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!

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?

Am I Two-Faced? Are You?

Pondering how and whether to integrate or fragment my two selves. As I participate more and more in online social media and networking spaces, I find myself faced with difficult choices. I have so many personas:

1. Librarian
2. Information architect / taxonomist / metadata queen
3. Curator of content at the Resource Center
4. Promoter of social media to nonprofits
5. Social media enthusiast
6. Mom / family member / social being

Some of these could be combined without too much fuss. It wouldn't be horribly jarring for librarians to read about my IA (information architecture) interests, though it might bore the IA community to read about my library stuff. So, OK, combine 1) and 2).

It could make sense to combine my overall resources for community service programs and nonprofits with my specific resources for them about using social media. So, OK, combine 3) and 4).

5 is problematic. Although some do, most of my nonprofit peeps don't want to hear about every little development on friendfeed, or learn about 27 brand new lifestreaming startups. Ditto for my librarian peeps. Some care, most don't. Where do I draw the line? Clearly I'm overthinking this.

But 6 is problematic too. So many people encourage us to be ourselves online, share a bit of our personal lives and we become more human to potential clients, bosses, funders, or future colleagues. I don't have a problem with this in theory, but often the joy of online social spaces is that people can become quite intimate (and no, I'm not talking cybersex here, but simply confessions, sharing, revealing aspects of one's personal life, engaging with emotional honesty). It is difficult to control who does and doesn't have access to that world.

Because these concerns were present in my mind, I initially started down the road of having separate online presences in several places. On YouTube, I have an account for me, and one for my work (which is meant literally to represent our project, the Resource Center, not just work-related stuff). On delicious, I did the same, but that is becoming a huge pain in the butt. The resulting workflow has been that if I happen to be logged in as myself, I add a tag which alerts me that I should port the link over to the Resource Center account. Can you spell "inefficient"? Yet, it is way too unprofessional to send people to /lnorvig/serviceresources instead of /serviceresources AND, I do need to add organized and specific tags to everything on /serviceresources. Curses.

Then came Squidoo. I have two accounts there also. One represents persona 4., the other is persona 6 plus an experiment (quickly abandoned) to see if Squidoo could actually bring in any revenue.

Now I'm starting to think the Resource Center needs to be on Twitter and Facebook. And I know I should just consider that part of my work, like I would "become" the Resource Center during the day and hang out in social media spaces as that entity, but I already feel two-faced enough as it is.

How about you? Are you two-faced? How do you blend or separate the personal and the professional online?