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Case Study – National Constitution Center
- National Constitution Center
- Philadelphia, PA, USA
- Industry
- Non-profit education
- # of employees
- 150
- # of content partners using the wiki
- 30+
- # of educators using the wiki
- 6,700
- # of people visiting the wiki
- Tens of thousands
- # of Confluence spaces
- 35
- Key customisations
- Search optimisation; document formatting with metadata
A conversation with Tom Hillhouse, Web Services and Marketing Manager, U.S. National Constitution Center
Signed into law in 2005, Constitution Day celebrates the birthday of the United States government. On September 17, and throughout the year, the National Constitution Center's Constitution Day wiki serves as a national hub for educators, students, community leaders, government employees, and military personnel in search of educational resources to teach and inspire.
Let's start with a little background on the National Constitution Center and your work in support of Constitution Day.
The National Constitution Center is a private, non-profit, non-partisan museum and education center dedicated to increasing public understanding of the U.S. Constitution and its relevance in our daily lives.
Constitution Day is a federal holiday celebrating the Sept. 17, 1787 signing of the U.S. Constitution. On Sept. 17, all schools and government organizations that receive federal funding are required to celebrate the Constitution with lessons and activities. That means not only first graders and civics teachers, but CIA agents, USDA inspectors, and Amtrak operators, too.
In 2005 when the bill was signed, there were really no central resources dedicated to Constitution Day. So, at the National Constitution Center, we decided to develop a comprehensive website to help all of these diverse groups find an appropriate way to observe Constitution Day. The Constitution Day wiki site is now a rich source of content for "all things Constitution Day." We serve as a content provider, as a clearinghouse for content from our national partners, and as a community hub for visitors of all ranks and ages.
- "The Constitution Day wiki site is now a rich source of content for 'all things Constitution Day.' We serve as a content provider, as a clearinghouse for content from our national partners, and as a community hub for visitors of all ranks and ages." Tom Hillhouse, National Constitution Center
What made you decide to deploy a wiki as the backbone for the Constitution Day site?
We had a static Constitution Day site in 2005. For 2006, we wanted a more public, democratic process that did more than present information. We wanted more of a forum and a community that allowed people to find and contribute content.
Still, we weren't necessarily looking for a wiki. What we really needed was a content management solution that allowed more public access than a top-down publishing solution. It needed to be open, so that our content partners and the public could contribute, update, and edit content. A wiki turned out to be the best way to implement an open content management solution for our particular needs.
Why did you choose Confluence over other wikis?
We chose Confluence for a couple of reasons. One was that our development partner, Night Kitchen Interactive, uses it with a lot of different customers and they highly recommended it to us. We also needed to have a lot of control over the content — to enforce strict rules about what could be posted and what couldn't. Other wikis didn't provide that capability.
Why did you need to have such tight control over the content?
You hear stories all the time about high schools and middle schools banning sites because they contain objectionable content. Because we were using a wiki for a public Internet site, we needed to maintain tight control over it — not so much from a security perspective, but to exclude any questionable content and we also wanted to make sure that everything that was posted was correct!
Who provided the content on the wiki?
This year, we primarily received content from partners. We started off with five or six partners, and as we got closer and closer to Constitution Day the number of visitors increased as more organizations realized, "Hey, I want to be part of this, too." By Constitution Day, we had 30 partners ranging from Court TV and USA Today to C-SPAN and the National Archives. The National Constitution Center itself was also a major contributor.
Teacher contributions were mostly in the form of comments rather than content, because we didn't have a whole lot of educators who knew about the site. They provided feedback on resources, like, "I used this in my classroom and it worked really well," or, "This is a good lesson plan when paired with that assembly program." Now that there are almost 7,000 teachers registered, we think that their contributions will make up a much larger portion of the content next year.
Did the content providers and visitors know they were using a wiki?
We didn't use the word "wiki" actually. We just treated it as a regular website that allowed people to register and become members of the community. We had a rudimentary verification process to make sure email addresses were from real schools, but we didn't worry too much about imposters masquerading as teachers!
For our partners, the process for submitting content depended on the technical resources they had available. If they had an IT person who could work with and edit information in Confluence, they did that. If they didn't, they would pass the content to us and we would enter it ourselves.
Did people use the Constitution Day wiki in ways that you hadn't expected?
Honestly, no, because we really wanted it to be used in a specific way. A nice benefit, though, was the reciprocal marketing between our site and our partners' sites. They directed traffic to our site in the months leading up to Constitution Day, when we had over 50,000 visitors viewing their content. We still have about 4,000 visitors a month, which continues to drive traffic to our partners' sites.
Your implementation of Confluence rocks — it looks amazing. How did you achieve that and how easy was it to do?
It was surprisingly easy, especially considering that we chose Confluence and began development just three months before Constitution Day 2006. Night Kitchen Interactive designed the look-and-feel and interactive features for the site. We used a couple third-party plugins and developed several of our own custom ones as well.
We were really impressed with the quality of the developer community out there supporting Confluence, and with how quickly they were able to produce plugins. If you tried to do custom development on any other content management solution, you'd spend almost as much on that as you did on the CMS itself. We were very surprised that we were able to do custom development on a tool like this for as little money as we did. We are non-profit, so of course that was very important.
What custom plugins did you create?
We made the search a little easier to use and added some structure to our documents. For example, if we added a resource about a lesson plan, we wanted to classify what age group that lesson plan was for, what audience it was for, what topics it covered, etc. so that each resource within our system was classified according to certain metadata. We customized the search tool, called the Resource Wizard, to be able to use that metadata as well.
- "We didn't know if the application would be able to handle the demand, but in the end we ran out of bandwidth long before we ran out of horsepower with Confluence." Tom Hillhouse, National Constitution Center
How would you rate Confluence's performance and reliability?
We were a little skeptical at the beginning because we considered a wiki as an Intranet application used by workgroups to serve a finite number of people. You may have a hundred people or a thousand people, but you know how many there are. The Constitution Day wiki was open to the public so we could have anywhere from a couple hundred to 50,000 visitors in one day, like we did on September 17th. We didn't know if the application would be able to handle the demand, but in the end we ran out of bandwidth long before we ran out of horsepower with Confluence. We were very pleased with it, and I'm sure it's going to get better, too.
What would you say is the best thing about Confluence and the Constitution Day wiki?
The rating tool was one of the coolest things we did on the Constitution Day wiki. It allowed people to rate an activity or a lesson plan or an event. They might say, "5 stars — that worked really great in my classroom." Or they might say, "2 stars — that wasn't very helpful." With 50,000+ people looking at our site and searching and rating the content, we were able to quickly see what worked and what didn't. For example, we learned an online interactive game that we thought was really cool wasn't that cool after all.
That kind of feedback was not something we got in the static 2005 site and it's not something you'll find on many other sites for civic education. Again, that's because most approaches are very much top-down, one-way content management systems. Confluence allowed us to involve the community. And when we married the search engine with the ratings, it was incredibly powerful, because people were able to say, "I would like something for elementary school students on this particular topic and only show me things that have received 4 stars and above." It allowed teachers to quickly sort through all of the civic education content that was out there to find exactly what they were looking for and to find quality materials as well.
- "Confluence allowed us to involve the community." Tom Hillhouse, National Constitution Center
You mentioned that a lot of educators didn't know about the site this year. How do you plan to raise awareness and participation for Constitution Day 2007?
We'll invest more in search engine optimization, especially since we already have an existing site in place to drive traffic to. We also found that we rose on search engines pretty quickly on our own. That was largely due to partner marketing, where our content partners provided links to the Constitution Day site from their sites and we did the same for them. When you have 35 partners, it helps a lot.
What changes do you want to make to the site for next year?
We really want to see the community of educators contribute content, and help us craft next year's iteration of the site. We're identifying people within our organization to work on that aspect.
As far as content, I'm sure we will have a lot of great new resources, and we're looking specifically to provide more materials for elementary school students and teachers. On the technology side, we'll be upgrading the firewall and routers to handle the increased load we expect next year. And from an aesthetic point of view, we plan to include more multimedia content in the site.
Do you plan to use Confluence for other educational programs in the future?
Yes. We are already working on another Confluence installation for PENNCORD (Pennsylvania Coalition for Representative Democracy), which is comprised of the National Constitution Center, the office of the First Lady of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Bar Association.
PENNCORD's charter is to implement best practices standards for civic education in schools throughout Pennsylvania. They really liked what we were able to do with Constitution Day in terms of the social networking that Confluence enables, and they wanted to create a similar kind of site for Pennsylvania teachers. They are working to create a site that will become a model for other states.