Weekly post (weekly)

• John Seely Brown: Chief of Confusion

  Keynote at Pegasus conference. Talk about scalable learning, connected to open source and more.

  tags: innovation, web2.0, technology, people, opensource

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly post (weekly)

• Producing Open Source Software – Google Preview – O’Reilly Media

  Great resource on organizing open source projects.

  tags: book

• Social Media — Plone Conference 2009, Budapest

  tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly post (weekly)

• Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship IMPACT Series: Tirza Hollenhorst — ifPeople

  tags: no_tag

• CRM Implementation Plan and Topics – Getting Started -

  Useful worksheets and process for rolling out CRM. Also helps you define custom fields (vs default fields).

  tags: crm, salesforce.com, resource

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly post (weekly)

• Taproot Foundation – About – Impact

  Organization that organizes professional pro bono work for nonprofits. Largest nonprofit consulting firm. Check out items they report measuring.

  tags: measurement, metrics, impact, nonprofit

• AirBnB: Vacation rentals, private rooms, sublets by the night

  great interface for finding places to stay. alternative to hotels

  tags: travel, lodging

• Upcoming Trainings and Webinars — ifPeople

  tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

A Simple Way to Understand Climate Change

Have you ever wondered why it is so complicated to reach a global agreement on climate change? Or why an additional 45 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere makes such a difference?

Understanding what is necessary to achieve 80% reductions and finding a solution that works for everyone is difficult, to say the least.

Now, you can try your hand at understanding and negotiating such an agreement with the Copenhagen Climate Exercise, a role-playing simulation of the upcoming Copenhagen negotiations designed by MIT and Sustainability Institute. Set up as a highly simplified “Copenhagen-2009-like” U.N. meeting, participants play the role of delegates from three regions of the world and work together to reach a global accord that meets the group’s goal for CO2 levels. A ”UN Secretary General” receives pledges from three different “blocs”, asks her or his technical staff to simulate them in the “C-ROADS” climate simulation (or its simpler version, “C-Learn”), and informs delegates of results, often sending them back for another round of debate, strategy and collaboration.

Designed for 10-60 players,  the Copenhagen Climate Exercise helps people quickly learn the policy-relevant science of climate change, viscerally experience the international dynamics, and succeed at crafting a solution to the challenges, while taking a realistic look at the scale of changes ahead as we shift to a low-carbon global economy.

Over the past year, Drew Jones of Sustainability Institute and John Sterman of MIT have run this exercise for European business leaders in Greenland, European Union government policymakers, oil executives, the US Forest Service, members of The Climate Group, and students at MIT and the University of North Carolina. The simulation debrief tends to cover multiple areas: international geo-political dynamics, the biogeochemistry of climate (oceans, plants, the carbon cycle, tipping points), cultural barriers to global agreements, managing hope and fear amidst an uncertain future, a “systems” perspective on complex issues, and the technological, legal, and behavioral changes that will help stabilize the climate.

Blog Action Day is about getting involved, so join in and share your thoughts here! Do you worry about climate change? Are you willing to make drastic changes to prevent it? Do think that we’re pretty much doomed already? Whatever your opinion, join the conversation now!

Plonistas: Order Your Stimulants for the Conference!

Plan Ahead So You Don’t Miss A Minute!

I’m getting really excited – Budapest is going to be an awesome Plone conference!! (if you haven’t yet, then go register – we need you there!)  You know how it’s going to be, right? Tons of awesome content, for three solid days, plus the trainings beforehand and the sprint afterwards. And that’s just the official program! So many conversations to catch up on and beers to be drunk…it takes a lot of energy! So, I recommend that everyone get stocked up on stimulants for the conference…in particular yerba mate!

Huh?

I’ve been totting my gourd and yerba to Plone events since I started going in 2005. It comes it incredibly handy, since it’s nice to be coherent at 8am, noon, 8pm…2am…Yerba mate is a tea traditional to South America’s Southern Cone (did you know we have a Plone group there?). It gives a “healthy energy”. It’s got caffeine (and other stimulants…or the legal variety!), but it also has loads of Vitamin C, B, magnesium, potassium.

Yerba mate is traditionally drunk out of a gourd that holds the tea and has a filter straw you sip out of. It’s a social drink, so goes great for conferences (you have to be careful drinking by yourself as you can get reaaaally wired!). It can be used in a French press if loose leaf and also comes in tea bags. It can be drunk hot or cold, bitter (natural) or sweet.

Let me at it!

I recommend you go with Guayaki as a provider. Their yerba is organic, fair trade, and shade grown (I’ve visited the farms, met farmers, and seen the whole process). Their company is able to preserve thousands of acres in the rainforest by the sale of yerba mate!

To sweeten the deal, I’m offering to help in 2 ways:

1.If you live outside the US, you may not be able to get it in time and it may be really expensive to ship to you anyway. I’ll have some extra space in my bag and will be able to use it to haul Guayaki mate to Plonistas (until I run out of space). If you are interested, leave a comment and let me know how much stuff you are getting so I can plan the space. First come, first served! Do this soon because it takes a while to get to me!!

2. I got a coupon for you . 10% off the whole order. Just click Guayaki to start exploring mate goodness.

• If you want to go traditional, you will need a gourd (check out the 50% off sale on gourds!), bombilla (filter straw), and the loose leaf yerba mate
• On the site, you can learn more by clicking “All About Mate” and get info on the tradition, ritual, and properties of mate.

Hope to see you soon – and bien mateado – in Budapest!

Voting for NTEN Sessions Ends Friday

As many of you are aware, the highly anticipated NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference is being held April 8 – 10. 2009, in Atlanta, home of ifPeople HQ.

To engage the nonprofit community, NTEN has made all session proposals public and has invited people like you to vote on your favorites. This is a great opportunity to let your voice be heard and help influence what’s going to be an informative and inspiring conference for non-profits and consultants alike.

ifPeople has proposed several sessions. Click on the links below to read more what we’re proposing — and don’t forget to vote as well!

An Open Civic Engagement Platform: Empowering Nonprofit Communications with Mature Stable Solutions

An Open Source Approach to Collaboration: Sustainable, Inner-Organizational Collaboration

25 Ways to Increase Your Org’s Communication Capacity: Accomplishing More Without More Staff

Or get a full listing of all the proposals and vote on your favorites.

Hurry! Voting ends this Friday.

Weekly post (weekly)

• The Climate Interactive Scoreboard — Climate Interactive

  Want to know what the climate policies being negotiated mean for global impact? Check out the Climate Interactive “Climate Scoreboard”

  tags: climate, plone-site, ifpeople-client

• Learn Python from MIT OpenCourseWare videos of lectures in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

  OpenCourseWare content from MIT – learn Python!

  tags: python, development, resource, video

• Certified Administrator at ForceCertified.com

  Study guides for the salesforce.com administrator exam

  tags: salesforce.com, reference, certification

• Ubuntu One : File sharing, syncing for ubuntu

  Looks like a remake of Dropbox, but for Ubuntu-specific users. Has desktop and web component. 2GB free.

  tags: ubuntu, linux, web2.0, free, tools

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Weekly post (weekly)

• 15 Online Press Release Distribution Sites

  Great resource on press release distribution

  tags: resource, communication

• Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection? | Berkman Center

  Provocative topic lecture at Harvard Berkman Center, video and audio available.

  tags: video, communication, to-check-out

• Consulting Resource Center – Home – developer.salesforce.com

  Resources for providing salesforce.com support and help. Nice collection, and open to improvement by community.

  tags: salesforce.com, resources, howto

• Plone Event Sponsorship Policy — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management

  The Plone Foundation now has a formal means of supporting participation/promotion of events.

  tags: plone, community, conference

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Hashtags: Turning Twitter into a Valuable Tool for Small Businesses

If you’ve involved in marketing for a small business or nonprofit, you’re undoubtedly familiar with the buzz around Twitter. Tech savvy social networking aficionados sing endless praises about the microblogging site, and cite case study after case study about how Twitter is changing the way businesses communicate with potential clients. Meanwhile, sceptics shrug and dismiss Twitter as a passing fad, or as the black hole of productivity — a thinly veiled time waster that has usurped the water cooler as the epicenter for mindless chitchat.

The truth, however, is that both can be true. Twitter can be a valuable marketing tool, but only if those using it (a) understand how the system works and (b) know how to manage their time. Small business and nonprofits must understand that tweeting is not a random process. It’s a calculated, strategic communications effort that involves meticulously tracking conversation threads and responding to posters when appropriate. The first step to using Twitter successfully is knowing how to find the conversations that are useful to you and then participating in those conversations.

In other words, it’s all about the hashtag.

What’s a Hashtag?

Hashtags (#) differentiate Twitter from other social networking sites. They are a simple way to catalog and connect tweets about specific topics. Perhaps most importantly, however, they help filter out unrelated tweets that might randomly contain a misleading keyword or two. Hashtags are inserted into the tweet itself, usually before or after the main message. A hashtag is a single word or phrase preceded by the pound sign (#).

It looks like this: #mozservice09.

Recent posts with #mozservice09

This hashtag was created by Mozilla and used by the company and their partners to catalog tweets about their 2009 community service week.

Users can search for hashtags on Twitter and catalogue tweets based on particular hashtags.

You can use multiple hashtags for a single tweet. For instance, Mozilla Service Week is about helping nonprofits who need technology assistance. So it makes since to categorize a tweet about that event under both Mozilla Service Week (#mozservice09) and nonprofit technology (#nptech). Now, that single tweet appears in multiple conversation threads, and is viewed by more people as they track and participates in the conversations that interest them.

How Can Small Businesses Use Hashtags?

There are two main ways you can use hashtags.

1. Track existing hashtags, then respond to relevant tweets.

One of the main obstacles with Twitter is that many new users find it difficult to locate hashtags relevant to them. Trending sites track the most popular hashtags, but most small businesses and nonprofits don’t care about what someone was wearing on Larry King or which b-list celebrity was arrested last night.  You’re looking for the hashtags used in your niche, not necessarily the ones that are uber-popular.

Twitterfall

We’ve found the best way to identify relevant hashtags is to start following people or companies in your industry and make a list of hashtags they use to categorize their tweets. After you find a hashtag that’s relevant to you, start tracking it with a third party site like Twitterfall. This site has a wide range of functionality, including:

• easy-to-use interface
• tracking of multiple hashtags simultaneously
• color coding of tweets by hashtag for easy identification
• Twitter login options so you can tweet within the application

Another similar site is Monitter.

When you experiment with either of these sites, you’ll find it’s easy to see what people are talking about and to respond to relevant tweets. Once you get the hang of this, you’ll start to see how Twitter connects you to conversations you wouldn’t be having outside the microblogging site — and allows you to network quickly and efficiently.

2. Create your own hashtag, then tweet with it

Once you’ve used Twitter for a while, the time will come when you’ll want to begin a conversation thread that doesn’t exist yet. This means creating a brand new hashtag, and using it in your tweets.

Say you’re heavily involved in NTEN’s upcoming 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. Right now it’s fall of 2009, so there’s not a lot of conversation on the subject. This is the perfect opportunity for you to start a conversation thread by creating a hashtag (like #nten10, for example).

However, before you create a new hashtag, make sure that another hashtag for the same conversation thread has not already been created. In the example above, it’s possible that someone has already created a hashtag such as #nten2010 or #ntenten. Paying attention to already created tags helps avoid duplicate conversations and makes it easier to track what’s being said about topics of interest.

hashtags.org

There are a few ways you can search for these already existing hashtags. You can look on a site like hashtags.org, which is basically the wikipedia of hashtags. The problem with this site, however, is that users have to add entries themselves, so hashtags for more obscure topics are often missing. We’ve found the best way to find out whether a hashtag exists is to use advanced Twitter search or simply pay attention to your Twitter stream.

Does anyone else have suggestions about how to locate hashtags?

Final Words

If you’re interested in using Twitter as a marketing tool, start playing with hashtags — and let us know what you find.