Web 2.0 and Your Organization – Event Hosted by Eventbrite
Coming to Toronto in July: the workshop that I developed with Jason Mogus on how organizations can effectively use social media tools. Join us, and please encourage your friends and colleagues to attend.
Toronto workshop: Web 2.0 and Your Organization
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.
The true meaning of Facebook
Why invest in an online community if Facebook is going to knock you out of the game?
Accord Weather
Supporting non-profit innovation through NetSquared: a Drupal module for Newscloud
Rob and I are spending the next two days at NetSquared, in the company of 21 outstanding teams working on projects that harness social media tools for social change. We met many of these folks for the first time yesterday, in a pre-conference session that brought the projects together for an afternoon of collaborative idea-sharing and relationship building, and we were incredibly impressed by the commitment and creativity that these folks are bringing to their respective projects. As part of the NetSquared Innovators Support Network we will choose to work with one of these projects on a pro bono basis, providing them with their choice of a customized community participation plan, a recommended community feature set, or complete specifications for a new custom Drupal module.
But one of the themes that emerged in yesterday’s conversation was the desire to foster collaboration not only among the 21 finalist projects here in San Jose, but among the more than 150 projects who participated in this year’s call for Innovation Fund submissions. Like a lot of the folks here, we got really excited about quite a few of the projects that didn’t end up in the top 21, and we started thinking about how we might support their work.
That’s why we’ve decided to extend the same offer of pro bono support to one of the projects that isn’t in the room today. Next month, we’ll start working with Newscloud, an open source media platform that combines news sharing and social networking. Jodie Tonita of ONE/Northwest recently introduced us to Newscloud’s founder and driving force, Jeff Reifman, and we immediately saw Jeff’s work as exactly the kind of technology innovation that non-profits need now.
Using Newscloud, an organization’s members and supporters can identify the news stories that matter to them, annotate those stories with their own reflections, and collaboratively create a window on the day’s issues that reflect their interests and priorities. Individual users may find Newscloud compelling too — quite apart from the social benefits of collaboratively surfacing interesting stories, it’s got a great interface for reading blogs and news sites that displays stories as they appear on the originating site, rather than as plain or reformatted text. The best way to understand Newscloud’s value is to visit the Newscloud site, sign up for an account (it’s very quick!) and take it for a spin yourself.
Our clients and colleagues in the non-profit sector often ask us to help them integrate news into their online communities. They want a way to bring their members and supporters the news that is relevant to their issues and interests, and ideally, they want a way for their audience to interact with those stories and engage in meaningful conversation around the latest news. Newscloud offers that potential, but right now organizations need to either convene on the Newscloud site itself, or install their own version of the Newscloud platform.
We’re going to work with Jeff to make it easier for non-profits to integrate Newscloud’s features directly into their own web sites. Working from our own experience developing non-profit sites on the Drupal platform, we’re going to help Jeff develop a Newscloud Drupal module, so that the thousands of community sites now running Drupal can integrate Newscloud-enabled news sharing directly into their sites. We’ll use our own clients’ needs as the basis for developing the module’s specifications, but we’d love to hear from other organizations about their own needs for news sharing and commenting, so that our specifications can reflect the needs of as many organizations as possible — just leave your comments on this post, or e-mail me directly (alex at socialsignal dot com) to get involved.
We’ll keep the NetSquared community posted on how this experiment evolves. And we hope that other members of the NetSquared community — technology assistance providers, developers, funders, and participating projects — will think about how they might help or collaborate with one or more of the 150 projects that have profiled their needs on the NetSquared sites. The time, advice and support of this community can help each and every one of these projects move forward, and advance the state-of-the-art in using social media for social change.
Freaky Facebook bug?
Anna Strom just invited me to join a group for people whose babies were delivered by Pacific Midwifery. After I joined the group, I went to the “invite people to join” page, and saw a list of all the pending invitations, with the message that “19 invitations have not been sent”, and a “send” button waiting for me. I hit send, and all the people on that list who happened to be in my friend list got the message, but the remaining 14 are waiting there for Anna. But….what up, Facebook? That is one weird bug.
Turn It Off! British Columbia – The Pledge | 30 Days of Sustainability
On May 16th, I’m turning off…
1. My hair dryer (so no cracks about the ‘do, ok?)
2. All the #@*!!## beeping, noisy kids’ toys in our house. Let them play with carbon neutral, quiet blocks for the day.
3. My TV. I can read the American Idol results online. 😉
Why would I live without all that electrical goodness, even for one day?
Because May 16th is “Turn It Off! BC” — a day for people across the province to turn off their lights and other non-essential electronic and electrical devices. We’re going to show the world that BC-ers don’t just talk the talk on sustainability — we’re prepared to talk in the dark.
Please join me by:
1. Forwarding this message to three (or more) of your Facebook friends (instructions below)
2. Joining the Turn It Off! BC Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/gr
3. Taking the Turn It Off! pledge at http://30daysofsustainabil
To turn YOUR friends off….
1. Select this message (everything down to where it says THANKS!), copy it, and then hit the “share” link (above if you’re reading this in a profile, below if it’s a message in your inbox).
2. Choose the “send a message” tab, and paste this text into the body of your message.
3. Edit the list at the top of this message to replace one of my pledges with your own (or replace all 3 items).
4. Enter the names of 3 of your friends in the “To” field (Facebook will help fill it in), slap on a subject line (“Can you turn it off?”) and hit “send”.
And while you’re at it, why not post to your profile or your wall, too?
On May 16th, I’m turning off…
1. My hair dryer (so no cracks about the 'do, ok?)
2. All the #@*!!## beeping, noisy kids' toys in our house. Let them play with carbon neutral, quiet blocks for the day.
3. My TV. I can read the American Idol results online. 😉
What will YOU turn off?
Facebook will keep us together
….love is subscribing to someone’s Facebook updates on your cell. The uncanny thing is how quickly Rob’s cell rings once I hit the return key.