple as possible we started out with a very basic forum, but due to demand we will be adding certain features (avatars added yesterday) such as signitures, WYSIWYG editors and video uploads over the next week, so keep your eyes peeled!!

If you still havn't signed up to our forum please check it out here

Regards,
Seb & the conflict gateway team

Our first week..

2008-08-14T07:57:00.000-07:00

After a delayed launch, Conflict Gateway is two weeks old today! And it's been a fantastic (but hectic) two weeks. The first thing i'd like to do is thank everyone for all the interest in the site!! we have already recieved a few backlinks, got into google (more on that later) and ironed our a few eerors in the site. I'd say one slight drawback is that we had hoped to launch with more content than we have, but obviously this is something we can grow in the next fews weeks, so HORAY!! :-).

The site is running great and we should see the forum start to pick up soon, and well as submissions. Our objectives for the next 4 weeks are..

1. Google. We aim to have a PR1 rating this time next month! (So any backlinks would be GREATLY appriciated!

2. content. We aim to have 2000 resources by this time next month.

3. Forums. 20-30 registered members, and a beginnings of a community :)

For now i'm taking a few days break, and sketching out some other project we've been working on.

Regards,

Sebastian.

Land Ahoy!

2008-08-07T09:05:00.000-07:00

Greeting everyone,

Today I am in an excellent mood! Why you ask? well last night the server problems FINALLY got resolved and Conflict Gateway FINALLY sprung to life!! Although the site is technically up and running, it still needs a lot of work, as the directory is virtually empty (100+ listings last time I checked) and the forums are pretty quiet.

So now we move on to phase two..

1. Build the directory up with quality resources from ADR fields. (We aim to have at least 1000 within a week. 10 000 within six months).

2. Get the forums up and running. This is really down to user participation, so if you know anyone interested in the ADR field then please encourage them to sign up!!

It's nice when things start to work out :) For now I am going to take a day off.. and come back to the site on Saturday :).

Enjoy !!!

Sebastian.

Breaking through walls...

2008-07-30T07:33:00.000-07:00

Well after an exhausting 12 HOURS of coding the mySQL database it looks like we're finally making some progress. The annoying thing is all that effort that goes into the "behind the scenes" running of the site has little to show when it comes to the outside !! However the "launching August 1st" message has now dissapeared from the Conflict Gateway homepage, and a fancy new search box appeared :-). Please do not use this yet as It's not operational, and will just screw up your browser! as the launch date grows ever nearer it looks like this is going to be a 24hr a day project. Fun fun fun.

Conflict Gateway

2008-07-29T15:51:00.002-07:00

www.conflictgateway.com

Quick link just in case anyone was wondering :-). If anyone wants to help improve my google ranking by linking to Conflict Gateway or this blog, then please do!!

Who am I ?

2008-07-29T15:51:00.001-07:00

Hello everyone,

Just thought I'd give a quick introduction and write about why I started Conflict Gateway.

I am a university lecturer in the UK and teach conflict transformation. I have noticed a lot of the sources for conflict, peace building ADR and mediation on the internet were fragmented, and there was no easy way to find them all in one place. Therefore I decided to create a very simple easy to use site that links these together, is community driven and where people can exchange ideas and knowledge.

I will also be setting up a conflict resolution consultancy firm, and publishing my work and will be looking for ambitious students in related fields who might be interested in working as trainee consultants (worldwide travel may be neccessary as part of the job). So watch this space!

In the meantime, the short term goals for Conflict Gateway are to create a site that everyone can use, contribute to and find the resources they need easily.

Regards,

Sebastian

Stress!!

2008-07-29T11:14:00.000-07:00

Who knew building a website could be so much stress !!! (Well probably everyone but me).

After compiling a massive database of sources together, I seem to be having major issues with executing the script. Although I know a fair bit about web desig this is probably the most ambitious project i've ever done so this a steep learning curve. Looks like i'll be pulling some all-nighters this week.

On a different note, as a example in the potential power of Conflict Gateway I met a fantastic chap who is now part of the community, a fellow by the name of Joseph Agula, who is doing some fantastic work in Uganda. I'd highly recommend adding him as a friend and having a chat, he's got amazing field experience.

I'll keep posting on how it's going, looking forward to August 1st and I will keep my facebook chat open during my all nighters if you want to keep me company haha :-)

Sebastian

A big thanks to everyone at George Mason

2008-07-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

Just wanted to write a quick post thanking everyone at George Mason University for the help and support they have shown in the very early stages of this project, and also for giving Conflict Gateway some space in the July Newsletter!! Many thanks to you all, you have been an inspiration and a motivation !!!

Sebastian.

Hello and Welcome

2008-07-29T10:21:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody and thanks for finding this blog!

My name is Sebastian and I have recently started a website called Conflict Gateway (www.conflictgateway.com). For those of you that already know about it from reading the site, or finding the Facebook group you will probably not need to read the next part of this. However for those of you who are new to the site Conflict Gateway is a web portal that aims to connect the leading mediation, conflict, ADR, transformation and resolution sources on the internet together on one easy, free and ethical website. It also aims to create a community of user generated content and provide networking and knowledge exchange oppurtunities in these areas (as well as some internship and scholarship oppurtunities).

The tone of this blog will be very informal, and chart the making of the website, as well as more about me and my personal struggles getting it up and running (and believe me there have been a lot of struggles!!) . However firstly I will outline the objectives of the site...

Mission:

Our mission is to create a simple, easily accessible portal which brings together all of the conflict, mediation, resolution, transformation, and ADR resources on the internet.

Design philosophy:

1. Simple - The website should be as simple as possible, and able to run on ANY computer in the world. It should be intuitive to navigate, clutter free and easy to understand.

2. Meaningful: - The website has a SPECIFIC purpose; to link together all of the conflict, mediation and ADR content on the internet. In this way Conflict Gateway acts as a conduit for all relevant information.

3. Community: - This website is for everybody, and encourages a strong sense of community. Forums are available and users are encouraged to add to them, invite friends and add meaningful links to the site.

Ongoing evolution:

Conflict Gateway is an ongoing project that will always grow and change with the feedback of the community.

So once again thanks for joining!! and I look forward to getting to know everyone a bit better once the since launches via the forums, until then ENJOY! :-)