Online workspace facilitation and improvement.

The Department of Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) has a requirement for an online workspace facilitation and improvement project for the Canadian Council of Forest Ministers (CCFM), Climate Change Working Group’s (CCWG) and Forestry Adaptation Community of Practice (FACoP).

The Forestry Adaptation Community of Practice (FACoP) is a virtual network of over 800 persons interested in climate change impacts and adaptation options for forestry in Canada. The FACoP requires a dedicated online workspace to share information and best practices on current activities in the area of climate change vulnerability and adaptation assessment, from within Canada's forest sector and beyond.

The online workspace must include secure, password protected access for members, online member profiles, discussion forums, current news and academic literature resources, facilitated webinars, calendar of events, and wiki-style pages. Members must be able to post and edit information on each of these pages. The supplier will monitor the posts and facilitate the pages.

The supplier will also be required to gather relevant current events, news items, and academic literature and provide this information to the membership via monthly emails and ongoing updates to the workspace. The supplier will be responsible for attaining required permissions from publishers of academic literature and news items so these items can be posted on the FACoP workspace and distributed to FACoP membership. The supplier will develop a scheme to increase membership, membership engagement, and prioritize workspaces’ updates to match membership interests. The supplier will also be required to facilitate monthly online webinars on topics identified by the FACoP community. Facilitation of the webinars includes providing the technology for webinar participation via computer and telephone connection for up to 200 participants, working with webinar presenters to develop presentation abstracts and biographies, development of webinar notices, distribution of webinar notices to membership, and serve as webinar moderator. The FACoP also requires site usage data reports (e.g., number of members, top page visits, page activity records, number of webinar participants and their affiliations). The FACoP also requires a survey on the workspace to be conducted and reported on by the supplier.

The online workspace must be turnkey and fully-functional at the start of the contract given the FACoP is an active community with an existing workspace in place. The supplier must be willing to work with FACoP to continually develop the workspace to meet ongoing development goals of the FACoP.