Last night a long feline life of 17 years came to a peaceful end as my friend Mehitabel sat in my lap and breathed her final breath. Here’s a short slideshow of photos of her:
Author: Ruby Sinreich
Things I love about canvassing:
Meeting my neighbors and/or getting to know them better.
Enjoying lovely Fall weather.
Spending time with my son. (Now his second annual canvass.)
Checking out the variety of door styles and various porch architecture in my neighborhood.
Getting some exercise.
Beating Richard Burr!
Addressing Social Media Culture Shock
Since I already posted my slides from the NTEN We Are Media workshop held at the annual conference of the NC Center for Nonprofits, I thought I would post the slides from Kivi Leroux Miller‘s talk as well. I thought she did a great job of addressing the cultural and organizational change issues that many non-profits face when confronting new media and new forms of communication.
Addressing Social Media Culture Shock
View more presentations from Kivi Leroux Miller.
Enjoy!
In praise of…
(Things I’m feeling thankful for this morning.)
…saying what’s on my mind in more than 140 characters.
…family members who are fun to be around, have impeccable taste, take great care of my son, and make it possible to see each other more than once a year.
…awesome music on my headphones, like Mosadi Music which makes me smile and dance and learn.
…cheap coffee and free buses.
…the opportunity to see a wonderful dharma teacher like Therese Fitzgerald tonight.
Photo: http://dharmafriends.org/?page_id=251
Building “buzz” for your cause
Today I’m thrilled to be at the annual conference for North Carolina nonprofits. This used to be a regular hangout for me, but in the last decade my work has shifted to more national organizations and I haven’t had the time or funding to attend it in many years. Nice to see all the new and old faces here.
The reason I’m here is that I was invited to be a co-presenter of NTEN’s We Are Media workshop. This all-day workshop is based on the fantastic curriculm developed by the NPtech community with Beth Kanter’s leadership a few years ago. For my breakout session on “Building Buzz” I’ve combined NTEN’s materials on the subject with my own network-centric approach. You can see the results in my presentation…
Building Buzz
View more presentations from Ruby Sinreich.
Developing a thoughtful RFP
Remember the RFP that I bragged, err, blogged about back in July? If not: I released a detailed request for proposals (RFP) from Drupal developers to build a new web site for hastac.org. Last week I spoke to the HASTAC Steering Committee about the process of creating it. I thought other folks would also be interested in hearing about how we did it as well.
This presentation below was made as we went along, rather than after the fact, so some ideas evolved and didn’t come out as originally planned – and that’s a good thing. We are now preparing to interview the three top vendors out of 20 that submitted proposals.
HASTAC's RFP process
View more presentations from Ruby Sinreich.
RIP Rich D: Dancing in the Rain
What a difference some context makes. I few months ago I came across this video of four young men doing some amazing dancing on a street corner (via a link on Twitter, natch). The dancing style is like a fusion of ballet and breakdancing, I’d never seen anything like it, and the rainy streetcorner setting and minor-key soundtrack made the scene particularly otherworldly and melancholy.
Today a friend IMed me a link to an article on Oakland’s TURF dancing that explained it all, and the story makes the video even more fascinating.
Continue reading “RIP Rich D: Dancing in the Rain”
Working hard is hardly working
I just came across these words of wisdom from Caterina Fake, co-founder of the completely-awesome Flickr.com, who says that “Working hard is overrated.”
Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.
– http://www.caterina.net/archive/001196.html
Izzy loves London
We just returned from a great trip visiting my dad and stepmom in London, England! Below is the greatest hits version of our pictures. Click here for the full album on Flickr (about 100 pictures and videos).
Delivering more than an RFP
I feel a little like I just gave birth to another baby, but thank goodness it took less than 9 months to gestate and was a lot less painful to deliver!
Less than one year after starting my job at HASTAC and then immediately overseeing the re-launch of hastac.org, I realized that our site would have to be re-built entirely from scratch. I spent this summer working with my colleagues to create a clearer vision and a plan for a complete overhaul of the site. Here’s the request for proposals: http://www.hastac.org/drupal-rfp-2010. I’m really proud of this document as it shows a solid foundation, a forward-thinking vision, and a practical strategy for how to make best use of our great ideas, the Drupal platform, and a brilliant and engaged community of members.
HASTAC Director Cathy Davidson is a deep and complex thinker. Here’s some of what she had to say about the RFP on her blog today:
If you are not a programmer but are interested in how you build up a successful virtual organization, a network of networks, the rfp is a lot more interesting than you might think. It’s not just about half a million page views a year (although we’re proud enough of that!), it is about how a distributed, collaborative team converges into a virtual site and ends up with a whole greater than the sum of many, many, MANY disparate parts. VC’s out there, listen up! There are lessons here.
Ruby’s method was fascinating. I’ve been involved with building three previous websites and no one has organized our group meetings towards the rfp conceptually before. I was skeptical at first, although I loved the conversations we generated from talking about what we envisioned for HASTAC and how we saw the website as the one portal through which you could extend outward through the network, and reach inward too, bringing what ever you and your institution had to offer back to the site where it would likely receive more attention than it could on its own.
It turned out (I’m not sure we would have found this out any other way) that we all possessed different kinds of gifts when asked to conceptualize a virtual network. Fiona Barnett, Director of the HASTAC Scholars, turns out to be a genius at formulating precise kinds of audiences and how they might or might not be best represented or welcomed to the site (yes, we’ve always known Fiona’s a genius but this was yet another manifestation). I tend to be a “both/and” kinda gal, so found myself over and over saying, well, it’s one kind of Venn diagram if you think about it this way, but it’s this other kind when you think . . . This can make developers crazy but Ruby somehow managed to capture the key point that we need FLEXIBILITY AND SIMPLICITY more than anything else.
So that’s the process on the way to Ruby’s eloquent, elegant, and detailed rfp.
– http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/what-exactly-network-networks
Now that I’ve crossed that finish line, I’m going on vacation with my family for two weeks. When I get back I’ll be gearing up for the next race: actually managing the creation of our new web site.