Online community camp, May 25th in San Francisco

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.

Ode to Aggregator2 on WorldChanging

I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default: 

Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news. That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.

Read the whole story on WorldChanging

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver: May 4 at the Whip

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!

Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.

The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from one of the members of the Habitat Jam team about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from Steven Forth of the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.

The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org 

 Event details

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Thurday, May 4th
6pm-8pm
at
The Whip (map)
209 6th Avenue East (at Main), Vancouver

RSVP on Upcoming.org 

Any questions? Email info@socialsignal.com

From Corante: snail mail as a digital campaign tool

From my blog on Corante: Anti-war e-activists have embraced one of the old standbys of pre-digital politics: snail mail. Bring Them Home Now is selling postage stamps with the “bring them home” symbol: a yellow ribbon super-imposed on a peace sign. BTHN is...

Business tunes into grassroots community

I’m just back from SXSW, where I was reminded that there are still a few people out there who are thinking about the Internet as a potential business opportunity rather than as a chance to reinvent democracy.

At the panel I was on — Remixing Business for a Convergent World — it seemed that what is really converging is how both business folks and political hacks are looking at the Net. Let’s take, for example, the question of how to make strategic use of blogs — a question that my fellow-panelist, Robert Scoble, addresses in his recent book Naked Conversations.

Thanks to blogs, businesses can no longer afford to ignore even their smallest customers. Traditional blue-chips are starting to recognize that their next p.r. crisis could be precipitated by a cranky shareholder or dissatisfied customer who blogs about the company. As for the latest generation of web start-ups — sites like Squidoo, Frappr, or LinkedIn — they’re not only sensitive to customer perceptions: their entire business models are based on user (i.e. customer) contributed value.

Once you start to see customers are value creators, rather than value consumers, a lot of business truths get turned upside-down. Take, for example, the idea that businesses are primarily accountable to their boards or shareholders. Does anyone out there think that the success of del.icio.us or Flickr depends more on Yahoo shareholders than on the users who are contributing bookmarks, photos, and software plug-ins?

If businesses find themselves suddenly accountable to their users, that kind of accountability is old news to both government and civil society organizations. Governments have always been primarily (if imperfectly) accountable to citizen-voters, and civil society organizations (whether community service groups or political advocacy organizations) have always been primarily accountable to their members and donors.

The net result is that it’s business that now needs to learn from civic and public organizations about how to enage at the grassroots level. It’s not like public and nonprofit organizations have all the answers — great examples of effective two-way member/voter engagement online are still rarer than the many examples of organizations that are still in “broadcast” mode — but at least there’s a decade of effort to look at.

For those of us who’ve been thinking about online democracy and grassroots engagement for something like that long, the rise in business interest should come as (mostly) good news. Sure, there’s more competition for public attention: efforts at getting voters to participate in policy discussion now have to compete with businesses offering free ipods in return for customer feedback.

But there’s also a rapidly expanding toolkit for grassroots community-building. Tools like Squidoo, Flickr, and del.icio.us offer entirely new ways of involving members and encouraging members to interact with one another. Just as important, the private sector’s growing embrace of customer “community” may help to build a broader culture of pervasive engagement.

Monkey Love

Monkey love Last night someone handed me this monkey at the Flickr/Yahoo/del.icio.us party,and told me I was supposed to pass it along. I confessed that I really wanted to just pass it along to my 2-year-old, and whoever it was who handed it to me thought that sounded...

UPDATE: Choosing effective del.icio.us tags

I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks. Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t...