Beth's Blog: Nonprofits and Social Media

Jonny Goldstein's Shooting Techniques

 

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I'm pleased to present my fourth installment in my interview series with famous video bloggers about video blogging techniques that nonprofits or others might use.  Past subjects have included  Nick Booth, Steve Garfield, and Robert Scoble.   In this segment I interview Jonny Goldstein  about how to shoot video without shooting yourself in the foot in the editing room.   The interview took place during during Beyond Broadcast

When I first started to make video blog posts, I had no idea how much my shooting techniques would impact the amount of time I would have to spend editing.  I quickly learned that you can create editing hell for yourself if you're not careful.  As I've come to discover various techniques while shooting interviews that save me time later in the editing room, I've also learned a lot by observing and interviewing other video bloggers. 

Jonny's tips include:

1.  In camera editing:  You edit in the camera as you go along.  You shoot something.  If it stinks, you delete and re shoot.  So that by the end, you just have good stuff in your camera.  Of course, that means you have learn how to use the editing controls of your camera.  And, with a tiny camera and I need magnifying glasses to read the controls.

2.  Keep a log:   As you're shooting, jot down where you captured good stuff.   That saves you time from having to go through an entire tape.

3.  Use a script:  Write out your questions in advance and this keeps you on track.  That way you know what you're going to capture.

When Jonny interviewed me, I noticed that he didn't explain off camera what he was going ask me on camera.  We discussed the pros/cons.   The benefit of not negotiating the interview off camera is that you get a certain energy.  The downside is that the person may not say what they're going to say succinctly or you may not gain their trust. 

I tend to negotiate off-camera.   Part of the reason for that is because of my cheap little cannon camera. I have to stick it in people's faces to get acceptable (to me) audio quality.   That can be a little instrusive for your subject.  So, I like let them know.

Speaking of good audio, I raised this question on the video bloggers listserv and David Tames (who took the photo stills in the video) offered some great tricks here.  Right now, with my camera, I had only used the trick of getting close to my subject or controlling the noise in the room.

This video also incorporates some cell phone movie footage taken by Michael Marcotte, a news director at a public tv station.  He told me at the time "in case you wanted another angle."   Ah, some more creative possibilities. 

If anything, the juxposition of the cell phone footage with my camera footage shows that my camera audio and visual quality looks and sounds great in comparison.  In fact, the audio in his clip is unacceptable to me, but  I had some problems editing with my free Windows moviemaker editing program. I had really wanted to do a over halfway into the clip, but the program is too limited. 

I would like to see how my camera audio and visuals (a cheap cannon) compare with the next level up. Not that I could afford to purchase one anyway, but just curious.

I think I'm ready to turn my attention to obsessing with the editing of the video in the editing program itself.   How to make smooth transitions between music and talking.  How to use more than one audio track.   

Nonprofits and Videoblogging: Janitors Own Words: Video from SEIU

In a few weeks, there will be a video blogging geekout session at NTC.  I'm the session designer and  I got a couple of rock stars from the video blogging community with us - Jay Dedman, Ryan Hodson, Jonny Goldstein,  Andy Carvin,  and Robyn Tippins to lead the session.   

So, over the last month, I've been looking for examples.  In the comments to a post, Jonny Goldstein, pointed me to the above video from SEIU in YouTube.  At Beyond Broadcast Conference keynote, Henry Jenkins, used the term "astro turf" to refer to "participatory media" made by big business.  Well, this example is no astro turf.  It's the real thing. It's authentic.

I was able to track down Anthony Jennings who is the  Web Site Specialist at SEIU. His job includes strategic planning, launching and maintaining web sites for the International and some locals.   I did a brief interview with him through YouTube to learn more about how they created the video.

1. How did the idea of using YouTube to message about your organization
come about?

We agreed You Tube should be used to showcase video when we decided to experiment with other forms of "emerging technology" like Digg, Flickr, etc.  It was an experiment to see if pushing SEIU in non-traditional areas for us would prove popular.

2. This particular video, was it produced by staff in-house or did you work with a videographer/production company?  How much time did it take?

Taping and interviews were done by a staff person. Editing was done by an outside contractor.  Taping and interviews were done in less than 24 hours. Post production was done in a few days.

3. How did you incorporate the use of video in your campaign?  What were the goals?  What were results?

Once videos were complete, they were posted as home page material, and a communique to local press in Houston was sent.  If any picked up on the story of the campaign, an email was sent to our activist list in Texas with a campaign update, a link to You Tube and a mention of the news coverage.  We got great coverage on the series of worker stories in the Houston janitors campaign ... Hundreds and hundreds of views of videos we told relatively few people about.  It encouraged us to put more resources behind producing fresh content and keeping You Tube in our arsenal.

4. What did you learn about using video/youtube that would share with others?

One thing we learned is You Tube is an easy way to get video out to people without also having to give them a crash course in what software to download to watch this QuickTime, or that Windows Media.  Anyone who has ever watched a broadcast news program (especially those owned by Newscorp) have heard of You Tube or MySpace.  They're familiar with it.  Once politicians started using it, it just because an automatic thing you do .. you have video, you post it on You Tube. Our challenge in the near future is to get ahead of the "hot new thing to do on the internet" and apply its utility to our campaign goals.

Chronicle of Philthanthropy Blog

The Chronicle of Philthanthropy has launched the "Give and Take" blog.  Here's the description.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy‘s Give and Take column seeks to highlight the most notable and provocative online postings — and keep you up to date on the most important and intriguing observations about the nonprofit world.

They ask:

If you know of an interesting blog about the nonprofit world that is not included in our blog roll, please send us a message.

There are two very important nonprofit technology blogs that should be added to the blogroll:

NTEN Blog
Gavin's Digital Dinner

Life Long Computer Skills: Information Coping Skills

Jakob Nielsen's Alert Box has a column today called "Life-Long Computer Skills"  I have been on a soapbox about information coping skills for almost ten years now.  Here's my early curriculum and some more recent posts.  Someday, maybe I'll have time to think about this more and develop a workshop.

He offers this advice:

In the future, there will be even more email, more IM/SMS/ mail/phone calls/video mail, more websites, more podcasts, and richer intranets. And all of it will be available in your office, at your home computer, on your mobile, and on various ambient devices.

People can take simple steps to fight information overload, but as information snowballs, we'll need more sophisticated strategies.

What are your information coping skills?

Some more discussion here, here, and here.

My best one is running 5 miles or doing a spin class.  For some reason, vigorous cardio exercise helps clear out the information anxiety  Maybe it is the just the stepping away from the reflected light dancing across my eyes coming from the monitor.

Interview: Zen and the art of Nonprofit Technology

Michelle Murrain, Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Blog

Michelle and I are  graduates of Bennington College (so is Deborah Finn).  It is a very small liberal arts college in Vermont, where everyone knows everyone's name.  What's very funny is that we were in school during the same two-year period, but we never met!   That's because Michelle was in the Science Building on one end of campus, while I in the Music Building way on the other side.

Although Michelle has some deeply geeky skills, she writes from the perspective of a neo-luddite.   Her blog is filled with insightful pieces that cut through the hype of new technologies and often ask the hard probing questions that haven't been asked. 

Michelle most recently published a white paper in collaboration with NTEN called "Let's Talk: How Open APIs Can Change How Nonprofits Manage Data"  It is a topic of critical importance in the nonprofit tech space.  The paper is a must read.  She is also the coordinator for NOSI - Nonprofit Open Source Initiative.  You can learn more about her impressive accomplishments by reading the official CV/Bio at her web site.

I had a chance to reconnect again with Michelle when she signed up to volunteer for the NTC Day of Service.  Here's my interview:


1.  Like many of us out there, you work as an independent consultant - so you are paid for your expertise and knowledge.  Why the heck would you ever want to give it a way for free by volunteering?

I've been an educator for pretty much all of my adult life (even at Bennington, I was a tutor, and taught some classes in technology.) And so education comes naturally for me, so translating what I know in ways that other people can understand has always been important to me, and I've done it whether I've been paid to do it or not. I want people to understand things better, I want people to be able to approach technology with less fear and trepidation, with less intimidation.

When I first started out consulting, one of the first pieces of advice I got was that giving things away free is an avenue to getting business. I can't really quantify whether this has been the case for me - but between my natural inclinations, and that advice, I certainly got into the habit of doing it. At this point in my life, I'm not worrying about getting business so much - I'm thinking a lot more about a bigger picture of things, and assuming that it will all work out in the end.

That's the more spiritual approach to things - the calling is in relating to people, and in providing information to organizations that helps them accomplish their mission better.

2.  How do you see gift economies operating in the nonprofit open source community, the nonprofit blogosphere, and nonprofit tech community in general?  Is there a downside to gift economies?

I am a big believer in gift economies. I think that the nonprofit tech community in general operates a lot out of a gift economy model. Of course, open source is one big gift economy, although it certainly intersects with the "real" economy, and there are some interesting things that happen in those moments. I see a general desire to provide information and support for free - it's amazing how many responses people get on email lists to a specific problem that they are trying to solve.  People seem to be in this field because it matters in some way to them - to the world.

I don't see any downsides to gift economies, honestly. I wish the whole world worked that way. :-)

3.  Let's talk about your blog(s) - specifically Zen and Nptech which you launched a few months ago.  What value do you get from it?  What is most exciting to you personally and professionally as it relates to blogging?

What I get from it primarily is a venue to air my ideas about technology and human beings, as they form more and more in my mind. I guess I also get out of it feedback and push back on my ideas - which I'm always looking for. It's a good excuse to read lots of other people's blogs, and feed into the general nptech blogosphere, which is fun. It's really a soapbox, honestly. I don't expect to get any tangible benefit from it.  I just hope it's interesting and useful to people.

It's worth mentioning my main blog - which is called "Metacentricities."  Often, that blog is about personal issues (it was quite taken up with my moving experiences lately,) but I also use it to talk about more specifically spiritual issues. I spent half of 2005 and all of 2006 in seminary, in Berkeley, CA, and a lot of the issues that I was exploring during that time I have talked about on that blog.

4.  What is the gender balance/politics/issues/trends (if any) in the OS nptech community?

Aye, what a question. I don't know that the gender balance/politics/issues/trends of the nptech OS community is so different than the general OS community. There is a woeful dearth of women in both. It's funny, there is this very, very active conversation going on one of the mailling lists of the Linuxchix community about gender and open source communities. It's been an issue for years and years, and is why Linuxchix (a community dedicated to women in open source) exists.

I wrote a post about this on my blog once - it was asking the question of why, when you look at the nptech field, that as you get more and more geeky, there are fewer and fewer women. And still, OS is considered pretty geeky, and there are only a handful of women in OS nptech community. It's great that there is leadership in the nptech OS community that understands these issues - but it's going to take some active effort to address them.

5.  Do you think Open Source is like fair trade coffee?


I've been trying to make that argument for years - I wish I had thought of that idea of relating it to fair trade! It's a tough sell, though, this idea that how nonprofits solve technology issues is as important as solving the issues. I think it's like trying to sell the US government on the idea that war is not the way to peace. From my perspective - the means *are* the ends - and the ways we go about trying to work on changing the world is as important as the goal of changing the world - in fact, those ways end up directing the goals in more ways that we understand.

It's one of the reasons that I started my blog - I want people to think about technology in new ways, and think about the ways in which everything is connected. Does it make good sense, for instance, for unions to buy lots of new computers that were manufactured in non-union shops, even if it makes organizing easier? Does it make sense for environmental groups to upgrade their computers every 3 years and put the old ones in a landfill? Does it make sense for an organization dedicated to education to spend money buying software from a company that is dedicating itself to making it easier for all content to be controlled in a  way that makes it harder and more expensive to access?
These are the kinds of questions I want people to think about.

6.  Tell me about your work with NOSI?  What are some of your hopes/dreams/visions?

I'm the Coordinator of NOSI - the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. NOSI is working to provide concrete resources for nonprofits to help them use open source software. We are also working to build partnerships and relationships between the nonprofit technology field and open source projects.

My hope is that NOSI will become an organization that can provide thought leadership for the nonprofit sector around open source software, provide training and resources to help nonprofits, and convene events and forge partnerships that help to increase and sustain the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector.

Ultimately, it would be my hope that open source software would become very mainstream in the sector- which it already is becoming for some kinds of situations (like content management, for example.)

7.  What else you doing you'd like to mention?

Well, I'm becoming more and more of a writer. On the technology side, I just finished, with NTEN, a paper on open APIs. I'd like to do a lot more like that  - it was a fun project, one that I hope will be helpful for people. But I do a lot of other writing. Some of it can be found on my main website and in my main blog

I also finished a science fiction novel last year that I hope to publish in one way or another this year.

8.   What are the 3-5 best blogs by women writing about nps, social change,
or nptech that you read regularly?

The Bamboo project blog
Jen Mei Wu's Dangerous Ideas
Marnie Webb's Ext.337

There are a bunch of women linux geek blogs I read, and a bunch of women religious blogs I read too.

Cross posted at Blogher

How To Green Your Tech Conference

The NTC Ride/Room Share Board

 

Last summer, I remember seeing Britt Bravo photographing the trash at the Blogher Conference.  She was creating a visual for this post, "Can't Blogher Conference Be Greener Next Year?"  Looks like Britt has been looking at other tech conferences and asking the same question.  Her recent post at Netsquared called "How To Green Your Tech Conference" has some good advice.

Britt interviewed Green Mary who was an Event Waste Reduction Consultant to Aspiration Tech for their recent Nonprofit Software Development Summit.   Mary offers six good tips for being more green at conferences.   In the comments, there is also a pointer to NTC's Green FAQ

Note that one way to go green is to encourage room and ride shares.  NTC has been doing that for many years, but I was delighted to see this automated solution called Soapbox from a small not-for-much-profit Web development firm called PICnet.   

Ryan Ozimek (who blogs here), the CEO, had sent me a link and invited me to play with a new module called SoapBox Events.   To be honest, I'm not a back-end type of gal. I'm too old.   I have to see the front-end.   So, now that I've seen a front-end, I'm ready to visit the back-end.  But, I would like a guided tour.  So, Ryan, maybe at some point during NTC or at Penguin Day, you could give me a tour?

Will you blogtip with Kivi?

From Kivi Leroux Miller

I am going to start blogtipping on the first of each month on blogs in the nonprofit sector and encourage you to join me. What's blogtipping?  See http://technorati.com/tag/blogtipping

The idea is that you pick three blogs to highlight, stating three things you like about the blog and one tip you have for each blogger. The concept was started by Easton Ellsworth at Business Blogwire (http://www.businessblogwire.com/blogtipping/)

I thought it would be yet another way to build connections within the nonprofit blogosphere.

If you decide to participate, please let me know and I'll add your permalink to a summary post on my blog.  You can leave me a permalink as a comment on the blogtip post I'll make on Thursday or on the announcement post:

http://www.writing911.com/blog/2007/02/26/will-you-blogtip-with-me-thursday-march-1/

 

Oh Yeah, and I shoved a camera in his face

Photo by Kino-Eye in Flickr

If you want to get acceptable audio for video blogging on an inexpensive camera you need to control the noise/environment or get really close to your subject.  That's me interviewing Jonny Goldstein after he interviewed me.  I asked him about shooting techniques.   It's part of my series of video blogging famous video bloggers on technique (so far have interviewed or captured them in action -- Nick Booth, Steve Garfield, and Robert Scoble)

The guy watching us was public broadcasting producer.  He pulled out his cell phone and took some footage.  He offered to send it to me and I got him on camera giving me permission to use it.  He didn't have a card, but I gave him mine.  So I hope he sends it to me so I can finish editing.

The excellent photo was taken by David Tames who I had interviewed earlier.  In looking at all the photos in the stream from the conference, his photos are definitely some of the best.   His conference reflections are here.

The title of this post was inspired by this quote from JD Lasica in an article about personal broadcasting:

A camera, firewire and the ability to Webcast are all you need. Oh yeah, and don't forget that you have to like sticking a camera and microphone in people's faces.

I'm still thinking about the comment someone made in the Beyond YouTube Working Group about audio quality and how it makes them shudder that the user-generated content doesn't have good audio.  What does that mean?  Certainly not everyone can afford to purchase expensive equipment to ensure broadcast quality audio.  How can you get acceptable or decent sound quality but use inexpensive, accessible equipment?

Beyond Broadcast: Wrap Up

Flickr Photo by Geoffrey and used with permission

David Weinberger gave the wrap up at the end of the day.  An outline of what he said is here.   He made this point:

But, participatory culture is changing the nature and topology of ours. It's ours in a different way. We can create works with strangers, with anonymous crowds, and in all the other ways we're inventing. This is a very different sense of ours. And it's not just that we can build Wikipedia or Flickr streams. We also get to make these works matter to one another: That we can surface and pass around the video or the prose so that it becomes a shared cultural object also changes the nature of the ours.

He ad libbed this line:  "Holy shit, we built this thing to together!"    I would have done a remix of this photo with that line as a speech bubble using one of the flickr remix tools, but the best photo of Weinberger in flickr was not licensed with a Creative Commons by license, but all rights reserved.   That prevents strangers building something together.  I had to go the extra step to email Geoffrey and request permission to republish the photo with attribution.  He granted it.   

Geoffrey has an excellent collection of photos from the conference here

Beyond Broadcast: Suzanne Seggerman, Games for Change

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I ran into Suzanne Seggerman from GamesforChange at the reception at the end of the Beyond Broadcast Conference.  She was in the working group on Beyond Virtual Worlds To Intentional Communities.   I piggy backed onto an interview that Jonny Goldstein was doing and just grabbed this snippet about the gap between public perception and reality when it comes to using games for social change.   

I've got to find a camera that captures video onto a card and an external plug for a mic that doesn't cost a lot of money.  I've limited myself to the cheapest tools possible because most nonprofits don't have the resources of the local public broadcasting station.  What this means is that sometimes means that production values suffer or as some public broadcasters said yesterday in the Beyond YouTube Workshop about user-generated video content, "Yuck, awful audio quality."

Here's Jonny Goldstein's video of the entire interview.  He used a different camera/mic.  Note the difference in sound quality.

Wikipatterns: Adoption and Anti-Adoption

Andy Roberts, who facilitates the wiki on wiki facilitation, points me to Wikipatterns.

He describes it as:

This was quite an exciting discovery, a group of people trying to put together a pattern language about wiki adoption.   My initial thoughts are slightly troubled by the idea that the patterns may be applicable in some contexts but not in others, in particular the difference between enterprise wikis and public ones. Can the two quite different endeavors be described within the same pattern language ? We shall see

There are patterns and anti-patterns and organized by individual behavior (people patterns) and group behavior (adoption patterns). Each one is given a description and technique.  Here's some examples:

People Patterns
WikiFairy and Wikigardner

Anti-People Patterns
Over Organizer

Adoption
Lunch Menu

Anti Adoption
All Wiki All The Time

This resource, along with Andy Roberts work, are invaluable resources in planning a project that involves wiki adoption.

Beyond Broadcast: Beyond YouTube Working Group

Click to Play

David Tames gives us the summary from the working group on Beyond YouTube. More notes can be found here.

The afternoon was all smaller working groups and it was hard to choose.  So, I'm gathering notes/blog posts I didn't attend right here:

Beyond Games: Intentional Virtual Communities

Open Media Library: An Open Source Media Publishing Tool

Free Culture Timeline

John Palfrey at Beyond Broadcast

Text notes here and podcast of his remarks here.

Beyond Broadcast: Morning Sessions

I'm at Beyond Broadcast Conference today.  I got up early on a freezing cold Saturday morning to hear Henry Jenkins speak.  He delivered the key note address. (Here's audio)   I've only heard him while being logged into Second Life and I wanted to hear him live and in real time.    The wi-fi wasn't working so I took my notes on paper, but later it on it worked.   I'm not going to transcribe my notes now, but rather point to someone else's here.  I also took photos of his slides which are in flickr.    (Jenny Attiyeh also has an interview with him prior to the keynote.)

There's a lot here to digest and how it applies specifically to nonprofit space.   More about that later - right now I'm in rapid capture mode, not reflection.

The photo above is from the first panel that was on participatory culture.  Some more notes here and here. (audio here)  Arin Crumley from Four-Eyed Monsters participated remotely from LA.   What he had to say was most interesting to me.  Most compelling was his stats on the number of people who saw his film within the first 24 hours of distributing it via the Internet via the old model of lugging it around for 9 months to independent film festivals.   They were equal.   He also pointed to a mashup he created on his site with google maps that allowed them to see how many fans were in different geographic locations.  They could take that information to the theatre and demonstrate an audience.  More thoughts about this panel from Doc Searls (seated behind me) who points to Dave Winer.

Doc Searls asked those of us sitting next to him if this was George Washington in Harvard Square.

NpTech Tag Summary: Highlights from the NpDev and More

From Flickr User Philswin2003


The above flickr photo is from the Nonprofit Software Development Summit and some flipchart notes illustrating what's going on right now: inspiration, matchmaking, and practical methods!

The Nonprofit Software Development Summit

Lots of notes and blog posts over at the 2007 Nonprofit Software Development Summit wiki to read. Integration is the hot button topic, as noted by Holly Ross in her "Integration is King" post.  There's lots more to digest and lots more to come.  Here's a few sessions notes in the wiki:  NpTech Tag,  definition of Open API  For-Profit/Nonprofit Software Collaborations and where are the biggest tool gaps?  There's an interesting idea for "emergency NGO in a box" in the notes about Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance Tools and an interview with Gregg Swanson of HumiNet by Britt Bravo from the Summit.


The Summit runs until Saturday and the correspondent reports and notes are being filed.  I'm looking forward to reading the reflections next week.

Tools

Creating Passionate Users Blog asks "Are our tools making us dumber?" and offers some advice to tool makers, teachers, and users.

An article called Free Software, Handpicked for Nonprofits by Tactical Technology Collective and iCommons just published on Techsoup.

Open Content, Online Privacy, and Virtual Worlds

Where Most Needed points out that few US Universities jump on MIT's Free Courseware Bandwagon.

Tor is a toolset for a wide range of organizations and people that want to improvie their safety and security on the Internet.

Lucy Bernholz summarizes what NY Times Columnist, David Pogue has shared about his experience in Second Life and suggests his comments are revealing regarding the development of an independent sector in the virtual world.

Carnival Collaboration

The Carvinal of Nonprofit Consultants and The Giving Carnival will join forces next week.  Deadline is March 2n.

Reading Minds and Telling You What's on Their Minds

Mary Joyce from DemoBlog has a post called "Think Digg: How NGOs Can Read Their Members' Minds"

Sean Stannard-Stockton from Tactical Philthanthropy writes about the potential for "donor-created social media philthanthropy research" and thinks it should encouraged. There's a thoughtful comment from Givewell that points out the work flow involved.  "We're using social media because the technology is here and it's helpful, but if it weren't here, we'd make a newsletter and Xerox it for everyone we know. What really defines GiveWell is collecting the information that nonprofits are surprisingly hesitant to share, and centralizing and coherently summarizing it. Information-sharing tools are great, but they don't magically make this happen. There's a lot of work to be done, whether the results go on a wiki or a blog or a stone tablet."

Colin Delany got a little hacked off at a social media critic and decided to respond.

The On-Demand Nonprofit

Katrin Verclas at NTEN examines the implications for nonprofits about the recent announcement of the free Google Premier Apps, a suite of on-demand Google services. 

ZdNet post raises the question "Salesforce.com pulls back on releasing subscriber totals; is that worrisome?"

Michele Martin talks about the barriers to adoption of google tools in government agencies and nonprofits.  Here's ten steps towards Association 2.0, a remix of Marnie Webb's Ten Ways to Use Web 2.0 Tools To Change the World.

Rules of Thumb

Michael Stein (East Coast) describes how "rules of thumb" used in the medical field can be applied to nonprofit management.

Random Thoughts on Life and Work blog points us to a recent article from the Wharton School about Internet Collaboration and suggests that nonprofits should pay also attention.

Email Newsletters

So, What's an E-mail Address Worth is the title of this week's Tip Sheet Tuesday from the Democracy in Action Blog.

Nancy Schwartz writes about the importance of email newsletter welcome messages because your audience is most engaged as a new subscriber.

New Blogs

Yes, Tobias Eigen blogs and we've just discovered his blog in the NpTech Tag stream.  It's called saidia.org  It's Swahili and means help.

A Better World In Second Life Blog is tracking political activism taking place in virtual worlds.

Privaterra blog showed up in the tag stream.  It focuses on the area of data privacy, secure communications and information security.

Last Call for the Oscar Pool

Jason Z reminds us that Oscars on Sunday and it's the final call to enter the NpTech pool.

The NpTech Tag started as an experimental community tagging project in 2005.  A  loosely coupled group of nonprofit techies and social change activists  decided to use the tag "NpTech" to identify web resources that would  create an ongoing stream of information to promote and educate those  working in nonprofit technology.  Many individuals tag hundreds of resources each week.   Through TechSoup's Netsquared project, blogger Beth Kanter, was commissioned to write a weekly summary. 

You can find the columns here:  http://www.netsquared.org/blog/kanter. The summaries are released on cc  2.5  license and you are encouraged to use, remix, and forward, with the appropriate attribution!

Open Source Thinking: A Remix Wikitation of Marnie Webb's Ten Ways To Use Web2.0 Tools

Flick Photo by Thomas Hawk

Later today I'm doing a Webinar, a briefing on Web2.0 tools for the good folks at NCNA.   I'm filling in for colleagues Marnie Webb and Billy Bicket from Netsquared. 

I'm trying to embrace two ideas here - the idea of open source thinking and wikitation.  Both require me to let go of old ways.  That's a hard thing to do.

Allison Fine's book, Momentum, has a whole chapter on what she calls "Open Source Thinking," and how it is key to successfully using these new tools.   Open source thinking is sharing  and remixing.  You've got to set your ideas free, you can't control your content.    It is a different mindset: "Ah darn, someone else has got there first" versus "Great, don't have to do that,  I can build it on it!"    For me, it’s been the ability to think out loud with colleagues on ideas and topics, share presentations, etc.

Marnie Webb's excellent presentation called "Ten Ways To Change the World With Web2.0 Tools" and published under creative commons by/NC license.  That means you are free to use as long as you give the author credit and it isn't being used for commercial purposes.   So, I remixed it for the audience.   I added a lot of visuals, I changed the examples, reorganized and tweaked the steps.   You can see my remix here. 

My next step is to contribute it to the Np Best Practices Web2.0 wiki that Michele Martin created.  Maybe we can add a section for presentations that we can share.

I've been fooling around with alternative ways for share presentations over the web. 
You can export jpegs to flickr and create set, you can upload a powerpoint into slideshare or create a wikispace for the presentation or wikitation.  I generally like to have visuals, a place for my script, and links.  I like having a leave behind.    There are some definite pros/cons to the different approaches and I'll write about it later.  I'm also curious to see what works for a webinar.

If I could do the NpTech Tag Over Again ...

I just noticed a session at the Nonprofit Software Developers Summit that is probably happening right now.

Marnie Webb is facilitating.  Here's the description (notes here?)

The NPTech tag is used on del.icio.us and Tehcnorati to designate technical resources that may be useful to nonprofits. It started right when these sites had just started, and it arose from the need to develop a nonprofit technology taxonomy. The idea was to tell people to tag with nptech everything that is relevant and then look to see what was being tagged to see how the tags were being used. It was a big surprise that this started being used by a large group of people, and also that tags started being used for just about everything (photos, blog posts, etc.).

nptech was chosen so that it made sense, and because it was short -- short and intuitive. Therefore, the goal was to encourage people to use it. Over time, as people started using it more often, it was being used to market and advertise. At first, tagging (bookmarking) was used for individual use, and then it started being more social and more as a means to broadcast information.

The problem with seeing how it was used is that there wasn't necessarily enough data about how people were tagging -- as in there was not enough sites that multiple people tagged Also,del.icio.us is not easy to get a large amount of data out of.

In evaluating the use of the nptech tag, it was discovered that a lot of people were using the tag, but not necessarily reading the tag. It was also discovered that people want a directory of resources.

Advocacy Widgets: 18seconds CFL Summit in San José, CA

Now, this is a cool use of a widget!  It is part of an awareness raising campaign about switching to CFL light blubs.  I can customize the widget to give me the information by state, city, or zip code.

The 18seconds.org CFL Summit is taking place on February 22, 2007 and will be held at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San José, CA.   The Summit, hosted by coalition partner Yahoo!

Summit participants will discus issues, share accomplishments and plan the next steps to help America switch to energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).  Currently, there is a lot of attention on global warming and energy efficiency in the United States, and the Summit organizers believe that we can capitalize on this momentum to bring CFLs to the tipping point.


It takes about 18 seconds to replace a conventional incandescent bulb with a CFL.   This group of actvisits is formalizing an effort to make the CFL the bulb of choice for America by creating the 18Seconds Coalition – a cross-sector “network of networks.”  The coalition is open to organizations, elected officials, corporations, nonprofits and individuals that want to champion the CFL cause as a means to save money, promote energy awareness and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  They invite you to join coalition, which we will formally launch February 22.

The 18Seconds.org website, built by Yahoo! is a tool to track nationwide CFL purchases by metropolitan area and state.  Any organization can easily download the “badge,” which draws data from 18Seconds.org and creates a tracker on the organization’s website.  Check it out and spread the word!

Lawrence Bender, producer of An Inconvenient Truth, previewed the site at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington D.C. on January 25 and the formal launch will coincide with our San José Summit, February 22. A number of mayors have already pledged to use the site to encourage their constituents to try CFLs, and we hope many more elected officials, organizations, corporations and individuals will launch their own campaigns on February 22.  During the Summit, you are encouraged to share with the innovative ways you hope to use the 18Seconds.org website.

It takes about 18 seconds to replace a conventional incandescent bulb with a CFL.  We are formalizing our effort to make the CFL the bulb of choice for America by creating the 18Seconds Coalition – a cross-sector “network of networks.”  The coalition is open to organizations, elected officials, corporations, nonprofits and individuals that want to champion the CFL cause as a means to save money, promote energy awareness and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  We want you to join this coalition, which we will formally launch February 22.

Let's all check out the NpDev Tag ...

The Nonprofit Software Development Summit starts tommorrow and if it weren't school vacation week, I'd be there live blogging it.   And, if it wasn't school vacation week, I'd attempt to remote live blog it ... Say what?

That's is when a live blogger - who is not on-site - is monitoring a dedicated IRC channel where someone in the room or at the conference is typing summary notes,  monitoring the conference tag in flickr, technorati, and other places and live blogging a summary.  I saw  this being done during the Global s 2005 by Angelo E who live remote blogging from the Middle East while we were all in London.    He did it again at this year's summit in Delhi (I couldn't go, but I stopped by the IRC backchannel).  Another technique GV used  that greatly enhances remote participation for the remote participants is to have an IRC Advocate in the room who monitors the back channel and makes sure that the remote participant's questions are answered.

Nonetheless, since it is school vacation week, I'll set up a watchword in Technorati on the term "npdev" and try to follow the flow, tag stuff with NpTech.  I hope you'll all do the same.   

There are so many sessions I'd love to be fly on the wall for -- here's the event schedule.

Oh, expect lighter blogging this week - it's school vacation week.

Gung Hay Fat Choy! Year of the Pig!

Year of the Pig
Originally uploaded by andyket.

Today begins the Lunar New Year!

Happy New Year!  Off to Chinatown in Boston in search of Lion Dances, Fire Crackers, and Good Food!

Andy Carvin Opens The Kimono At NPR on Social Media

Click To Play Video

This week Andy Carvin at NPR  hosted a small group of social media folks at NPR to help them think through their strategies regarding user-generated content and social networking.  This 10-minute video features Jay Rosen, David Weinberger, Jeff Jarvis, David Folkenflik, Zadi Diaz and Michel Martin discussing the shift of power from media outlets to the public during an internal session at NPR.   This is an amazing to have access to this discussion.  Lots of incredible learning here.

This video of David Weinberger makes the case for NPR to trust the public when it comes to uploading user-generating content and discerning the differences between NPR content and user content.

Photo from Andy Carvin's Flickr Stream

This video of Doc Searls talks about two of the competing metaphors that exist on the Internet - the static Web vs. the dynamic Web.   

Allan Benamer's NpTech Tag Meta Feed Digg Plig Collaborative Search Mashup

Click through to flickr to see larger diagram
Created in Snagit

While Allan has been in Vietnam celebrating the lunar New Year and eating exotic foods, he has still managed to get online, play with Pipes, and IM me about it.   People who can touch API's out there have been fooling around with trying to extract data from the  NpTech tag for analysis as well as think about ways that we can make the data that has been tagged more filtered via social search, collaborative filtering, and whatever else.  More importantly, have that filtered product available easily to those without API programming skills or a low-tolerance to information overload.

So, Allan takes us through a few options and explains here.

I admit that I don't understand some of the more technical stuff.  And, since I'm so much a visual learner I had to diagram what he was saying before I can understand it.   So, Allan, did I get it right?

Update:  See Ben's Comment over here.

Pointers To Context To All This

Deborah Finn's thoughts on the NpTech Tag Mashup

Michele Martin's NpTech Search

NpTech Tag Summary of Conversations:

Jan 26, 2006

If you couldn't make to the NpTech Conference call this week, there are notes here. Many useful observations and questions raised about how to analyze the tagging data we've collected and how to move from a folksonomy to a taxonomy.  We also discussed the aggregation and publishing side and some initial goals for the NPTech Community site.  Peter Campbell, who created the site, has moved the site it's new domain http://nptech.info - so stay tuned for more updates.

NpTech Conference Call Notes

January 19, 2007

Marnie Webb puts out a call for a call next wed, thurs, or friday to discuss in real time the issues that have surfaced around the NpTech Tag.   She proposes several different times, leave your preferences in the comments.   The proposed call agenda is here.  To catch up, read the summary here and to read the most recent thoughts -- see Gavin's newest post here and Emily's reflections here.

January 12, 2007

Summary of Cross-Blog Discussion on NpTech Tag

Gavin's Digital Dinner "Return to Beneath the Valley of MetaData"

Allan Benamer's "The NpTech Tag and Why It is Broken"

Life, Times, and Context of the NpTech Tag: An Informal Discussion/Reflection Online at CpSquared

An informal online discussion about the NPTECH tag over at Cpsquared.  If you've participated in using the tag and share some of your reflections of where it's been, where it is going, and other insights about community tagging projects, come join us.    We'll be discussing this online leading up to a conference call Thursday, March 1 at 20:00 GMT. To translate into your time zone, use the World Time Clock.   It's an opportunity for some reflection about what the story means.

Here's a list of questions we're discussing online now:

• How does the community evolve along with the tag and how to nurture it?
• What are some the "best practices" and what are some of the pitfalls?
• How does one "facilitate" a community tagging project, if that can be done at all?
• What is some of our thinking related to the NpTech Tag and folksonomies,taxonomies, and social search?
• How do we see a tagging project fitting into other events, projects, or developments? (What do we see happening beforehand or afterwards?)
• What are the technical and social pre-requisites for a tagging project? (a rough guess is better than no clue, I would think)
• What about the time dimension? How long did the NPtech thing take to get going?
• What is the proportion of "hard-core" folks who were really into it?
• How do you manage the needed iterative, cycles of divergence and convergence to make folksonomies take off?

Want to join in the fun?  Leave a comment in this post and I'll get you entry into the discussion and phone discussion.

The Story of Daily Lives

Next Saturday in NYC is the NYC Grassroots Media Conference and I can't go as I'll attending the Beyond Broadcast Conference in Cambridge.  (No travel)   But, if I'd be seriously tempted to take the train to NYC just hear this session:

The Story of Daily Life: Connecting people through video collaboration "Using inexpensive digital cameras and the power of web distribution, we can now help groups around the world to record, distribute, and archive stories from their daily life. AliveinBaghdad.org, Swajana.com, and Livesinfocus.org are three great examples of video collaboration that could only happen through the internet. In this presentation we will show recent examples of these collaborations, discuss the problems and solutions , and walk you through the specific process of how to use free online tools to build powerful videoblogs."

The presenters are: Ryanne Hodson, freevlog.org; Sandeep Junnarkar, Livesinfocus.org; Markus Sandy, apperceive.blogs.com; and Jay Dedman, NODE 101

I noticed that the LivesInFocus project on life behind bars also made the First-of-its-Kind top ten list for personal fundraising campaigns.  Check it out here.

The examples here show the potential and power of using vlogging for nonprofits to tell their story and a great example of combing vlogging with personal fundraising.    BTW, 2 of the presenters, Jay and Ryanne, will be at the NTC Conference for the NTCvideogeekout session. 

Meet Miles Maier: London Region ICT Champion

Flickr Photo courtesy of Miles Maier, London ICT Champion

I've had the pleasure of talking with Miles Maier face-to-face last month in Birmingham at the UK Circuit Riders conference hosted by LASA.  Currently, he's blogging about his Web Office experiment which is well worth following.  I'll get a chance to see Miles again at this year's NTC Conference and some lucky local nonprofit in DC will have Miles as a volunteer for the NTC Day of Service!

1.  Tell me a little about your background - I know you work for Lasa - can you tell how long, what you do on a daily basis.

I've been working in the non-profit sector for 5 years now and joined Lasa in June 2006, first on the consultancy side of the business by helping non-profits with their IT projects, and later as the wonderfully entitled London Regional ICT Champion.  This role is more about providing London's non-profit sector with a for ICT issues and getting policy-makers and funders to recognise that investing in the ICT of non-profit organisations can actually achieve lots of positives - transforming organisations to work smarter and better, better collaboration and information sharing, and so on.

Before making the jump to working for non-profit, I was on the other side of the fence, working for London's largest charitable funder, which had an annual budget of some $31m.  Being able to hand out grants and see how the money made a difference was satisfying but not always challenging, and on the whole I prefer life on the cutting edge of the non-profit sector, that's where the drive for social change is coming from.

2.  Let's talk about your blog - What value do you get from it? 

The blog is a pretty new thing to me and I get a tremendous amount of value out of the blog through connections I've made with other bloggers talking about the same things that interest me.  Probably the most satisfying thing has been to meet the authors behind the blogs - David Wilcox and Steve Bridger - and make a more personal connection there.  I'd like to blog a lot more, particularly about the potential of social media. 

3.  So, tell me about your Office 2.0 experiment? 

The two week long 'Great Web Office' experiment was inspired by IT Redux's Office 2.0 and the Dot Organize 'Organizer's Toolcrib', the idea being to find out just how easy or hard it would be to apply online tools to my everyday tasks - email, calendar, contacts, word processing, spreadsheets - that many other people in the non-profit sector also use to carry out everyday business tasks.

My own perception is that online tools have the potential to allow non-profit organisations to more easily exploit ICT (which many aren't doing) and better achieve their organisational goals. However, most of the UK voluntary sector (apart from larger organizations) are not grasping the opportunities of online tools to connect with their stakeholders.

For me, the key is going to be showing how online tools can be applied to everyday tasks, like the social media game developed by David Wilcox, which aims to show organisations how they might apply online tools or new media to their business. The question are web 2.0 tools suitable for business tasks like email, calendar, documents and spreadsheets?

Yes, I realise that many non-profit organisations face basic ICT barriers before they even get to thinking about applying online tools to their business, but it's in the nature of experimentation to show what can be done!  You can read about the 'web office 2.0' tools I used here


4.  Do you think Open Source is like fair trade coffee?

No.  You could argue there might be some overlapping values that FOSS and Fair Trade share, but otherwise they're not at all the same thing and the comparison doesn't work for me.


5.  As part of your work, you are assisting nonprofits with the use of technology on a daily basis.  I saw that you just signed up for the NTC Day of Service (bless you).  Why would you ever want to do this work as a volunteer?  Why do you think giving back or volunteering is important?

I'm now a trustee for a volunteer centre in East London and I think the short answer to this question is in Kevin Spacey's 'Pay it Forward' movie from 2000:

#1. It has to be something that really helps people.
#2. Something they can't do by themselves.
#3. I do it for them, they do it for three other people.

These are the rules when you pay it forward

6.  How do you see gift economies operating in the nonprofit open source community, the nonprofit blogosphere, and nonprofit tech community in general?  Is there a downside to gift economies?

Yes, I'm a big believer in the idea of being able to give and receive without necessarily monetizing it. It seems to work pretty well in the non-profit and open source context where the starting point is an expectation of sharing, collaboration and attribution. 

Personally, I expect to see gift economies really take off on the web, in non-profits and open source with the ability to remix knowledge, skills and experience into something different. It's already happening in the non-profit, blogging and open source communities, with Creative Commons and GPL open source software licences being examples of how the process can be operated fairly.

Gift economies can also help those without material wealth to trade for goods and services. By coincidence I've been reading Tony Horwitz's Blue Latitudes, which talks about the cultural clash encountered between Polynesian gift economies and western ideas of property and ownership as presented by the 'explorer' Captain Cook. Go read it!

My wife, Deepa, really got me started on the notion of gift economies within her online artistic community.  Here, collaboration, sharing, remixing, pass-it-forwards and random-acts-of kindness with others in the community are all very common as folks have no interest in buying or selling from each other.  Much more important is the spirit behind the gesture, that not everything given has to be for something in return.

7.  What are the 3-5 best blogs by UK folks writing about nps, social change, or nptech that you read regularly?

That would be: David Wilcox, Steve Bridger, Podnosh and Youthnet.

* Disclosure:  One of my contracts is with NTEN is to coordinate the Day of Service.  My contract does not include writing about the event or conducting interviews on my blog with event particpants.  I did this interview with Miles because he has some great insights to share!   Also,  we still have volunteer slots available for the NTC Day of Service and if you are attending the NTC and want to participate, please do sign up!