A collective “nice to meet you”

It seems like after every conference I come away with a handful of business cards and the intention to follow up with lots of new people and possibilities. However, my intention does not always translate into action. Although I still hope to contact these folks and/or blog about about all the cool things they are doing, for now I am going to do a brain dump to document (and lazily ping) everyone.

• Tom Ficklin, CIO of Empowerment New Haven (Connecticut), was probably the first person I met. We first crossed paths watching basketball in the hotel bar and I enjoyed checking in with him throughout the conference.
• I didn’t get to speak with him for very long, but I enjoyed the great presentation by Ethan Zuckerman, and was pleased that he remembered meeting me over 2 years ago at the Emerging Democracy thingy in San Diego.
• Another person who I met at a conference in in 2004 was Eddie Codel, who has been doing tons of great things including Geek Entertainment TV for which he shot a lot of video this week. He is also organizing VloggerCon to be held in San Fransisco next month.
• Justin Perkins is just another person to add to the list of nice folks at Care2.
• Ivan Boothe of the Genocide Intervention Network was a major force at the conference, he contributed insightful blog entries and comments in the hallway, and I really enjoyed talking with him. I’d like to connect him to my new colleague Tom Glaisyer, who shares Ivan’s interest in how social software can be used to prevent genocide.
• I was happy to run into my friend Kellan Eliot-McCrea who now works at Yahoo which is located in Silicon Valley (of course). I also got to meet two fierce coders who are friends of Kellan’s: Josh Crawford of the Brattleboro Collective and Evan Henshaw-Plath, aka Rabble, of Odeo.
• I already mentioned how great it was to meet Tantek and Kevin from Technorati, but I may have to follow uo with them as I’m still not sure my tags are working correctly…
• On the second day of the conference I sat down with my laptop determined to catch up with my e-mail. Haney Armstrong of Omidyar was very understanding of my anti-social behavior and I fortunately got to make up for it when he helped me figure out Second Life (his name: Haney Heaney) later that afternoon.
• I had the great fortune to also share my table with Sharron Rush of the innovative Austin nonprofit Knowbility and Jayne Cravens who is a true pioneer in the field of virtual volunteering. Both of their reputations preceded them. I had heard of Knowbility because they do some work tied into South by Southwest each year to promote web site accessibility, and I knew of Jayne because she has been a a leader in my field since before I was in it (and that’s a long time)!
• Another person who helped and promoted my entry into Second Life is James Au of New World Notes. He is somewhat of a honcho in SL, which you can tell because his avatar “Hamlet Au” has his own last name.
• I enjoyed walking (to dinner) and talking with Amit Asarvala, who does web strategy for Tech Soup. I should mention that I actually hung out with a lot of TechSoup/NetSquared staff this week, but I didn’t get their cards because I already know them. Rock on Marnie and Billy and everyone!
• At dinner I was chatting with a nice group of people and didn’t even realize I was talking to Tobias Eigen of Kabissa until he gave me his card. His parents are German and he said my last name (which is Austro-Hungarian) means “meaningful.” How cool is that! Meeting him reminded me that I want to hook Tobias up with the African nonprofit that I met through IFI Watch Net a few months ago.
• I also have to mention that I finally got to spend a little quality time with the fabulous Susan Tenby, who is the goddess/ruler/cheerleader/director of the TechSoup community. I have been wanting to hang out with her since we first met about 3 years ago. She is responsible for getting me to start playing with Second Life, where she is known as Glitteractica Cookie, and I hope we get to hang out more either in this life or the second one.
• Another person I enjoyed seeing was Holly Ross who is the director of programs for N-TEN. She organizes their conferences which I have been attending for the past few years. This was the first time I have seen her when she had time to think, talk, and discuss. I was really impressed with her sharp thinking about political issues. She also said that she was very excited about the new Executive Director that N-TEN had just hired, but she wasn’t at liberty to say who it was. Well a big announcement came out yesterday although I can’t find it on the web anywhere – congratulations, Katrin!