The mind boggles

At this year’s National Technology Conference offers even less internet connectivity than past years. Although I was able to use wifi in the common area, today it is password-protected! In the hotel rooms we are asked to pay $16/day for a wired connection.

I’m told that presenters will get a pass word for their session, which especially sucks for people in the last session on the last day. But it also sucks for me in the first session because I am on in about 90 minutes and I need the Internet to prepare for and to do my session.

O, the irony of N-TEN’s promotion of the 06NTC tag for aggregating conference content. How the hell are we supposed to publish any content?

I need some coffee.

See you in Seattle

Next stop on my March Madness World Tour: Seattle and N-TEN’s 2006 National Technology Conference.

I will be leading a panel featuring the illustrious Alexandra Samuel and Victor D’Allant. We will be in the first session of the first day of the conference so don’t misss out. You snooze you lose. 😉

During the same time slot, we are up against a “speed geek” session on Online Advocacy Tools and it appears that the program (at least online) does not list the people behind each session, so please spread the word!

Here’s a rough description:
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March madness

Lest you think that the end of my job at Planned Parenthood meant the end of my globetrotting… I have got my own personal world tour coming up in March. I will be out of town on 3 different trips for a total of 15 days.

  1. I will be doing a presentation for work on network-centric advocacy for IFIWatchNet, which “connects organisations worldwide which are monitoring international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank, the IMF, and regional development banks.” This is a great organization that is doing great work, and it’s a great place to apply network-centric thinking.

    Oh, and by the way this meeting will be in Montevideo, URUGUAY! It will be a short but amazing trip for me. I have been across the U.S. and I have been to Europe, but this will be my first time in South America, the developing world, or the southern hemisphere of this large planet. I can’t wait to practice my Spanglish, and that’s just the beginning of this short (3 days there, 1.5 days in transit) adventure.

    You can learn more about my trip from looking at my ‘montevideo’ bookmarks.

  2. The same day I get back from Montevideo, I will depart for a 6-day trip to Austin for South by Southwest Interactive. This is one of the most fabulous and creative conferences you can attend, so I’m pretty excited about that.

    Plus I get to visit the Texan branch of my family!

  3. Finally, after 6 days back at home I will fly to Seattle for the National Technology Conference. This is the standard industry conference for nonprofit techies (my peeps). I am looking forward to seeing Seattle for the first time, and to seeing many of my friends who will be there, but after Montevideo and Austin, these 4 days will be a like a restful break for me.

Meanwhile there is a small matter of basketball going on! UNC women are now #1 in the nation, and Ivory Latta can taste the NCAA championship. The men are #2 in the ACC and we’re getting better with every game recently, so I think we could be a contender for that title and should make a strong showing in the NCAA as well. Wish me luck in getting to see any of it. 😉

Processing Esther

I had an interesting conversation with someone here who said that her boss wanted to strangle Esther Dyson after her talk today. ED had talked about how it’s at least as important for nonprofits to get more efficient, not just to innovate and do new things all the time. She pretty directly said that nonprofits were inefficient and failing to measure and evaluate our work.
Continue reading “Processing Esther”