Meet Morgan Sully: An Interview with NAMAC's New Online Community Manager
This past July, 27-year-old Morgan Sully arrived at NAMAC headquarters to serve as our CTC (Community Technology Center) VISTA online community manager. Through the CTC Project, Americorps *VISTA places VISTA members with non-profit organizations to provide capacity building services by using technology tools in innovative ways. Not only is Morgan remodeling and rebuilding our venerable NAMAC website, but he is creating a number of interactive, web-based pathways for NAMAC members to better communicate with each other, develop and strengthen our networks, and organize our diverse communities to meet the challenges of the emerging public mediasphere. We love his enthusiasm and the light touch he brings to all the possibilities that the new online tools can offer us.
—Helen De Michiel, Co-Director
HDM: How did you get involved with CTC VISTA?
MS: I enjoy using my passion for technology to inspire and connect others to the knowledge and resources they need. I got involved with the CTC VISTA project in 2005 because it provided an opportunity for me to blend my passion for creative technology use and exploration with compassionate community-building. I discovered that CTC VISTA provides an excellent path for professional development.
What is an online community manager from your perspective?
I would define an online community organizer as someone comfortable enough with web technology to figure out how to connect people to each other in meaningful or life-changing ways. It’s been said that while online organizing provides the far-and-wide scope in reaching people, it lacks the depth of the personal, human touch that face-to-face “offline” organizing brings. An online organizer simply leverages technology to attend to and balance both.
How did you get into developing yourself as an online community manager? What drew you to this area?How do you envision helping NAMAC and the field, as you immerse yourself in this assignment?
I want to support the development of media arts organizations, and by extension the media artists and communities that benefit from them, in their creative development, connecting them to the resources and information that they need—what I feel is my essential purpose anyway. For as long as I can remember, I have wanted to found a media arts organization for precisely this vision/purpose.
It’s a bit of a meta-level of community work for me, working at a national organization like NAMAC, but one that I envision having unlimited potential to inspire others. Local roots are still important though. It’ll be interesting to see how we tie in our national web/community development with the local support of the media ecologies we work with. What is the opportunity that exists? I always like to ask that question.
What attracts you to working in a nonprofit, and specifically NAMAC?
Coming into an already established hub, understanding its strengths and weaknesses, and developing a plan to make it better. NAMAC publications are awesome. The vision is far-reaching, and it ties to my own personal vision for what I want to do with my life.
In no more than 25 words, define Web 2.0 for our distracted readers.
Well, you certainly can’t download it. It’s just an idea really.
How do you see media arts organizations interacting with Web 2.0?
Less consolidated media distribution channels with insecure return-on-investment potential, small revolts that aggregate into larger citizen action movements, and a return to hyperlocal “little” organizational ecologies. “Smart” media content, metadata and new applications will be able to talk to one another—multitasking in ways that we have yet to imagine, but that generations after us will take as second nature.
What do you plan to present at the NAMAC Conference to showcase the NAMAC project and the CTC VISTA project?
During our panel we will showcase stories of change which reflect the positive core of the media arts field while putting a face to the people on the front lines of this movement. I’d like to see this presented through the various projects that VISTA members ingeniously plan, develop, and implement in the communities that they commit to during their years of service, and show more precisely how valuable national community service is to the communities that need it the most.
What do you like to do after-hours?
Online research to figure out ways I can stay off the internet during my free time—that and music. Geeks don’t sleep much, apparently.
If you would like to contact Morgan or learn more the CTC VISTA Project, visit his staff profile page at:
http://www.namac.org/user/1447
