Category: NTC

• Mena Trott started her keynote with apologies for her presentation. I hope this just self deprecation and not a sign of things to come.
• She shared some amusing examples of bloggers helping who are not that much in need of help: save karyn, the star wars kids.
• Blogs are sites that:
  – have chronology
  – are frequently updated
  – archive content
  – media rich (photos etc.)
  – are easy to use & maintain
  – updatable via web, clients, mobile
  – easy to parse, read, and follow

  – are maintained by inexpensive tools

  * capture personal voice

Continue reading “Mena speaks” →

I have added a page on the NTC wiki for anyone who is blogging the conference to add themselves.

Maybe next year we’ll get our act together and have an RSS feed.

I’m already having a great time at the NTC and it has barely started. The vendor exhibit, they call it the “Science Fair,” was much bigger and more interesting than I had expected. I met some nice people and got some good schwag. I met the director of the Public Interest Registry, they are responsible for policy oversight of all .ORG domain names!
Continue reading “Fun @ the Science Fair” →

In the 2004 Elections as an Engagement Opportunity for Everyone: c(3)s, c(4)s, Campaigns, and Beyond session, there are a lot of people who want to beat Bush. I might be in the wrong place. I was hoping this would focus specifically on the online organizing strategies. I probably didn’t read the description well enough. It’s more about we can do as (c)3 organization to affect the election. An important topic, to be sure.

I’m so glad the facilitator is having us go around the room and introduce ourselves! This is the first and only session where I’ve seen this happen. This is so helpful because it enables a bunch of networking that can happen after the workshop. If I see someone who sounds interesting, I can talk to them afterward. It’s like getting a free peek at 20-30 of the 700 amazing people here. I’ll write more about this networking stuff in a later post, I think.

John Hlinko, who started DraftWesleyClark.com wants me to tell you about the online dating service for activists that he and his loved one founded (they met online!). It’s called ActForLove.com and the slogan is “take action, get action.” Cute.

There are folks here from the Management Assistance Program, whose Library I love and use all the time. Since I probably won’t remember to go over and tell them in person, I want to give them a shout out here. Thanks, Sheldon!

So Greg moves us on to the topic of voter registration & lists:

Yourvotematters.com is Working Assets’ online voter registration hub.

This only works thanks to the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), which has
led to standardization across the country. What a good thing! Too bad you still have to complete the process by printing, signing, and mailing the form. Actually, that’s probably not too bad of a thing. Online registration could open up the same can of smelly worms that is being uprooted by the online voting concept. Nice theory, dangerous application.

Also earthday.net wants to register lots of people, musicforamerica.com is doing concerts with voter reg drives, and of course rockthevote.com – by now a venerable dinosaur in this field – is on the case.

Tanya Zumach (whose presentation I loved yesterday) talked about list enhancement, which is a wonderful thing.
We have a great group in North Carolina that does list enhancement: Peace LEAP.
Tanya’s doing it with a GLBT network. She says the cost can vary from zero to thousands of dollars. She says that 50-80% of the membership of most nonprofit lists is registered – this is more than the general public, but it leaves a great goal for us to get the rest of them registered Rob Stuart says not enough organizations are doing list enhancement – let’s get to work.

Could e-mail enhancement (address matching) lead to SpamForChange.org?
Lots of folks here have concerns about privacy and spamming our
supporters, but it’s all for the cause. Is it justified?

Marty says what about messaging strategy? Folks need to do advocacy communications, not just branding and PR. What’s our communication capacity? You can’t just say “we don’t have communication staff” and get off the hook.

John Hlinko says “it’s much easier to ride a tidal wave than to make one with your hands.” Take advantage of media attention to other issues and events. Great idea. For example, you can generate earned media (news coverage) for your local delegation to the national March for Women’s Lives. Then you are promoting your local organization and/or issue as well as the March. It’s a win-win.

Rob Stuart pointed out that environmental groups (for example) are considered to be a “trusted source” by many voters, even moreso when they’re local groups. I quaked in fear when Rich Cowan started actually talking about the issues. Sorry, but we can’t start discussing Bush here, it’s already 90 degrees in this tiny room and it’s after 5 o’clock.

Tanya has a great idea about letting activist make their own personal voter guides to share with friends online. Someone please do this!

This session was the first time I started to feel like I was getting to
know some of the people that I keep seeing around at the conference. Even though it wasn’t as well organized as it could have been, I’m really grateful to Greg for pretty much letting do what we want and connect to each other in his workshop. It was a good conversation, and I think it was very helpful for most of the participants, but it was nothing I needed for my professional or personal activism.

As a colleague just noted, “this feels like being a college student sitting in a high school class.” This doesn’t just apply to this session, a lot of us have been doing this nonprofit technology stuff for a long time – we’re ready for grad school!

Marty Kearns (who blew my mind yesterday) has been posting over at the NTC EventSpace blog. He wrote “Top five reasons I blog as an Executive Director of a small nonprofit.” Wow, I just realized that he’s the person behind the Network-Centric Advocacy blog that I have been reading for ages! You people continue to amaze me.

All of these good ideas are floating around, decentralized. Next year we’ll have to have an NTC aggregator…

So now the Circuit Rider Roundup has been completely subsumed by the National Technology Conference. Are the needs addressed by Roundup still being addressed in this new format? I never got to go to the Roundup, so I really don’t know. I am curious to hear other’s thoughts.

You know the amazing thing about these conferences is always the unstructured stuff that happens “offline” (meaning outside the programmed activities). Last night I met two Aussies who are doing amazing things like developing networks of autonomous robots that function like a decentralized network gathering and sharing information, and covering global protests for Greenpeace, and developing online journals of progressive activist thought.

Anyway, these are things people come to the conference for, and frankly I learn at least as much from those experiences as I do from some of the planned sessions. The organizers are obviously doing a great job – you can tell by the wonderful collection of people here. I just wish there were more ways for us to communicate with each other directly. The workshops are interesting, but allowing for 4-5 questions at the end of a series of presentations simply isn’t dialogue.

Here are a few thoughts that are percolating up…

• I need clearer information about what’s happenning and who is here. I had to choose between carrying my laptop or the huge sprial-bound notebook I was given at registration – I chose the laptop. The “birds of a feather” tables at lunch, the dinner meetings, the film last night are not presented in an obvious enough way. Am I lazy? I want this simplified in one clear format repeated in various media (flyers, website, poster boards, etc.). How about a schedule that could beamed (or at least downloaded) to palm-top devices (like this)?
• How about some different structures for breakout sessions, or maybe even some big sessions? For example, let’s try some network-centric models. Also I’d like to see some different types of sessions, perhaps involving an activity other talking? For example, a writing workshop, a design workshop, a training on mindfulness meditation.
• Let’s use the Internet’s unique capacity for many-to-many conversation while we are here having this shared experince. this can be done so many ways: chat, listserv, blogs, wiki, IRC.
• A consistent, open wireless network would enable some of these ideas. True it could prove to distract participants, but let’s trust and challenge each other to stay engaged.

This is mostly pouring out of the top of my head. What ideas do you have? Please click the “rant” button below or continue the conversation on the circuit riders list.

Finally, I want to say again that if weren’t for the hard work of Holly & Co at N-TEN, I wouldn’t even be here thinking and learning and doing these ideas. My hope is that we can do this same great conference in the future, even better!