A new BPN website is under development. It will improve the BPN experience for parents and allow us to become financially sustainable, so that BPN can continue to operate as an independent, not-for-profit parent-to-parent resource for years to come.
See Updates on the New Website for recent news.
Background
Since 1993, Berkeley Parents Network has been a free service for local parents run by volunteers. BPN is grateful to UC Berkeley for hosting our website and mailing list for 21 years, providing logistical and technical support on an informal basis. But as the number of subscribers has soared over the years, from the original 14 UC graduate students to nearly 34,000 Bay Area parents as of this writing, we realize that we must find a way to make BPN sustainable for the long term. We can't rely forever on volunteers using their spare time to send out daily newsletters and maintain a burgeoning website. We also want to take advantage of the technology that has become widespread since BPN's early days, when a computer scientist mom created the original site from scratch. A few months ago, BPN formed an organization and obtained 501(c)(3) non-profit status, and is now run by a Board of Directors consisting of all current BPN moderators. Our first project is a new website that will allow us to do more for our subscribers, and ensure that BPN is still a valuable resource for our children's children.
Goals for the New Site
- Streamline the posting process and keep web archives up-to-date by automating some tasks that are currently manual.
- Make improvements to allow the website and mailing list to be maintained without the need for high-level technical skills.
- Add new functionality such as surveys, databases of schools & daycares, and web-based announcements and events.
- Create a new paid subscriber category for local schools and businesses who want to post announcements to BPN. These fees will allow us to fund professional technical support and a full-time Director/Administrator
What Won't Change
- Parent subscriptions will continue to be free.
- No advertising will appear on the website or in mailings.
- The website will continue to look "plain" - no flashy graphics - though it will look more modern!
- All postings will still be reviewed by BPN moderators.
- The public content on the BPN website will stay public.
- The subscriber-only content will stay subscriber only, except that announcements from our Community Subscribers will be accessible to the public on the website's public section.
- BPN will continue to rely on volunteer moderators.
- Subscribers can still post anonymously.
- Non-profit groups and public schools who subscribe to BPN can continue to post announcements and events at no cost.
What Will Be Different
- We will host the BPN website independent from UC Berkeley and have a new URL (BerkeleyParentsNetwork.org).
- We will accept donations.
- We will have a paid Director/Administrator (currently, BPN's founder, Ginger Ogle).
- Posts for some digests, such as Childcare and Marketplace, will appear on the website rather than mailed out in a weekly newsletter, and will be searchable in a variety of ways.
- Each BPN subscriber will have a login account for reading subscriber-only content and for posting.
- Subscribers will be able to choose which digests they want to subscribe to.
- Some postings, such as reviews of daycares and schools, will be directly archived to the website (after review by a moderator) instead of the sporadic manual archiving we do now.
- A paid "Community Subscriber" category will be created for local schools and businesses (see this page for more information.)
- Community Subscribers will be able to update their information on the BPN website, add new information that isn't currently available, and post announcements about openings or events which will now be available to the public as well as parent subscribers
Phasing in the New Website
The new BPN website will be phased in over a number of months. Phase One will focus on moving the weekly Childcare newsletter to the new website. BPN subscribers will be able to create an account on the new website to post a message or to search childcare-available postings in a variety of ways, such as searching for daycares in a particular neighborhood that have openings and where Spanish is spoken. Childcare providers will be able to upgrade their subscriptions to Community Subscriber status, which will allow them to post detailed information about their programs, such as hours and current openings. This information will now be publicly available (see this page for more about Community Subscribers.) During the transition, parts of the existing website will continue to operate. Upon completion, http://parents.berkeley.edu will be decommissioned (it will forward requests to the new site.)