Today in the Globe & Mail: Alex on the business of social media

Today’s Globe & Mail included a special supplement about MBA programs, with a feature story on why and how schools are incorporating social media into the curriculum. “Within minutes or even seconds, online chatter can span continents, conveying positive spin or the kiss of death for a product or company,” reporter Diana McLaren writes. “Business schools are adapting to the rapidly shifting relationship between companies and consumers.”

Diana spoke to me about Social Signal’s experience integrating social media into today’s businesses. (And the Globe ran my favourite, uncredited headshot — by the remarkable Kris Krug.)

Here’s what Diana included in today’s story:

Social media consultant Alexandra Samuel, co-founder of Social Signal in Vancouver, says that social media is “not just a marketing technique. It also allows a business or organization a way of monitoring for customer care.

“Social media can’t just be out there isolated in some little marketing department. You need someone to monitor and respond to what people are saying.”

The challenge for MBA schools, she says, is to “get people to think about a dramatic shift in organizations needed for social media marketing. They need less hierarchy and more communication across teams. Generally speaking, one of the first concerns for business is risk management. The reality of social media is far greater than risk. It’s about throwing a party and no one comes, there’s no response.”

As someone who consults with organizations on social network marketing, but also a business owner herself who hires staff, Ms. Samuel agrees about the need for more MBA graduates to offer a combination of traditional skills, such as financial management and business strategy, with an understanding of social media that makes them “billable” to clients.

“My dream hire is for an MBA with social media expertise,” she says. “Someone who comes with the whole package.”

Status update: Twittering your way to effective (and expressive) communication

Like many forms of online conversation, status updates make it easy to confuse the expressive value of communication with the effective value of communicaiton. I’m concerned about the expressive value of communication when I’m “getting something off my chest”, “speaking my truth”, or engaging in some form of creative expression. I’m concerned about the effective value of communication when I’m trying to get you to hear me, listen to me, or understand me.

Every Human Has Rights makes human rights personal

For the past two months, I've been part of the digital strategy team for The Elders, an extraordinary NGO that was launched last year by Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel. The vision is to convene a council of elders for the global village; the founding elders include Desmond Tutu, Aung San Suu Kyi, Mary Robinson and Kofi Annan.

As part of this work, I've been supporting the web team for Every Human Has Rights, a campaign to spread awareness and support for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This year is the sixtieth anniversary of UDHR, and being part of its celebration is a wonderful echo of one of the first pieces of work I did as a grad student at Harvard, thirteen years ago. (Ouch!) At that time I was a research assistant for Andrew Moravcsik, helping him research an article on international human rights regimes (PDF) that he published in time to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the UDHR.

Moravcsik's article focused particularly on the creation of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR), which, unlike the UNDHR, was designed to be an enforceable document that would give individuals the legal standing to pursue human rights issues in an international court of law. What the ECHR advanced was the idea of personal, individual-level responsibility for human rights advocacy; what it lost was the boldness and breadth of vision of the UDHR.

The EHHR project recognizes that online networks provide a way to have your human rights cake, and eat it too. EHHR is focusing on each of the core themes of the UN Declaration, a sweeping document that addresses basic rights in areas from religion to employement, and from freedom of expression to healthcare. But by asking people around the world to sign on personally — over the web — as supporters of that Declaration, it's reawakening the idea that each and every one of us has a role to play in supporting human rights.

And that role doesn't need to be limited to a courtroom. One of the key partners on the EHHR project is Witness, an online NGO that uses video and web technology to tackle human rights abuses around the world. Through EHHR and Witness's user-driven site, The Hub, anyone in the world can be an active advocate for human rights — a personal witness — by contributing a video or online story.

EHHR and Witness are just two pieces of a large and growing online ecosystem for supporting human rights worldwide. Global Voices Online gathers bloggers from around the world, including many who are writing under adverse — even life-threatening — conditions in their home countries. Ushahidi and the Tunisian Prison Map are putting human rights abuses in Kenya and Tunisia on the map (literally). The Martus project provides digital security tools to protect the effectiveness and safety of people working on the front lines of human rights protection.

The growing online human rights ecosystem of which EHHR is a part didn't exist when Moravcsik wrote his article. At the time, the courts were the best option — really, the only meaningful option — for individuals to engage in the public sphere of human rights. What made that interesting to Moravcsik was the way that human rights agreements allowed governments to dig themselves into structural commitments to human rights, with citizens serving as the hypothetical watchdogs.

Today there's a whole new set of tools to give those hypothetical watchdogs real teeth. But now, citizens don't have to wait to be invited into that role, nor do they have to find their way into a courtroom. They just have to pick up a cell phone, a camera, or a keyboard, and they can hold human rights violations accountable in the court of global public opinion.

The technologies are all there….all that's missing is the recognition of meaningful personal accountability for human rights. That's what EHHR puts back in the picture, by asking and every one of us to sign a personal commitment to the bold vision the UN set forth sixty years ago.

Of course, when the Declaration was written, most UN members would not have envisioned a world in which access to global communications could be virtually universal. Now that we have it, it's time to make human rights universal, too.

Change the web, change the world

How we experience the Internet in our daily lives — whether we experience it as a dehumanizing void in which e-mail replaces face-to-face interaction, or as a meaningful community in which we discover new commonalities and connections — is a choice we make every day, with every message we send or browser page we load. Those choices can add up to personal and social alienation, or personal and social transformation.

Project management and workflow with Basecamp

How can online collaboration tools like Basecamp support effective project management? That's one of the questions that came up at the values-based project management session I attended at Web of Change, led by Rob Purdie of Important Projects. I wanted to continue the conversation with Rob himself, and promised to blog our own project management workflow at Social Signal so that he could offer his comments and feedback on how to improve our approach.

Let me begin by saying this is very much a work in progress: we're still searching for the Holy Grail of optimized workflow, and feel like the tools we use now — particularly Basecamp — don't fully meet our needs. I'll address some of those limitations towards the end of this blog post, but let me begin with an overflow of what we use and how we use it.

Our main tools are:

  • Basecamp: for project-related task management and client communications
  • OmniPlan: for prospective project planning and gantt charting
  • Remember the Milk: for internal task tracking
  • iCal: for internal scheduling and time tracking
  • Google spreadsheets: for capacity planning and docket review

This blog post will focus on how we use Basecamp, which is our main tool for managing the ongoing work of individual projects. The fact that we use so many other tools speaks to the issues we have with Basecamp — which is one of the issues I'm particularly keen to hear Rob address. We're also fans of — though not religious adherents to — David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, which has influenced our approach to task management.

Set up

We set up a Basecamp site at the beginning of each client engagement. Some of the best practices on Basecamp set up that we are trying to adopt as our standard include:

  • posting a welcome message to Basecamp that explains how to use the site (see VentureMarketing's Basecamp Welcome PDF, and their Basecamp client jumpstart, for another approach)
  • presenting an overview of Basecamp at an early client meeting
  • when clients e-mail us outside of Basecamp, redirecting them back to the Basecamp site, often by copying-and-pasting their messages into Basecamp

I add all our subcontractors to Basecamp as members of Social Signal, so that we can cover any technical issues without dragging the client into the Drupal abyss. We recognize that our clients don't always benefit from seeing how the sausages are made, and when it gets into some of the intricacies of module development or permissions configuration, we like to keep the excruciating details private so that clients aren't drawn too deeply into technical issues. Unfortunately, Basecamp only allows private communications among members of the same company, so we choose to treat all our subcontractors as members of Social Signal.

Structure and usage

We use messages for communications that require an action or response. This includes:

  • communications with clients and client updates
  • client requests (bug tracking, questions, etc.)
  • internal discussions of how to handle tasks (marking these discussions private so they aren't visible to client)

We use writeboards for communications that are FYI only (though we may use messages to notify each other of a new writeboard).

We use task lists for items that require a "next action" (in GTD terms).

Messages

Social Signal Project> All Messages

We have recently refined our use of messages to keep better track of all open loops. We respond to urgent messages as they come in, and at least once a week (and ideally every 2-3 days) we review all the messages in a given project space, and update status. We find that updating message status on a real-time basis is excessively time consuming and leads to duplication of effort.

Our message categories vary a bit by project but mostly reflect major categories of project activities (see screenshot — some items deleted to protect client privacy).

When we review a message we briefly note our response, action required, or action taken, even if it's already completed, for future reference.

We then edit the title of the original message to note the status of that message:

  • QUEUED: the message requires an action or response. An item is only marked as "queued" when it has been added as a specific task or tasks in a to-do list. An item may be marked as "queued" even if we anticipate that it will prove too low-priority to address; however by adding it to our queue it can be reviewed with the client during our next review of outstanding tasks, and prioritized accordingly.
    Social Signal Project > CLOSED message
  • CLOSED/RESOLVED: the message requested or required an action or response that has now been completed. We switched from marking items "resolved" to marking them "closed" because sometimes messages are closed because the team (including the client) decide that no further action is warranted, because the item is low priority or because the issue is not expected to recur. When an item is closed we ALWAYS leave a final comment noting the action or decision that led us to mark the message closed.
  • NOTED: the message provided information that is needed by the team or client, but does not require direct action. When an item is noted it is usually placed in a writeboard we expect to refer to at a later date, e.g. a "think about for phase 2" writeboard or an "items to review before launch" writeboard.

Editing our message titles to reflect the status of each message gives us an at-a-glance view of which client issues have been addressed, and which need to be reviewed for action items.

To-dos

We have recently shifted from using fewer, generic to-do lists (which we were trying to standardize across projects) to using a lot more to-do lists, each one corresponding to a set of related tasks. This reflects the GTD notion of grouping tasks by "contexts" or as "projects" consisting of multiple tasks.

Social Signal Project> To Do Lists

By grouping related tasks we ensure that:

  • related tasks at the same time, and can therefore consider a solution that might address multiple requirements or bugs at once
  • tasks can be ordered in sequence or priority, so that a team member can quickly see which tasks must be completed in which order
  • a team member can see who else is working on related tasks
  • tasks don't get lost in long (20+ items) lists

When we had fewer categories we found that the very long lists of tasks under each made it hard to identify relationships or priorities; the shorter list of tasks makes this much easier.

We keep our to-do lists organized alphabetically; when we decide to prioritize a specific set of tasks as the next focus for our work, we move that to-do list to the top of the page and mark it "P1: to-do list name" (as in "priority 1").

Writeboards

Writeboards are our long-term storage area and collaboration space. We use writeboards for:

  • to-dos that we are considering (often for a future phase) but haven't prioritized/organized yet
  • reference information (like a description of our e-mail configuration)
  • meeting notes
  • personal notes that we might want to share with other members of the team, but which don't require an action from anyone (we may still use messages to notify the rest of the team that we have created a writeboard for them to look at)

Assessment

Our experience with Basecamp has been shaped equally by the technology itself, and our diligence in using it. Of course, these aren't unrelated issues; if Basecamp really met all our needs, so that we could keep all our tasks organized in one place, I suspect we'd be much more consistent in using it.

We find that Basecamp works well for:

  • collecting client and team correspondence in one place for future reference
  • organizing project tasks, particularly site/softeware development tasks
  • keeping track of our "someday" ideas in writeboards
  • centralizing our project notes as writeboards

We find that Basecamp works poorly for:

  • personal task management; we often transfer our basecamp tasks to Remember the Milk, where we each maintain an integrated personal "to do" list
  • sensitive communications with other team members (due to lack of privacy settings)
  • project planning (we use OmniPlan, then transfer milestones to Basecamp)

What we like about Basecamp:

  • industry standard — most of our partners and subcontractors, and a few of our clients, have extensive experience with Basecamp
  • nice-looking user interface
  • client-friendly/intuitive to use
  • e-mail notifications include full text of the message
  • availability of 3rd party add-ons

What we need that we're not getting from Basecamp:

  • deadlines for specific tasks, not just milestones
  • priorities for tasks
  • ability to assign one task to multiple people (though I recognize that could be a mixed blessing)
  • ability to comment on a task
  • bug tracking (could be addressed by ability to comment on a task)
  • ability to make messages/to dos private when communicating with people outside our own company

Nice-to-haves would include:

  • spreadsheets (as well as writeboards)
  • personal calendaring
  • ability to store project templates so we don't have to recreate all our categories from scratch each time
  • option to automatically alphabetize categories
  • option to keep message categories and to-do lists in sync (i.e. creating a new to-do list would create a new message category with the same name)
  • tags in addition to categories
  • better RSS output and/or an iGoogle widget that lets us interact with our tasks from our Google homepages (as Remember the Milk does)

Basecamp alternatives

One of my favorite compulsive activities these days is looking into Basecamp alternatives. So far my conclusion has been — to paraphrase Winston Churchill — that Basecamp is the worst possible project management tool, except for all the others. Here are some of the "others" I have looked into, or mean to look into; I'll try to come back to this post and annotate the list with the reasons we haven't moved to any of these:

goplan

Lighthouse

Unfuddle — intriguing because it includes subversion and bug tracking

Clocking IT — a free basecamp alternative, but as far as I can see no built-in messaging. Time tracking, though.

Michael Silberman of EchoDitto put me onto Central Desktop as a somewhat pricier Basecamp alternative that includes many of our concerns about Basecamp. We're trying it out, and it looks promising, although I'm a bit disappointed in the look and feel (it's not nearly as pretty as Basecamp) and daunted by the prospect of moving our projects over. However the prospect of being able to assign deadlines to tasks (imagine that!!) probably outweighs every other issue.

Brian Benzinger's roundup of project management tools for developers provides quick takes on some of the above, plus many more.

Other Resources

In the course of my obsessing over Basecamp and project management workflow I've found a number of useful blog posts on other people's use of Basecamp and Basecamp alternatives. For some reason many of the blog posts I've come across are by friends in the non-profit tech sector; I'm not sure if that's because of Google's freaky habit of customizing search results, or because non-profit techies are somehow more obsessed with workflow (comments, anyone?) Here are some of the posts I've found helpful.

Sonny Cloward mapped his workflow, which hinges on Basecamp, Backpack and Mozilla Calendar.

Ruby Sinreich blogged her thoughts on Basecamp plus GTD, which includes creating virtual "people" who represent different contexts, so she can assign her tasks to contexts.

LifeDev reports on using Basecamp with GTD, in this case using to-do LISTS as contexts.

Jon Stahl provided an overview of collaboration practices at ONE/Northwest, which includes using Basecamp.

Next steps

I'm going to take Central Desktop for a serious spin. I'm going to continue praying to the 37Signals gods for true Basecamp-Backpack integration, or to the Remember the Milk guys for Basecamp-RTM integration as an answer to their "how can we start charging for RTM?" quest. I'm going to try out Omni's forthcoming OmniFocus task manager.

And I'm going to resist the temptation to engineer an in-house Drupal solution to our project management wishlist. After all, our needs aren't THAT exotic, and there are an awful lot of people chasing the same vision. I'm trusting that one of them will get us much closer to a solution before long.

Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear from Rob Purdie and others about how we can improve our current Basecamp usage. In particular I'm curious to hear:

  • how people use Basecamp as part of GTD
  • best practices for to-do list structures and message categories
  • best practices for managing privacy and disclosure among staff, clients and contractors
  • advice on how to manage personal to-do lists within/alongside Basecamp
  • how people cope with Basecamp's lack of task due dates
  • experiences with Basecamp alternatives
  • advice on encouraging good Basecamp habits among staff, clients and contractors

And if you've blogged your own project management approach or workflow, please let me know by sending an e-mail to alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com, or posting a comment here.

Rob Purdie on values-based project management

This year's Web of Change conference included a session with Rob Purdie of Important Projects on values-based project management. Here are my notes on the session, which focused on collaboratively sharing tactics for boosting the various aspects of organizational culture that support effective project work.

Success of any project can be judged by 2 criteria:
1. were the objectives met?
2. did the team find the work itself rewarding?

Projects not going well has to do with not having a project friendly environment

What is a project?
A project is a temporary endeavour undertaken to produce a unique product, service or result.

ALL PROJECTS HAVE:
– objectives: the things the project is unertaken to achieve
– deliverables: what project will produce in order to achieve objectives:
– requirements: qualities deliverables must have/criteria deliverables must meet in order to achieve objectives
– constraints: that project must be delivered within [time/scope/cost] (the iron triangle) [scope=quality]

Project management is the application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities to meet project objectives.

On good projects, people take the time to define objectives.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Org culture is the river; the project is the boat.
If org culture is flowing smoothly, you just have to steer the boat; otherwise you're driving upstream
Projects involve risks, so risk-averse organizations will have trouble
With problematic culture you need more money, and more authority as project manager

Build a project-friendly environment, at least within the project team.
Build a culture of personal empowerment and risk-taking.

WHY PROJECTS DON'T GO WELL….
b/c of a set of assumptions that turn out not to be accurate
confusing the politics of anti-hierarchy with the need to get shit done
 

WHAT MAKES A GOOD PROJECT MANAGER?
– people skills: being able to listen and communicate well; need to manage expectations and explain things clearly so all sides understand; integrating into project culture is all about people skills
– they need to be bright and flexible and quick and adaptable and know how to talk to people
– persistence: keep coming back for the piece of info they need
– do they need to be values aligned?

Need balance between outputs and processes (ends and means)
Don't burn people out.

Cross-functional integration is valued
Risk taking is supported
High conflict tolerance; need to be able to engage in healthy conflict; a meeting with no conflict is not valuable
Value open and honest communication; respect for one another

5 groups: (how to build each)

Personal empowerment — grow our teams so people feel empowered. Everyone wants to contribute their best work (whether they know it or not). When people feel frustrated it's b/c they feel blocked. How can we remove things that get in way of allowing people to contribute their best work?

Trust — need closure in communications as pro-active way of building trust. Whenever I have a conversation with anyone about anything i want to know who is doing what by when. If you can do that with every conversation, nobody is going back to their desk wondering if the other person is going to be doing the thing that needs to be done for me to do my work.

Respect — what are some specific tactics for instilling this in group. Being late is disrespectful.

Commitment:

  • Buy-in. Are you going to stick with the project through hard times?
  • What is everybody's standard of excellence?
  • Commitment is a great quality for organizers, but it's different in a project context.
  • Can't focus on the meta-level of commitment at every project level — objective of producing the brochure can't be saving the world.
  • Project has a beginning and an end.
  • Commitment can be to doing a great job, to saving the world….but need a long-term theory of change.
  • Need to make sure we continue to find projects that the team finds meaningful. Team wants to be happy as well as paid.
  • Make sure that the projects speak to the values of the people I'm working with.
  • What projects you're choosing — projects can be aligned with a range of values. When does choice of project become strategic — not just about feeling good about the projects you're doing.
  • Can someone who's not values aligned authentically serve the role of supporting other people's values.
  • Think of this as irrigation: project manager is irrigating the growing plants — the people who are trying to get the job done.
  • You are serving a group of people who really care about this —
  • How can you transform someone into excitement about this value of promoting social change?
  • Ask them: are you interested in transforming?
  • Commitment builds trust.
  • If you do what you say you're going to do — you make a commitment — that builds trust. If you can't fulfill a commitment you've made, you go back to people and tell them you can't make it and tell them when you can meet them.
  • Staff commit to timelines but then don't meet it. People commit to overly amibitious timelines as a way of proving their commitment.
  • PMs  need to ASK, rather than tell, when something can be completed.
  • Time estimates should be offered by the person doing the work.
  • Need to create a culture of honesty about how long things will take.
  • Projects are always in a longer/larger context.
  • Overcommitment — working overtime — as a sign of commitment. Burn-out as a sign of commitment.
  • Sometimes the culture can be great, but people are just wrong about how long something will take.

 
PERSONAL EMPOWERMENT:
– need to be engaged in planning
– how to embed project into longterm goals of org — creating a culture

TRUST:
– establishing groundrules; closure on all conversations — who is doing what by when; clearly defining roles & responsibilities; including play in project activities to build trust
– project debriefs to make transparent what was broken
– Quakers: creating formats for appreciation — framing contributions in ways that are around appreciating fellow team members' work
– book: The art of possibilities

RESPECT:
– tied to trust, communication and accountability
– clear expectations about individual expectations
– what everyone is responsible for as a team member
– groundrules for ccing people, lateness
– here are the ground rules we're going to stick by
– issues board: every specific period — if you're feeling disrespected , there's a way to bring that up
– respecting what client brings, client respecting what shop brings

CONFLICT:
– proactively handle team by getting to know how they handle conflict
– establish ground rules
– separate problem from person — give people a sense that the objectives are the enemy, not the people on the team

ACCOUNTABILITY:
– clarity of objectives
– remember that decision-makers aren't the same as the implementers
– create culture with open feedback channel
– bilateral clarity of expectations — client needs to be accountable for their inputs

FUTURE CONVERSATIONS:
– bioteaming manifestos
– distributed teams
 

Falling for Facebook

I'm besotted with Facebook. I can see it becoming the primary way that I — and many other people — interact online. So if you aren't on Facebook already, join now. Now.

Still here? Don't tell me, you need actual reasons to join. Fine, here goes:

  • It's huge, and it's growing. While Facebook started as a network for college students, it opened up to anyone who wanted to join in September 2006, and grew more than 75% — to almost 25 million users — by February. I haven't found numbers more recent than that, but I can say that between 1-3 people in my own personal address book (1500 email addresses) are joining every day.
  • Your friends are already there. If you import/connect to your address book when you sign up , you'll discover all the folks you know who are already on Facebook. This is a great way to keep in touch with them. You can even find out who in your universe is already on Facebook, before you sign up yourself.
  • It mixes business with pleasure. Unlike LinkedIn, which feels like some sort of massive résumé swap, Facebook brings a personal side to its user interactions. More than half of my Facebook friends are colleagues or professional acquaintances, and now I'm finding out about their personal passions as well as their professional pursuits.
  • It's one-stop shopping. Facebook offers blogging, photo sharing, messaging, web-to-mobile communications, social networking, and groups.
  • It's a window on your world. Once you've added your contacts to your list of Facebook friends, your Facebook home page will be the best place on the web for you to find out what's going on with the folks you know. My favourite part of Facebook — the thing that makes it truly addictive — is checking in to see what's going on with all my friends and groups. I can see my friends' latest status reports, their latest new friends and groups, their notes, their photos….all in one place. The best way to get how cool this is is to take a look, but I don't think I can really share a screenshot because that would mean sharing details on my friends' activities. And that underlines what is so great about the Facebook feed: it feels far more personal than what you'd normally see on the wide open web.
  • It's pretty. God knows, I've fallen in love with my share of social media tools, but most of them have required me to look past a barebones or even downright ugly interface in order to appreciate the inner beauty of content sharing, social networking, or whatever. In contrast, Facebook has a very polished interface.
  • It can help you connect with your community. Facebook has now got an API — application programming interface — that lets people extend Facebook with all sorts of little applications and enhancements. (Check out some of the options so far.) And that API is going to see Facebook integrated into more and more 3rd party sites. If you find it easier to connect with your members, supporters, customers or friends on Facebook than to lure them into registering on your own site (and for most organizations, it will be MUCH easier to connect via Facebook) you need to start thinking now about how you can integrate Facebook's community and functionality into your own site.

I'll have more to say about Facebook — and especially about the options for integrating Facebook with external web communities — in the coming weeks. But if you want to understand why this matters, you need to join Facebook now. And once you do, be sure to add me as a friend!

Vancouver workshop: Web 2.0 and your organization

We're often approached by business and nonprofit organizations who are interested in tapping the power of the social web but don't know where to start, or how to get a feel for the possibilities. I'm delighted to be co-teaching a Hollyhock-in-Vancouver workshop next month that will be a great opportunity for Vancouver-based organizations to get smart about Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 and your organization 

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.

About the presenters: Jason Mogus is the CEO of Communicopia, which has helped progressive companies and non-profits communicate and collaborate via the web for 13 years. Jason is also the founder of Web of Change at Hollyhock. Alexandra Samuel, PhD (Harvard), is CEO of Social Signal, and is helping some of the web's most ambitious community ecosystems use the social web to support dialogue and collaboration.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Hollyhock Leadership Institute, Web of Change, Social Signal, Communicopia, Social Tech Brewing, and Impacs.

To register:

Visit the Hollyhock site, call 800-933-6339 x232, or e-mail registration[at]hollyhock.ca