I’m very proud to introduce a new feature at United Resource Connection that will improve the coordination and collaboration of local service agencies, social workers, and care providers, while advancing our additional mission goal to provide linguistically sensitive materials. Effective immediately, all chapters of United Resource Connection have multilingual support. To see this technology in action, simply click on one of international flags in the lower right-hand footer, representing the various languages into which United Resource Connection can now be translated.  By clicking on one of the flags, the entire web site is immediately translated into the language requested.  This even includes group forum topics and posts, no matter what language was used to initially post the information within these forums.”Universal translators” (to use an old star trekterm) have been around a number of years now; what makes our present development so significant is how easy it is to use today. With a single click of a button, visitors now have access to our entire website in 80+ different languages.  This is a huge asset in improving the delivery system of local resources in our growing metropolitan communities.

The 80+ languages include: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese Simplified, Chinese Traditional, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Haitian Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Check it out! Registration to share information on a local chapter of the United Resource Connection is free, and now, with multilingual support, reaches more people.  If you have not registered, do so today, and start spreading the wealth of knowledge you’ve gained over the years as a local service provider or recipient.

 

Edited 9/29/12 to reflect increase in the number of languages available, and changes in the location of the translator link, from the left side of the footer to the right.

Hi, my name is Stefan Densmore, founder of Cybercasemanager Enterprises. Those familiar with cybercasemanager.com from the beginning have seen a lot of changes to the website over the years. From its simple beginnings as a single page listing frequently used Cincinnati Mental Health internet links, the enterprise has taken off to host a variety of additional resources and has even expanded to include Chicago, Illinois. A significant milestone has been reached with the most recent launch, which I’d like to take a moment to discuss.

One of the first things you may notice is that cybercasemanager.com no longer defaults to the Cincinnati localization, but instead leads here, to this administrative blog. The thinking behind this was that the front end of the web site should be set aside to highlight the mission objectives of cybercasemanager, detail progress on those objectives, and invite peer review.

This format also allows the city localizations to stay what they are, as an online knowledge base of local resources, rather than the resource deficient corporate publicity billboard that most websites for social services unfortunately have become. So this will be the billboard, in all its stuffiness, you can check in as often as you like, or completely ignore it by making a bookmark for a direct link to the localization of interest.

For the past year, behind the scenes, we have been experimenting with a powerful new engine for our Content Management System (CMS). Code-named Cybermu, the new CMS is an installation of the open source semantic publishing platform wordpress mu (pronounced mew, like a cat). We chose to use the same open source solution to handle content management as that used by Harvard University, The New York Times, and Le Monde. The new mu engine enables multiple (literally hundreds of thousands of) integrated sub-installations, which is of particular usefulness to the cybercasemanager enterprise, given the ability to easily add new cities as our model grows.

Aside from the new look, and the addition of forums, the Cincinnati website is basically the same.  The Chicago website, however, has seen a major overhaul. Before the changeover, the Chicago website had not seen an upgrade of their system in years; they were still operating from the simple list of frequently used resource links that defined the earliest version of cybercasemanager. They now have the full functionality afforded to the Cincinnati website.

As mentioned before, the transition to the wordpress mu engine allows us to easily add new cities, with these full features, at very little overhead. With interest and support from users like you, we hope to add more cities to cybercasemanger.com in the coming years. If you’d like to help, please visit our “Support Us” page, and take a couple minutes to review the number of ways you can be involved.

We have also opened up the administrative management of the site, in a grassroots fashion, for case managers, doctors, social workers, nurses, and other direct service providers to join our board of advisors, via input in our peer review forums. This is a big experiment, no doubt about it, and unprecedented as far as I know. See the “Peer Review” page to fill out the online application if you are interested.

 

Edited 9/29/12 to reflect changes in how to join our board of advisors.