Today in The New York Times: How to Navigate the Postpandemic Office

How much time should employees spend at the office, and how much time can they continue to work remotely? How do we schedule office time for our teams so that we get the most from our space—and our employees? What do we do if some employees want to stick with remote...

Kris Krug on Web 2.0 at STT

Technology and copyright

Technology is obsoleting copyright law. Encourages people to use Creative Commons for all their work.

» bonus tip: When publishing with Creative Commons, use the attribution noncommercial license, which means that any non-profit can republish your content, as long as they credit you as the original author (or photographer). But businesses won’t be allowed to take your content and make money with it.

Promote ownership of your brand

Let people remix your content. Give them creative assets to work with.

Let go of control. Don’t make the mistake the music industry made — trying to loc down their content, and alienating their fans.

Document everything

If it didn’t happen on the Internet, it didn’t happen.

The power of open source

Open source software development is inherently tied to social change. They are building things for the common grood while working around traditional power models.

Vision Vancouver debate

So far no huge policy differences except on the idea of a “speculator tax” (Gregor: pro. Al: con. Raymond: ?)

A great member question: your supporters can select a 2nd choice on the preferential ballot. What can you tell them about your two opponents’ qualities and contributions to guide their decision?

I was sorry that none of the three responded with specific praise for the others’ virtues. It was such a nice opportunity to transcend the “fight” paradigm.

Chat transcripts for May 30th now available

Transcripts from our May 30th remote conference sessions and May 30th hallway chat are now online. You can find transcripts on the remote conference page or on the hallway page — or just follow the links below. 

You can subscribe to RSS feeds of the chat transcripts by pointing to http://feed.gabbly.com/netsquared.org/remote or http://feed.gabbly.com/netsquared.org/hallway That will give you the last 200 messages in the chat room; or if you subscribe to the feed from an aggregator, you'll get ongoing transcripts. (If you're new to RSS, see the RSS resource center on Net2Learn.)

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...