Archives for June 2006

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver

28 June 2006 | elsewhere, events, socialsignal | No Responses

Border-Busting: a conversation with Katrin Verclas

July 17th, Radha Eatery

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you’ll join us for a July 17th 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 July 17th event will feature a conversation with Katrin Verclas, the incoming director of The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN), an American group that works to support the diverse people and organizations who help nonprofits employ technology effectively. We’ve booked a great quiet space in which to have this conversation, conveniently located above a great spot to drink beer.

Katrin will lead an informal discussion about whether/how US npos can work more effectively here in Canada. She’ll also introduce us to a new project from the N-TEN Technobabes Community: “BraCamp,” which we’re hoping will lead to a broader conversation about gender issues in nonprofit technology.

Katrin’s presentation and Q&A will start at 7:15 and wrap by 8, so please plan to arrive on time. If you’re early, folks will gather underneath Radha at the Brickhouse for a brew or two. And if you’re still hot to talk after we wrap, we’ll be moving back down to the Brickhouse again for another hour of libations, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

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

Details:

Date: July 17, 2006 7-9pm

Venue: Radha Eatery, 730 Main Street, Vancouver, BC

Cost: Free!

Plus…
Participants in Social Tech Brewing are specially invited to an Open Space for Identity in Vancouver, July 20-21 at the Sutton Place Hotel. This is a unique opportunity for the Vancouver nptech community to participate in the development of open identity standards that will solve the Internet’s ‘identity crisis’. Don’t miss it!

Free and low cost passes are available. For more information, please visit Identity Woman & the Planetwork Blog, or contact the Open Space facilitator Kaliya Hamlin directly: kaliya (at) mac (dot) com.

All the chat transcripts are now available online

1 June 2006 | miscellaneous, elsewhere, netsquared | No Responses

Transcripts from our remote conference sessions and hallway chats 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.)

Dispatches from NetSquared — Day 1, part 2

1 June 2006 | miscellaneous, elsewhere, news, socialsignal | No Responses

I was going to say that I wish I had made more time earlier today to blog the rest of yesterday's sessions for folks to read about, but you know, I really don't wish that at all. I spent the second day of the NetSquared conference fully engaged, and I wouldn't trade the time I've spent with people here for anything.

That said, though, now that the five of us who remain here in our swank silicon valley hotel are gone to bed & there's no more to talk about, I feel like it's okay to fit in a little writing. So, as promised, here's some more highlights from Tuesday afternoon. 

Distributed Grassroots Marketing

This session featured Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt & Chris Messina. It was (im)moderated by the invincible Marnie Webb. This is the one session during which I took stellar notes. I think it was because it was pretty noteable — well-prepared and well-facilitated, not to mention incredibly educational.

The point of this session was to discuss how grassroots marketing works in an online context & to develop strategies for creating critical mass around an issue, event or product so that it takes on a life of its own in the community. I wasn't sure that I'd be all that into it, really, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that the presentation, particularly Tara Hunt's portion, was actually super-interesting. It's easy to recap the high points, since Tara's portion of the presentation outlined 5 straightforward & simple concepts that make grassroots marketing campaigns successful. 

Here's her list:

  1. Maximize inbound rather than outbound messages.
    • Elites and 'thought-leaders' are not as influential as they once were. The most influential groups in peoples lives are amateurs and peers. Spend time working to let those people in.
  2. Be a community advocate, not a company evangelist.
    • Learn to take feedback about your company or org, and allow that feedback in turn to help you tailor your product/service to better serve the needs of your community. People love that stuff.
  3. Practice 100% authenticity.
    • There was a great question from the audience about the difficulty of communicating authenticity. Chris weighed in to say that the way to earn peoples' trust in this regard is to thoroughly document your journey. People will get a sense of who you are through your personal (or organizational) history… you just have to let them have access to that history somehow.
  4. Cater to the long tail

    • Under-represented audiences grow, whereas older, more 'conventional' audiences hardly ever do. Plus, working with under-represented audiences is cheap!

  5. Follow open-source principles
    • Let your users see how you did what you've done, and let them learn from you.
    • Allow your users to drive your project to its destination. Create an API & allow people to freely re-mix your technology.

There were many great questions from the floor, too — check out Sarah Pullman's live-blog notes for more info.

 

Gender & the Social Web

This was the event that I was most excited about. I spend a lot of time thinking about (offline) social issues related to the construction of gender, and I'm thrilled to know that people are pushing to make gender a central issue in our online communities, too.

But I have to say, the session wasn't exactly what I expected. I had hoped for a great discussion about ways to a) push out gender as an issue online, make inequities visible & create 'best-practice' style solutions, and b) broaden the incredibly narrow understanding of gender in the world of digital identity. The session was actually more of a 'state of the woman on the internet'; a kind of round-up of success stories. Which is also super-cool — don't get me wrong. It was great to hear about the successes of Blogher, the Omidyar network & Moms Rising in fostering gender-neutrality on the web. I was disappointed, though, that the conversation wasn't more dynamic. Gender was ever expressed in binary terms, and success seemed to be measured by gender parity, which I felt was a little shy of awesome. I was reminded by a good friend, though, that this is still a pretty young conversation in the online domain. There's still lots of time to push it in all directions. 

One very interesting thread that emerged during the conversation was that the trend toward 'bottom-up' organizing in the open source community is very much in keeping with principles of feminist organization often seen in activist communities. Changing the timbre of social movements is all about changing the nexus of control, and it was inspiring to think about open-source models as successful contemporary examples of non-heirarchical structures that work incredibly well. 

The panel discussion included Catherine Geanuracos, Christine Herron, Fran Maier & Lisa Stone. It was facilitated wonderfully (really — the facilitation was impressive) by Susan Mernit. For more information, check out the session page. (I couldn't find the live blog notes this morning when I looked for them…)

 

I'm going to cut it off here. There was also one other session that I attended during the day, which was a discussion about Social Networking, but I was embroiled in tech support work for the NetSquared site, so I didn't get to pay very close attention. I'll try to add my notes from 'day 2: twice as awesome' later today. Woot!