Web 2.0 and Your Organization
July 24 & 25th, 2007
Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Avenue, Toronto

How can your organization use social media tools to deepen your relationships with supporters, reach new audiences and raise more money? More than twenty people discovered the power of social media tools like blogs and wikis through a workshop I co-taught with Jason Mogus on Web 2.0 and Your Organization. Jason and I had so much fun teaching that March workshop in Vancouver, and got such a positive response from participants, that we will be offering the same workshop in Toronto this summer.

Here's the skinny:

Are you interested in how online communities like Flickr, MySpace, and YouTube can empower your members and customers to carry your message out into the world? Could your organization benefit from deeper collaboration among your team members, clients, partners or the public? Could better knowledge-sharing, stronger relationships and closer communications inside your organization and with your core supporters foster more efficiency, insight and effectiveness?

The latest generation of "Web 2.0" or social web strategies and tools offer powerful opportunities for organizations to improve the way they work, communicate their messages, empower others, and serve the public. In this workshop you will learn how the latest tools for online collaboration and community building can make your organization smarter and more effective.

This workshop is designed for communications strategists, marketing managers, and webmasters who are interested in how this evolution of the web can help evolve your organization's online strategy. We will give you the tools, knowledge, and most crucially, the vision for how your organization can use the web as a stronger agent of change. We’ll also cover the nuts-and-bolts, introducing the latest tools so that you know which options are most promising for your needs.

This workshop will take place from 6pm to 9pm on July 24th, and from 9am to 5pm (with lunch break) on July 25th.

Follow this link to register today -- space is limited.

For more information, please contact web2andyou@gmail.com. Or download our leaflet (PDF, 1 MB).

 

We wish we'd been able to make it to DrupalCamp Toronto, but client business kept us planted firmly on this side of the continent.

Still, we were able to attend in spirit: by reading Khalid's (and others') terrific blog coverage of the event, and by oohing and aahing over his photo of the T-shirt. The DrupalCamp logo is brilliant.

(What's that, you say? You see the Social Signal logo on the back of the T-shirt? Why, yes – we are proud sponsors of DrupalCamp Toronto!)

Now, if there are any of those T-shirts left over, I suppose receiving a few of them might take the sting out of having had to miss the camp itself...

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for the March gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from social media, nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

read more »

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for the October gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

Our October event will explore online tools, campaigns & projects designed specifically to support communities in the Lower Mainland. A handful of charismatic guest speakers will give short presentations about their Vancouver-related projects, which will then be followed by a general discussion of strategies and tips for using online tools to support local initiatives.

Presentations & discussion will start at 7:00 and wrap by 7:45. At about 8:00 we'll move across the street to 6 Acres Pub for another hour of libations, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

Please RSVP (http://upcoming.org/event/113144) and let us know you're coming. We hope to see you there!

Details
Date: October 25, 2006
Venue: WorkSpace, 21 Water St. (http://abetterplacetowork.com/)
Time: 7-8 @ WorkSpace; 8-?? @ 6 Acres (across the street).

PS: We're still looking for a few more guest speakers to do 5 minute presentations of their Vancouver-centric projects. If you're interested in presenting, please add a comment on upcoming or send an email to aaron@socialsignal.com. Thanks!

Last week I had the pleasure of attending a production of Palestine, Israel & Me: A power play by Headlines Theatre, presented as part of the WUF's Earth festival. And while I don't usually go in for 'participatory theatre' (too often it feels cheap and gimmicky), this was different. Headlines doesn't make you participate, they invite you to participate in creating a compelling and thoughtful real-world dialogue through the art of 'forum theatre'.

Forum theatre (as I saw it) works like this: The actors play out a single scene involving an emotionally and politically charged inter-personal conflict. Just as the conflict comes to a boil, the scene ends, and the audience is left in the incredible, uncomfortable, unresolved tension of that moment. Then the actors do the show again, only this time audience members can 'freeze' the scene any time they see fit, and come onstage to take the place of one of the characters (called an intervention) and try to steer the situation toward safety and resolution. Neat, huh?

Only it's really hard! The actors (actually non-actors, in this case) did a wonderful job of staying true to their characters' motivations and beliefs, which made interventions very difficult... just like they would be in real life. In fact, the sense you come away with after the show is that this is a kind of rehearsal for real life, to help us get the tough things right. David Diamond, director of Headlines theatre drives home the importance of these rehearsals:

If a person in a workshop creates a moment, once, I do not believe it has anything to do with "acting". When that person takes on a role, though, and must do the same thing over and over again - hit a mark, get a cue, reach a rehearsed emotional place - this is a performance. In this moment, the citizen becomes an actor, and becoming an actor on the community stage leads to acting in a different way in the community. It leads to a different kind of self- and world-analysis, a more informed internal and external set of actions. For me, this is the essence of community development, and community development is the core of a healthy response to the negative impacts of globalization.

Despite a little difficulty getting started, the audience contribution was amazing. It's rare to see people modeling thoughtful conflict-resolution tactics in real-time, especially when the issues run so deep, especially when the topic is Palestine and Israel. After each intervention, our facilitator, David, would gather the cast together and question them about the relative success of their interventions, whether they created safety for the characters in the scene, and if so, whether that safety came at the expense of other characters. It was fascinating to see what worked and what didn't, and I learned a lot from watching other audience members translate their strategies into action.

Forum theatre is a unique type of dialogue because it's part conversation, part entertainment: it's exactly as engaging as it is meaningful. Throughout the show, David was constantly re-inforcing the idea that it's interventions that contribute to this form, not statements or debate. He wouldn't let audience members participate at all unless they were willing to come up on stage. And you know, at the time, I felt like he was completely ignoring the potential contributions of most of the room. But as the evening unfolded, what emerged was infinitely more valuable than an argument or debate precisely because we didn't get off track. We stayed focused on the characters, and through the characters we explored the issues. And when we were done, then we talked about it (just like in real life!)

The whole event was so refreshing, I can't even explain. Go see their next show -- you won't be disappointed. (And if you are, it's kinda your own fault!)

Some links to visit:

Headlines Theatre

Essay by David Diamond:Creating Community Based Dialogue

Wikipedia entry for Augusto Boal (founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, pre-cursor to forum theatre

Border-Busting: a conversation with Katrin Verclas

read more »

Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog

Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.

The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.

And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:

• Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
• Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
• Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
• Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
  
• Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
  
• Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
• Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
  
• Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
• Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
  
• Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
  
• Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
• Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"

The remote conference is open to anyone with an Internet connection. And feel free to drop by the conference hallway for even more remote conference-y goodness.

Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:

 * Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities. 

While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.