Archive for the 'Social Media' Category

NpTech’s - are you in the room?

Beth Kanter writes about some practical tips with the Nptech FriendFeed experiment currently taking place on FriendFeed where there has been a ‘room’ set up for non-profit techies by Jonathan Coleman to be able to share, discuss and comment using FriendFeed to connect. Find out how to join the room and participate on Beth’s original post at NpTech FriendFeed Room.

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Accessihacking

Chris Heilmann did an excellent thought inspiring post yesterday on his blog at Wait til I come! on Is it time to take Mashups and use them to solve real issues? where he writes about his mashup fatigue but also the recent events that have re-inspired him to think again with mashups especially later in the post on talking about the recent Social Innovation Camp with the winning and innovative Enabled by Design project, along with the Accessibility 2.0 conference and accessibility for all, with thoughts of creating an event for social and accessible hacking of currently used internet services.

As a web dev into all things participative and accessible to all, and with much of our modern fangled Web 2.0 which can unknowingly cause barriers to involvement for many, this was a refreshing post, I can’t wait to see if more unfolds from this.

Check out the article and add to the conversation at - Is it time to take mashups and use them to solve real issues?

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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…?)

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Common Craft: Podcasting in Plain English

Podcasting in Plain English by Common Craft

Common Craft have created another wonderful bite-size video in plain english, adding to their great collection of easy to understand and fun introductions into social media tools. This latest one on Podcasting, shows how versatile and portable podcasts can really be. See more of their videos in Plain English.

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Accessibility 2.0: a million flowers bloom

AbilityNet are holding an Accessibility 2.0 event later this week. Accessibility 2.0 will be a practical conference focussing on web accessibility in a Web 2.0 world, and looking at practical solutions to making the modern web a more inclusive and accessible place for all.

On the event webpage you can listen to a podcast or download a transcript with conference host Robin Christopherson, Head of Accessibility Services with AbilityNet discussing Web 2.0. He talks about some of the barriers encountered from a users perpective with some modern social networking websites and also the hopes with innovation the future.
Excerpt from the site -

“Being blind I’m honestly a bit worried what Web 2.0 will mean for me and my access to websites and web apps in the coming months and years. If accessibility isn’t foremost in everyone’s minds I’m afraid I’ll actually have less choice in what I can access, and that I’ll find surfing more difficult in general. Faced with inaccessible sites, those sites that do it well will have my custom for sure.”

Find out more about the event and to listen to the podcast at Accessibility 2.0.

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Building Community Around Your Blog

Chris Brogan, who writes about social media and technology to build digital relationships, shared his birthday yesterday with a free PDF download of Building Community Around Your Blog. Lots of useful tips, take a look at his post Free Tips for Your Blog.

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Google for Non-Profits

Google for Non-profits provides a round up of Google’s relevant and useful free tools, all in one handy place to help organisations get started easily.

The site lists everything from docs, calendars, web analytics, groups to YouTube. They’ve categorised the free tools list into two areas, ‘Save time and money’; and ‘Find and engage supporters’.

Excerpt from the Google for Non-profits webpage:

You want to change the world. We want to help.
Learn how to use free Google tools to promote your work, raise money, and operate more efficiently.

How will this help organisations?

Each application tool link takes you to a section which shows you what the tool is and how to use it with easy to understand tutorials. As well as the guides on how to use the tools there are useful innovative examples of how the applications can be used in a nonprofit organisation with real case studies in the ‘Get inspired’ sections. There is also a ‘Quick ideas’ section too, which can give groups some instant ideas in ways these applications could be used, as well as a handy ‘Question and Answers’ page for each tool, which covers many of the common questions that organisations raise when investigating new ways of using technology to acheive their aims and way they work.

An excellent one-stop-shop resource to help organisations to learn more and gain the knowledge and confidence that is sometimes needed to have a go with using these tools for the first time.
See more at Google for Non-profits.

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Twitter in plain english from Common Craft

Common Craft who produce the most fabulous fun bite size mini videos on social networking tools in plain english have released another in their growing series. The latest one is all about Twitter which explains how Twitter can be used in just 2.5 minutes. Check it out at www.commoncraft.com/twitter.

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Web Office 101

London region ICT champ, Miles Maier has created a great visual round up of some of the best web office tools on his blog. He ran a session called ‘Web Office 101′ at the recent Circuit Rider Conference, and shares a wide range of links to web-based office tools which allow you to create, collaborate and share documents through your web browser. Check out the article weboffice 101.

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Circuit Rider 4.0 Conference Round Up

Around 70 nonprofit techies and ICT development workers from across the UK came together in Birmingham for the Circuit Rider 4.0 conference organised by Lasa on 28th and 29th February. As well as those who innovate with technology for voluntary sector organisations here in the UK, some of my favourite inspiring nonprofit technology consultants from across the pond were also facilitating at the event.

I co-ran a session along with David Wilcox from Designing a Civil Society and Nick Booth from Podnosh and with the input too from Paul Henderson from Ruralnet.

Our session was entitled ‘Naked in a Goldfish Bowl - Web 2.0 and the non-profit world’. Beth Kanter from Boston joined us in the session using Skype (we hoped to have tested out the fab Oovoo but wasn’t to be, with wireless bandwidth issues on the day!). Beth shared her experiences and enthusiasm of her recent fundraising successes and the factors which helped to make it happen by using social media. A big thank you to Beth for joining us, especially with the first time we ran our session being just after midday here in the UK, and only 7.30 am there with Beth in Boston. You can read Beths reflections on her involvement in our session here.

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