Where I'll Be at NTC

Where I'll Be
At NTC
-- I like that rhyme!
At any time
You can look
You can see
Where I'll Be
At NTC

Super excited to be flying into a snowstorm to meet up with my favorite tribe ever, the nptechies!

First stop: #NTCBEER on Wednesday night at Brit's Pub, although I probably won't be there until about 8 pm.

April 11. This will be the first year I am going to do the Day of Service, on Thursday morning. Definitely looking forward to that -- I'll be helping out at The Bakken Museum. It does mean I'll have to miss a session being led by Debra Askanase, Maddie Grant, Vanessa Rhinesmith, Megan Keane, and Jess Main (phew! allstar cast!) on Social Media Boundaries: Personal Meets Personnel Policy, so I'm planning on checking the tweets (#13NTCpers) and looking up the session materials afterwards.

Thursday lunch: no particular plans. Text me if you want to sit w/me at lunch. 831-234-5828.

Thursday afternoon I'm torn between two sessions: Social Media Police: The Nonprofit Edition (#13NTCpopo) with Maddie Grant, Allyson Kapin, Melanie Mathos, and John Haydon or Mindful Engagement at Work and in Life (#13NTClife) with Aaron Pava. Which one do you think I should attend? I'm leaning towards the latter, because I'm too much of an information junkie and easily ... squirrel!!!

I'll stop by the Science Fair for a bit, but my main goal Thursday evening is to attend Ignite (Ballroom EFG, Third Level). I think this year is going to be a fantastic one - can't wait to hear Steve Heye sing his, and Chris Tuttle will be doing his first one - good luck, Chris! I know how hard they are, having done two at  prior NTCs (2009 and 2010), and am glad to just be in the audience this year.

April 12. Friday at 10:30 I'm facilitating a Birds of a Feather discussion, along with Michael DeLong and Danielle Siembieda, about Online Community Platforms and, in particular, Forum functionality. I'm embarrassed to even mention the title of it. It would have been OK if I had meant it ironically ... let's just say I did.

Friday lunch: no particular plans. Text me if you want to sit w/me at lunch. 831-234-5828.

Friday at 1:30 I may try to squeeze into Beth's session on Visual Strategies for Focus In Age of Distraction or I may continue the wackiness by checking out Steve Heye's Standup Hour. The dude is funny, this I know. My advice is to surrender to the Steve.

Friday evening I will be at the Nonprofit Engagement Party courtesy of Idealist, a super-supporter of nptech that I consider one of "the big three" along with NTEN and TechSoup.

April 13. Saturday at 10:30 there are so many sessions I want to attend! I'll be at either The Unanticipated Benefits of Content Curation (#13NTCcur8), Bite-Sized Tactics to Make Sense of Your Metrics #13NTCbite), or Rebooting Your Digital Community Building (#13NTCctalt).

Saturday Lunch will be at the wacky table with a bunch of wacky friends. You know who you are.

Saturday afternoon at 1:30 I might check out Data Is from Mars, Nonprofits Are from Venus (#13NTCVenus).

At 3:00 I hope to connect with some of our #commbuild community members (meta, yeah!) at Community Organizers Connect (#13NTCcomorg).

Other Where I Will Be Posts:
Beth Kanter
Peter Campbell
Steve Heye

I am on a plane running out of power so I'll publish this now and hope to connect with  you soon!

Google Plus - Hot or Cold?

So, I've already waxed a bit hot and cold about Google Plus.

The cold part is because, we've had so many of the same features in Friendfeed for so long that they don't seem special to me. Realtime? Friendfeed launched that years ago.

A little hot and a little cold: incredibly awesome conversations ensue when the digerati get access to a new exclusive service. This happens with every new service - Twitter, Quora, Friendfeed - I'm sure I've missed many others but it is absolutely the case that it is easier to have fabulous conversations when there is a small amount of extremely intelligent people on a nice platform.

Hot: Hangouts!

Everything is Miscellaneous

So much of being a librarian involves the instinct of wanting to group things together to facilitate future retrieval. In the early days of librarianship, cataloging was limited by the realities of physical space. In cyberspace, "Everything is Miscellaneous."

(and thus, my re-entry into blogging begins).

National Mentoring Month, Beth Kanter's birthday, and me

For several weeks now, I've been thinking a lot about the idea of getting myself a mentor. Not because it's National Mentoring Month (that actually slipped my mind as I was having these thoughts), but probably because it's a new year, and because of where I'm at in my career, and because I feel ready to try something new. I was thinking about it so much that I felt a blog post brewing.

Then I got an email from Amy Sample Ward giving me a heads up about a group effort to write some Happy Birthday Beth blog posts. Knowing how unlikely it was that I would actually bang out two blog posts in one weekend, and sensing a conjunction of topics, I set forth on a clumsy attempt to get all of my thoughts about this stuff out at once. And here it is.

You see, the reason I feel ready to really take advantage of a mentor, is I have come so far in the past year and a half. And as near as I can recall, the beginning of that year and a half journey starts with Beth.

Sometime around the spring of 2008, probably thanks to Friendfeed, I started finding and reading a lot of cool posts from Beth's blog.

In August of 2008, I watched with interest as Beth raised $2500 for her cause in 90 minutes due in great part to her reach on Twitter and relationships she had built both in person and with the help of social media. (Again, my awareness of this was due to Friendfeed, which made me aware of Gnomedex, and of some of the "players" in the social media sphere.)

My memory is not what it should be, but I have a hunch that Beth led me to become much more aware of Holly Ross and NTEN, and then in Feb 2009 I attended a We Are Media workshop with Holly and Beth. Mind = blown.

I keep coming back to the synergy of a) the personal connections I was able to make with Beth and Holly; b) the ability to see their social graphs on the social web; and c) the resources shared by that social group. That synergy has propelled me, in a very short time, to where I want to be for my organization and for my profession.

In April 2009, I attended NTC and gave an Ignite session there on my favorite topic, Friendfeed. By June 2009 I found myself co-leading a workshop at NCVS for 350 people, with Holly and Marnie Webb, on Social Media for Nonprofits. To prepare for that workshop I picked up the phone and connected with Jonathan Colman and Danielle Brigida to ask for some tips. I'm not sure I would have done that without the inspiration from Beth to transform online connections into personal offline connections.

Whether or not I get a formal mentor this year, Beth is already a mentor to me by the very act of who she is. Not in the superficial, "she has 300,000 followers on Twitter" sense, but in the very real sense of how completely authentic she is in life, work, and online. When I see her, she is so often happy and energetic, and ready to combine play, work, friendship, conversation and exploration. She has a true carpe diem spirit, tempered by a wonderful base of pragmatism and realism, a huge sense of curiosity, and a healthy work/family/me time balance. Just seeing those qualities in action inspires and mentors me to embrace those qualities more fully in my own life.

So, Happy Birthday, Beth. This is a very condensed/abridged account of the impact you have had on my work and life. May you get your birthday wish to help send Cambodian kids to school. I know you will.

Friendfeed as a Nonprofit Technology Water Cooler

Back in April I created a slide presentation for an Ignite session at NTC about the Many Uses of Friendfeed that Beth Kanter picked up on, intrigued with the idea of using it as an internal listening tool. I still don't know of that many nonprofits using Friendfeed, though, whether as an overall tool or for joining the "nptech" community conversation ("nptech" is a tag that Beth Kanter, Marnie Webb, and others have been using to tag nonprofit technology resources on delicious, twitter, etc., for the last five years or so).

Last week I dropped in on the weekly NTEN Water Cooler chat hosted by Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer of SocialFish. A few people in the chat were saying, “I tried Friendfeed. I didn’t get it,” while a few others were committed fans. I really don’t think Friendfeed is any different than Twitter in the sense that it is difficult to see the value until you have the right amount and type of followers and are following the right amount and type of people.

To get the most out of Friendfeed you do have to put more into it than just feeding your stuff in and reading others' stuff. Like the blogosphere, it helps enormously if you actually comment on items.

I have been a huge fan of Friendfeed pretty much from the moment I joined and, as Robert Scoble often writes when posting a thought to Friendfeed, “here’s why”:

1. A pleasant, intelligent, helpful community
2. Many community members are avid users of and students of social media – for some it is an integral part of their profession, so this is a great place to learn about social media
3. An incredible listening tool. If you’ve created a listening strategy, whether it’s a vanity search on yourself or your org, or topics that you monitor, you can bring ALL of your listening into ONE place (see my slideshow for more tips on this).
4. Extremely easy to build lists to separate out the types of people you follow. This is very useful if you follow more than about 100 people (especially if they are quite active online).
5. Real time. Every aspect of Friendfeed is realtime, including the powerful search.
6. Works great for real time chat. As long as everyone participating has an account (and it only takes about 30 seconds to set up an account), Friendfeed is a great place for a lively real time chat. It’s free, ad free, and typically spammer free (unlike Meebo Chat where someone usually wanders in and suggests we check out some hot chicks). Here’s how it works: the moderator starts a post. Users comment (often in relation to what is being said on a livestreaming audio event, or in reply to a question) and the comments show up in realtime, no refresh required, no relying on pesky Twitter search. For convenience, users can click on the timestamp of the post, then click on it again, and a smaller window opens on the side of their browser, with the comment field located at the bottom of the conversation. Another cool thing about this is that the chat remains archived for posterity.
7. Real time. Did I mention real time? (Just kidding, and these are only seven of about 20 reasons I love Friendfeed).

I know that there are many different venues where great conversations about nonprofits using social media take place. One of those venues is Twitter. Synchronous events there include the monthly #4change conversations. On NetSquared, nonprofit tech folks are invited to blog about one question each month in the Net2 Think Tank, and Amy Sample Ward summarizes these at the end of the month. NTEN holds numerous Office Hour chats, including the Water Cooler one.

There has been an nptech room on Friendfeed for quite some time. It has been through various different experiments and stages of piping feeds in automatically; waiting for people to post natively, and now has settled to a combination. If you post something to Twitter and add these two hashtags, #ff and #nptech, it will show up in the nptech room on Friendfeed. The room is becoming a nice repository of resources.

Beth, Joe Solomon, Jonathan Colman, and myself are all admins in that room. We’ve been pondering how to get more engagement there. We don’t want to take away from other venues, nor, necessarily, add one more thing to your already full “to do” list. But we’d love to have you drop by the water cooler and add to the conversation. Resurrect this older thread and introduce yourself. Or, contribute to the topic of the month below.

Friendfeed nptech room topic of the month: Have you ever considered using, or are you using, Friendfeed as a tool for your nonprofit organization, internally or externally? If yes, how is it going? If not, why not?