community application of technology for public benefit
We held another great NCTech4Good hybrid unconference last week. I especially appreciated the other organizers who displayed teamwork above and beyond the call of duty.
Here are a few fun pictures by other folks. You can find more at twitter.com/search?q=nct4g and learn more about it in my previous blog post.
Facilitating the 2014 NCTech4Good Unconference
It’s been a little while since I posted about this, but I have been continuing to facilitate NCTech4Good’s hybrid unconference annually since 2011. Tomorrow is our 2015 event!
A lot of people still don’t know what “unconference” means, so I get excited about spreading the gospel. I never fail to have people who looked at me skeptically in the morning come up to me afterward to say how much they loved it and that they will suggest their own organization or community try unconferencing.
Please read my blog post I <3 Unconferences that explains the history and how they work. NCT4G is a simplified hybrid of traditional and “open space” (ie: unconference) event so I will explain our unique methodology here.
Before the conference:
At the conference:
As you can tell, I am very skeptical of the whole idea of messing with unconference process, and I wasn’t completely sure it would work at first. But it has a resounding success for several years in a row and everyone came away satisfied. This year we’ll be doing the same and I expect it to go even better. If you are in central North Carolina, I hope to see you there!
If you’ve ever heard me talk about network-centric strategy, then you’ll appreciate this:
Thanks to the always-inspirational Evonne Heyning for sharing this.
In the past year I’ve been getting involved with my local chapter of a wonderful organization called Girl Develop It. They host social/networking events as well as programming classes. At their Code & Coffee I have found help for a sticky Javascript problem, gotten career tips, and helped others learn more about open source software. I took their Git class a few months ago, and now I use it at work every day! So when they asked me to lead a class for GDI RDU I was honored and happy to help.
This weekend I will be teaching a class on advanced WordPress Theming. Fortunately, I am able to utilize the wonderful curriculum developed by Tracy Levesque. So after thoroughly reviewing and slightly updating the slides (and making sure all the software on my own site was up to date, oops) I am ready to go!
If you want to follow along, I’ve posted the presentation here.
I usually enjoy small tech conferences, but I was still surprised at what a good experience I had at WordCamp Raleigh today. It started out on a great note when I checked in and learned that they had t-shirts in women’s sizes as well as the ubiquitous “unisex.” This really made me feel like I belonged, even though I only knew about a half-dozen people there.
Most of the sessions were either a little beyond my abilities or a little elementary for me, but I still got something out of every one. A few times I followed the unconference Rule of Two Feet and moved to a different session. I especially appreciated the speakers that shared URLs for their presentations at the start so that I could follow along easily from my tablet.
Here are some of the great talks I saw today:
I’m looking forward to returning to Raleigh tomorrow for another fun day of learning with and from my fellow geeks.
UPDATE: None of the presenters I saw on the second day had made their slides available online, but they claim they are coming soon to the Wordcamp site.
I’m very proud of some work I’ve been doing on the Drupal site that I manage at work. Here’s a blog post I wrote about some of the newest features:
Today I am excited to officially launch several new features on the HASTAC web site, including Collections, Similar Content, Knowledge Base, and more. I think these additions will do a lot to help people connect with and utilize the rich and deep content of the site.
The culmination of two months of very hard work, HASTAC Collections is a beta feature of our site that brings together content from across the site in a hand-curated list of posts which can be viewed in a large tiled display (at right), or in a multifunction list view (below left). Collections are not limited to highlighting hastac.org content, links to other sites are highlighted with yellow buttons. When viewing as a list, users can sort and filter the collection by type of content, topics and tags, and keywords in the title or body.
I invite you to check out our two inaugural collections, Digital Badges and MOOC HQ, and look for more soon. The staff are using and testing this feature now, and we hope to be able to expand it to more HASTAC members later this year. (It will require additional programming and may even result in a new module that we can contribute back to the Drupal community. As a result it will take considerable time.)
Visitors can browse our Collections by visiting the Topics landng page.
When looking at any content on the site you will now see a list of posts that may be about similar topics. It is generated by an algorithm based on the title, tags, and topics of the post. (See example at right.) If your post doesn’t seem to be generating revelant content, try adding more tags. These are the best way to tell the site what you are talking about and to properly connect related ideas.
The Help pages of our site have been in place since 2011, but don’t get much attention. We have now moved them into a proper knowledge page, and added a Frequently Asked Questions section. You can also use the Contact Support link there to create a ticket when you need personal assistance. This is being combined with our existing site feedback tool (see tab in lower right of your browser) which allows users to suggest and vote on improvements for the site.
I have also uncovered or enabled a few other goodies on the site that members might enjoy.
I hope you enjoy all these new features. If you have more ideas for improving the site (and I know you do) please fill out our Usability Survey (it only takes 5 minutes) and post your suggestions in our Feedback forum. Thanks for your engagement, it’s what makes HASTAC great.
I just finished attending the fantastic 2012 Mozilla Festival. I got inspired and wrote a blog post about it for work at http://hastac.org/blogs/ruby-sinreich/2012/11/12/collaborative-documentation-mozfest-including-joi-itos-call-maker-rev and cross-posted below.
MozFest might be the first physical event that I’ve attended that used Lanyrd.com. (I’ve seen it used for online events in the past.) It looks like about half of the 1,000 registrants (and all of the speakers) also signed up on the MozFest Lanyrd site, which makes it not the most efficent directory in terms of finding people.
But where Lanyard was truly essential was displaying a grid of the conference sessions. The MozFest site itself did list sessions, but simple as a textual list on one page which made it very difficult to understand the unusual “organic” schedule. Given that sessions were different lengths with a verity of starting and ending times and that there was no printed program available, the temporal grid was the only way to understand what was going on.
But now that the event is over, Lanyrd shines even more with a feature I hadn’t seen before. Any participant can contribute “coverage” of a session to the site in the form of notes, links, pictures, slides, videos and more. We were frequently reminded via Twitter to contribute, and the reult is this page chock-full of great reources with which to follow-up: http://lanyrd.com/2012/mozilla-festival/coverage/
In that coverage, especially recommend checking out the brief and inspiring keynote by MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito from Sunday morning, in which he reminded us that we’re all “a bunch of fucking weirdos” for wanting to be makers in any degree, but that makers are changing the world’s culture. He compared his own frustrating experience with formal education to his sister‘s success. Clearly they are both brilliant, but even among siblings great minds don’t always fit into neat academic boxes.
Citing a conversation with the great activist/thinker/lawyer Lawrence Lessig, Ito said “You don’t win by changing the world’s laws. You win by changing the world’s culture.” Whether you think of yourself an activist or not, “Understand that what you are doing is political. It will disrupt the system. Embrace it with your fist in the air” says Ito. Or, to put to put Joi Ito’s 21st century vision in 19th century verse, here’s Arthur O’Shaughnessy (by way of Gene Wilder’s Willy Wonka, I’ll admit):
We are the music makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers
And sitting by desolate streams;—
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
Photo credit: Paul Clarke
I don’t think I could sit through the canned B.S. that are American political debates without the deep insight and cutting snark of my friends on Twitter. So I Storified my favorite bits:
A few weeks ago as many of us were patriotically wishing a happy birthday to the United States of America, a coalition of organizations including the ACLU and EFF launched a Declaration of Internet Freedom. I love how simple they kept it, while also encouraging engagement with the statement in a variety of online communities. The declaration is below, in text as well as the obligatory infographic format.
Individuals are invited to sign it at Access, ACLU, CREDO, EFF or Free Press, and to comment on it at on reddit, Techdirt, Cheezburger (yes, really!), Github and Rhizome. They have also invited organizations to sign on. I signed it on behalf of HASTAC, where I work. Have you or will you sign it?
The brilliant Kellan Elliott-McCrea (my friend and former colleague) has put together a searchable archive of the first year of Twitter posts, and I’ve had some fun quickly going down the rabbit hole to 2006 when I had just gotten married and was enjoying travelling around to DC and other places for my job at NetCentric Campaigns.
I tweeted 170 times in that first year starting in October 2006, about 6 months or so after Twitter was effectively born.
At the risk of being narcissistic, here are a few of my old tweets that I thought were emblematic of that time. One of the most interesting things is how similarly I use Twitter today. I still talk about the same subjects including basketball, music, open source, and politics (but a little less “I had this for lunch” and no more Second Life). I still share links, converse with others, and complain about riding transit. I even live-tweeted a talk by David Weinberger at the 2007 NTC.
Plumbers gone. Rockin’ out to the awesome “Break the Chains” compilation http://www.iamedia.org/breakthechains/
9:43 AM – 13 Oct 06Very excited that I have no meetings tonight! What will I do with all this freedom?
4:53 PM – 24 Oct 06 (Something I will probably never tweet again for at least 15 years.)Just added a custom twitter bug to my blog. I’m so trendy!
3:01 PM – 21 Nov 06Just gave up on Civimail and Dreamhost ever behaving, and sent a newsletter with Constant Contact instead. A demoralizing day for open source.
4:14 PM – 12 Dec 06Women’s halftime score: UNC 44, Del St 22. Everything is under control.
2:54 PM – 28 Dec 06 (Already tweeting about basketball!)Currently obsessed with Facebook.com and Change.org. Look me up if you’re in there.
10:19 PM – 20 Feb 07Just had my brain enjoyably adjusted by Cory Doctorow, speaking at UNC.
4:02 PM – 22 Feb 07@SteveOlson: w00t! Does that mean you are actually going to start Twittering now?
11:01 AM – 6 Mar 07 (My first @ reply.)Stopped due to freight traffic again! This may be the last time I voluntarily ride Amtrak in the South.
6:54 PM – 16 Mar 07