Archive for the 'Events' Category

Blog Action Day on October 15th - have you signed up yet?

Last year, over twenty thousand bloggers participated in the first annual Blog Action Day. Blog Action Day is an event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. The aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion. Last year the theme was the Environment and this years theme is Poverty.

Register your blog and take part in the forthcoming event on October 15th on the Blog Action Day site.

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It’s a wrap!

Photo - Alexandra Samuel from Social Signal, in the Bringing Your Community to Life (with lots of fun chocolate to encourage participation!) session.

Last week over 300 people came together for the NetSquared Conference in Santa Clara, California. This years conference was all about the N2Y3 Netsquared Mashup Challenge where 21 projects competed for cash prizes to enable them to further their work in using the web to help with social change.

I’m finally back here in the UK, catching up after being away from my iMac for a couple of weeks, and finally stealing a rare moment to squeeze in a quick post about it all!

I was there as one of the live-bloggers, recording the sessions live as they took place enabling those who couldn’t attend to still be able to participate and see and read all about it.
It was an excellent experience seeing how innovation is taking place across the other side of the pond, and also hearing that many of the nonprofits face similar barriers to moving forward as many groups over here in the UK do too. I was really inspired by the drive, passion and innovation of all people who came from the chosen projects and the interactivity of everyone participating too.

The conference was recorded with live bloggers (My main live blogging buddy there was Brenda Hough who works with the MaintainIT project), video-bloggers and also others at the conference submitted blog posts too. Twitter was used lots (when it worked…Twitter was having a bumpy ride!) throughout too.
If you missed the conference, I’d highly recommend that you head over to the Netsquared Conference News pages to read more about the projects that were there, innovating for social change, but also about the other sessions too which included open source CMS such as Plone and Drupal for building online communities, and other sessions on how to encourage participation and build your communities and connect with your users. To see what took place in the sessions and more from the bloggers and vloggers at Britt Bravo’s round up post on the sessions at N2Y3 here.

Another of the high points was meeting so many people that I’d connected with on social networks, especially the effervscent Deborah Elizabeth Finn, Allan Benamer, of course great to catch up with Beth Kanter, meeting finally with Marnie Webb, Britt Bravo and many many more. (I could name drop forever on all the people I met there!) I also made lots of new buddies too including Katie Laird who made me smile and laugh lots (yup - Katie is definately a Happy Katie!), and it was great to see two others from the UK there, with Terry and Aba from LASA at the conference on their way back from events in Australia. It’s great to connect online with people who have shared interests and visions with nonprofit organisations and their use of technologies, but even more fun to meet up face to face and talk for real!

Thank you all at Netsquared and Techsoup for organising a great event! Hope to come again next year! You all rock!.

Is now wondering how we can get things moving here more in the UK with our own UK non profit tecchies, or something stemming from the Social Media Camp which took place back in April (and so sadly had to miss…but hear rumblings of another one coming…?)

Continue reading “It’s a wrap!” »

Ideas and innovators for social change needed

NetSquared Mashup Challenge

Over on the other side of the pond, NetSquared is inviting you to take part in the Mashup Challenge. If you have an idea which can make a real difference to create social change with your unique mashup, you could also have an opportunity to win cash prizes and attend the NetSquared Conference (N2Y3). Submissions will be accepted until March 14, 2008.
Excerpt taken from the Netsquared Mashup Challenge page -

“This year’s NetSquared Conference will bring together a unique mix of people from the public and private sectors to develop and release Mashups designed to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

Those “people” are you — members of the NetSquared universe working on behalf of communities everywhere and the technical experts who care about these issues.

If we’re successful, we’ll learn something about cross-sector collaboration, meet new and interesting people, and build a unique gallery of Mashups that citizens, schools, and community-based groups everywhere can learn from, replicate, and build upon.”

Submission of your ideas is via a form available on the site, and you can find out more about the challenge and see some great innovative examples too. Check out the Netsquared Mashup Challenge!

…and there’s more - over here in the UK…

Social Innovation Camp

A Social Innovation Camp is planned for April in London.

Excerpt from the Social Innovation Camp Website:

“What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out.
In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers
and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.”

You can find out more about the Social Innovation Camp and how to submit your ideas over at www.sicamp.org.

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Women Who Tech - a TeleSummit for Women in Technology

Any woman with a telephone who works in technology at a non-profit, a political campaign or is interested in technology is invited to participate in this free, live event on March 31, 2008 from 11 am to 6.15 pm EST. (We’re five hours behind here in the UK, so equates to to 6 am - 1.15 pm GMT!)

Women Who Tech: A TeleSummit for Women in Technology in the non-profit and political world aims to bring together the most talented and renowned women breaking new ground in technology.
The telesummit aims to create a supportive network for the vibrant and thriving community of women in technology professions by giving them an open platform to share their talents, experiences and insights via virtual workshops and panel discussions. See their website at www.womenwhotech.com for further information on how to participate, join their mailing list or Facebook group, follow on Twitter.

Eight of the twelve panels have now been announced and has a fabulous line up with some of the top women in technology and organisations taking part.

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Social media workshop update

Back in January, I asked readers of this blog, and others on my many other social networks what we should include on the session on social media that myself, David Wilcox and Nick Booth (along with the participation of others too!) could present to Circuit Riders at the forthcoming UK Conference for Circuit Riders being held at the end of February in Birmingham. Do take a look at the previous post which created some thoughtful discussions and conversations. A big thank you to all who participated.

We’re now currently building together our presentation and session activities following on from those discussions. For those interested we’ve begun to set up a mini site to support what we aim to deliver on the day with materials, activities and links for Circuit Riders and other nonprofit technology advisors to be able to take away and use when supporting their local organisations with their needs. You can keep up to date, or contribute over on the new mini site at www.open2media.org.

A new website has been developed and set up to support the work of Circuit Riders here in the UK, and the site will be used during the conference to aggregate feeds from blogs, photo’s, bookmarks and more. See the new site at - www.ukriders.info.

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