Toronto workshop: Web 2.0 and Your Organization
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June 4th, 2007 by Alex
Web 2.0 and Your Organization
July 24 & 25th, 2007
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto
How can your organization use social media tools to deepen your relationships with supporters, reach new audiences and raise more money? More than twenty people discovered the power of social media tools like blogs and wikis through a workshop I co-taught with Jason Mogus on Web 2.0 and Your Organization. Jason and I had so much fun teaching that March workshop in Vancouver, and got such a positive response from participants, that we will be offering the same workshop in Toronto this summer.
Here's the skinny:
Are you interested in how online communities like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube can empower your members and customers to carry your message out into the world? Could your organization benefit from deeper collaboration among your team members, clients, partners or the public? Could better knowledge-sharing, stronger relationships and closer communications inside your organization and with your core supporters foster more efficiency, insight and effectiveness?
The latest generation of "Web 2.0" or social web strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.
This workshop is designed for communications strategists, marketing managers, and webmasters who are interested in how this evolution of the web can help evolve your organization's online strategy. We will give you the tools, knowledge, and most crucially, the vision for how your organization can use the web as a stronger agent of change. We’ll also cover the nuts-and-bolts, introducing the latest tools so that you know which options are most promising for your needs.
This workshop will take place from 6pm to 9pm on July 24th, and from 9am to 5pm (with lunch break) on July 25th.
Follow this link to register today -- space is limited.
For more information, please contact sarahfelicity@gmail.com.
Now en route to NetSquared
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May 28th, 2006 by Alex
Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event.
The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.
I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.
Now en route to NetSquared
.28.5 | No Comments »
May 28th, 2006 by Alex
Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event.
The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.
I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.
May 30 & 31: NetSquared’s online conference with nonprofit leaders
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May 26th, 2006 by Alex
as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog
Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.
The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.
And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:
- Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
- Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
- Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
- Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
- Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
- Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
- Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
- Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
- Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
- Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
- Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
- Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"
May 30 & 31: NetSquared’s online conference with nonprofit leaders
.26.5 | No Comments »
May 26th, 2006 by Alex
as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog
Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.
The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.
And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:
- Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
- Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
- Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
- Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
- Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
- Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
- Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
- Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
- Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
- Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
- Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
- Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"
May 30 & 31: NetSquared’s online conference with nonprofit leaders
.26.5 | No Comments »
May 26th, 2006 by Alex
as posted on Corante’s Civic Minded blog:
Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.
The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I’m heartbroken that I won’t be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) — and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they’re going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.
And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology — leaders like:
- Judith Feder on “Health care and web 2.0 patient communities”
- Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
- Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on “Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net”
- Beth Kanter on “Tagging in the Nonprofit World”
- Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
- Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on “Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared”
- Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on “Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit’s Mission”
- Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on “Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op”
- Boris Mann from Bryght on “Open Source and your non-profit”
- Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
- Nancy White of Full Circle on “Online Facilitation Open Discussion”
- Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on “Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron’s point of view”
The remote conference is open to anyone with an Internet connection. And feel free to drop by the conference hallway for even more remote conference-y goodness.
Online community camp, May 25th in San Francisco
.25.4 | No Comments »
April 25th, 2006 by Alex
Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:
* Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.
Online community camp, May 25th in San Francisco
.25.4 | No Comments »
April 25th, 2006 by Alex
Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:
* Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities.
While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.
Putting Technology to Work in the Community Sector
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August 3rd, 2005 by Alex
Today’s news is a Call for Papers for what looks like an interesting conference in Sydney this November:
Putting Technology to Work in the Community Sector
Sydney, 14th - 15th November 2005
A conference for community and non-government workers will show it’s
not only corporate giants and dotcoms that can successfully harness
the power of the World Wide Web.
Representatives from community agencies and NGOs around the country
will come together in Sydney in November to share their experiences
of employing information and communication technologies (ICTs) for
community building and improved service delivery.
Making Links 2005 - “Putting technology to work in the community
sector”‘ will be held on 14 and 15 November 2005 at the University of
Technology Sydney (UTS). Participating NGO and community workers will
gain an understanding of the application of ICTs in community work,
as well as the fundamental tools for website development.
Call for papers Papers are invited from community sector or NGO
workers with ICT successes - or lessons - to share within the themes:
NGOs and IT;
Community Building and Social Capital;
Web Development; and
hands-on technical workshops.
Registrations: Open 27 July 2005
Become an online engagement pro
.20.7 | 1 Comment »
July 20th, 2005 by Alex
This fall I’m teaching two e-engagement programs through Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. One of the programs is a TeleForum (a series of conference calls) so it’s accessible to participants anywhere in the world.
Please let your colleagues and friends know about this chance to learn about online engagement and dialogue:
Do you need to build relationships with new stakeholder groups? Are you managing complex issues and relationships with limited resources? Is information management and information sharing crucial to your stakeholder engagement work?
Online tools can help you manage all of these stakeholder engagement challenges. Engagement leaders have recognized that tools like online discussions, resource libraries and surveys can increase the reach and effectiveness of almost any stakeholder engagement program.
Beginning in September 2005, the Collaborative Learning & Innovation program at Simon Fraser University is offering two opportunities to learn more about the values, tools and approaches that drive successful online stakeholder engagement.
The Online Stakeholder Engagement Teleforum (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_engagement_teleforum.htm) is a series of six monthly conference calls for engagement practitioners. These monthly discussions will focus on collaborative knowledge-building among participants in order to create a learning community that is useful to the work of its members. Participants will develop the field knowledge and analytic framework to assess e-engagement options and to plan for effective online engagement with key stakeholders. The first session will be held on September 14; calls will be held from 10 am – noon PST, and international participation is welcomed.
The Online Stakeholder Engagement Workshop (http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/online_workshop.htm) will be held on October 17 in Vancouver, Canada. This one-day workshop will provide an intensive introduction to online engagement work, emphasizing online engagement as a catalyst for increasing the depth and value of public involvement work. Participants will get hands-on experience with a range of online engagement tools, and will develop their own perspective on the opportunities for online participation through discussion and group exercises.
Both the Teleforum and the in-person workshop will be co-taught be Alexandra Samuel and Ann Svendsen. For further information please visit the CLI web site at http://www.sfu.ca/cscd/cli/executive_programs.htm, or e-mail Alexandra (alex_at_alexandrasamuel_dot_com) or Ann (svendsen_at_sfu_dot_ca).
The perfect event blogging tool?
.14.7 | 1 Comment »
July 14th, 2005 by Alex
I met a really amazing group of people at AdvocacyDev, some of whom I expect to see again at Web of Change. Within the amazing group were a number of bloggers, and I’m looking forward to checking out their blogs.
So here’s an idea: event-specific blogrolls. I’d love to find (or create) a tool that would allow event organizers to create blogrolls of event participants, and allow participants to temporarily rotate their blogrolls to reflect the blogroll of whatever even they’re at. Right now I use bloglines to generate my blogroll; but I’d love it if it were SUPER easy to switch that blogroll to temporary alternatives, to rotate my blogroll periodically, and to create a blogroll that is separate from my public list of blog subscriptions. That last item is a little to-do for Bloglines, since I often refer people to my list of Bloglines public subscriptions as a set of starter RSS feeds, but feel irritated that my list excludes a bunch of feeds that would be useful to RSS newbies but that I don’t feel like advertising on my blogroll (e.g. the CBC and the Globe and Mail).
But back to the event-specific blogroll idea. I think what would work great is a tool that integrates with event registration, so that it asks people for their blog URLs (if available) as part of the event registration process, and then (at the option of the user) adds that URL to a conference blogroll. The blogroll could be available on the conference website, along with a little snippet of code (or a link to the code snippet) that conference participants could put in their sidebar for the duration of the conference.
The ugly workaround approach would be to do something like creating a Bloglines account for the conference, and manually or automatically adding each registrant’s blog URL to the event’s Bloglines blogroll. Then participants could insert the code that Bloglines generates to replace (or supplement) their blog with the conference blogroll, and delete the code when the conference ends.
The way cooler approach would be something that integrates with event calendaring or personal calendaring. I’d love a service that keeps track of events I’m planning to attend and lets me share my calendar or a specific event with a trusted list of contacts or the general public (in fact, I need to start using something that does that anyhow). And I want that same service to offer blogroll management to all the events and conferences I participate in. Then I want the service to accept the URL or OPML file that corresponds to my default blogroll (i.e. my Bloglines blogroll) and to automatically swap out or supplement my default blogroll, replacing it (or appending to it) with the blogroll for whatever event I’m at at the moment. And last but not least the same system could add MY blog to the list of blogs to be aggregated into the event blog during the event’s duration, if those posts have been tagged with a designated conference tag.
To offer a use scenario, here’s how that might work with an event like AdvocacyDev. I register for the conference on the Aspiration website, at which time I am prompted to enter my blog URL (and perhaps asked about whether I wanted it added to the conference blogroll). My blog URL would then be added to a blogroll on the conference wiki and/or Asipiration blog (at least for the week). And anything I post to my blog with the tag “advocacydev” gets aggregated into the conference blog (so you have an easy, automatic, collaborative conference blog).
Meanwhile on my personal blog I have a sidebar that includes a little snippet of code generated by the calendaring app. This app knows the URL for my default Bloglines blogroll, and most of the time what appears in my blog’s sidebar is that Bloglines blogroll, passed through to my blog via the event app. But the morning that AdvocacyDev gets rolling, the event app tells my blog that I’m now at AdvocacyDev (which the event app knows b/c it’s gotten updated by the AdvocacyDev event registration system) and so from July 11-13, my blog’s sidebar shows a blogroll made up of my fellow AdvocacyDev participants, either instead of or in addition to my usual blogroll (depending on my preference settings).
The appeal of this idea is that it extends and inverts the logic of an aggregator-based event blog. Aggregation is all about taking these little individual nodes (individual participant/bloggers) and collecting them up in a hub (the conference site). But every individual is a hub for his/her own personal network, with her/his own usual readers and subscribers. By pushing the blogroll for an event out into the individual blogrolls for each conference participant, we could turn the community of conference participants into a broader community of like-minded friends and colleagues.
Anyone care to take this as a LazyWeb request?
From AdvocacyDev
.13.7 | 2 Comments »
July 13th, 2005 by Alex
Today is the last day of AdvocacyDev II, a gathering of people using technology to support nonprofit and social change work. As promised by Mark Surman, it’s been a truly mind-blowing experience.
A big part of what’s amazing is the event organizing and facilitation methodology used by Katrin and Gunner of Aspiration, who organized the conference. Their approach is to bring a whole bunch of interesting people together and let them drive and structure discussions. No talking head panels here: session topics have emerged out of the interests and needs of the people in the room, and each discussion has been a mix of brainstorming, case sharing, strategy sharing, putting questions out for feedback, and coming up with really concrete ideas for projects and next steps.
The wiki helps set things on fire becuase it creates a concrete collective output from each discussion. While a room full of geeks are particularly well-positioned to make good use of the wiki dimension (if only because everyone here has a laptop), the wiki is easy enough to use for non-geek events. And while the wiki is great and useful I don’t think it’s essential to the chemistry of the event (though I’d be curious to hear what Gunner and Katrin think).
Anyone who is involved in planning or organizing a conference or event would learn a lot from participating in an Aspiration event. And if you organize events for people in the tech or nonprofit worlds, it’s a must: make sure to put one of Aspiration’s upcoming events on your calendar.