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The latest discoveries with love from my friend the interwebs.
A little New Pornographers music video gone Sims style. Dorky, yes. But that's kind of what makes me happy. Thanks to Adam for uncovering this YouTube gem. :)
The latest discoveries with love from my friend the interwebs.
Mountain near Rawl, West Virginia
Originally uploaded by iLoveMountains.org
Benji Burrell is a great guy and technologist with a passion for his home, his community and his neighbors. He spoke with Net2 attendees about his organization, Appalachian Voices. They are based in Boone, North Carolina and are focused on fighting coal fire power plants and reclaiming their natural state. They've achieved much success - coalition of 50,000 people in Virginia to stop the power plant and delivered petition to company.
The group has started an 'End Mountaintop Removal' campaign online called ilovemountains.org that is just exceptional from a marketing and Social Media perspective. They have 2 main goals: 1) Stop mountain top removal coal mining and 2) promote sustainable forestry practices in the mountains.
The Appalachians house incredible biodiversity - right behind rain forest, full of indigenous species (like salamanders) and an enormous variety of trees and other wildlife. Appalachian Mountains and regional areas provide HUGE percent of coal for our country. 7-10% of US energy is fueled by coal from this region. However, we could save around 30% of energy by conserving and using more efficient -- this would totally offset the coal removed by mountaintop removal.
Some coal mine areas can be up to 10,000 acres (the size of Manhattan Island) - nothing but dirt and rubble - all the biodiversity destroyed and no one can live there anymore. Coal plants near homes and schools - young children getting cancer and dying. Their shoes turn black when they play on their playground from coal soot.
Continue reading "Maps and Mashups in the name of the Mountains" »
The latest discoveries with love from my friend the interwebs.
Cesar Castro, from the Institute for the Future, discusses Futurism and their concept of Open Innovation.
With the latest emergence of the DIY culture, sites and organizations like Instructables, Etsy, Bizarre Bazaars and Make Magazine - it's easy to see the world has become a more innovative place. It's all about Open Innovation and not just at home - but in our organizations and businesses as well.
Open Innovation has a lot to do with making your organization more transparent to the external world AND internally to your employees, customers and suppliers.
What is driving change in the Science community? Collaboration and crowdsourcing. It helps organizations to manage costs better and find results much more quickly than keeping it internally. caBIG scientific community is a powerful representation for this, have helped find treatments for cancer. Where it once used to be vital to be published first, scientists and academics are seeing the values and benefits of cooperative research and learning. Open Wetware is an interesting example of this.
Flatten your organization - allow ideas to come from anywhere, go horizontal not vertical. Reward people to become solution seekers, not problem solvers. We must find the answers, even if we don't come up with them on our own.
Create virtual suggestion boxes in our organizations - how to get our people to contribute pro-actively? How do we find our solutions and answers? Also, tap into other brain pools - students, professionals, retired folks, etc. - to get their insight, feedback and ideas. Companies also provide these services:
Continue reading "Open Innovation - I am making the Future at N2Y3" »
Gail Ann Williams - community manager at Salon.com of both the WELL and Salon Table Talk - is an experienced community builder and online community participant. She had lots of interesting observations of the mass entrance and exodus of large groups of users from social networks for various reason. Flickr has been a great and steady place for a variety of community to share imagery over the last few years.
Jason also did a super post on the Houston Net2 blog about this discussion, with a purdy picture too! Here are some notes from Gail's Flickr N2Y3 chat:
Be creative with tags -- use in combinations and focus on super specific words. If you have a photo of a mineral, include mineral properties to get those long tail searches on Flickr.
Seek out very niche Flickr groups -- ie: fire hydrant groups attracted to San Francisco earthquake golden fire hydrant.
The WELL uses Flickr group badges to use their photos on 404 pages. Traffic completely spiked, very successful gimick. Specifically for cause-related sites with good visuals, great way to get traction. Can limit to certain photographers or staff or featured photographers to make it a bigger deal.
Use Flickr as a way to extend community - give attention and validation in ongoing ways with your events and organization. Pass up a staff member's photo and use a member of the community's instead.
Take little video clips - mini testimonials - in addition to photos. 20 - 30 seconds means so much more than a blurb in print. Easy and fast.
I'm in town (along with my H-Town compadre Jason) for this year's NetSquared Non Profit Technology Conference in San Jose. And I am totally stoked :) This year's Mashup Challenge is going to lead to a lot of really interesting conversation and an uber-geeky way to look at NPO mission and technology.
From the awesome Britt Bravo, here are some ways you can participate even if you're in a different time zone or have developed major social anxiety overnight and cannot leave your hotel room:
1. NetSquared (N2Y3) Conference News page that will
aggregate posts by attendees, designated live-bloggers and
live-vloggers, and folks who tag their posts n2y3con: http://www.netsquared.org/
2. Watch interviews with N2Y3 attendees on the NetSquared blip.tv channel: http://netsquared.blip.tv/
3. Follow real time updates on the Net2 Twitter feed: http://twitter.com/NetSqua
4.
Join in the celebration of the launch of the Second Nonprofit Commons
Sim in Second Life Wednesday, May 28 starting at 10:00 A.M. PST/SLT
(Second Life Time): http://www.netsquared.org/
You can join the conversation by posting comments, and tagging your blog posts, photos and videos with "n2y3" and "n2y3con" (without the quotation marks).
The latest discoveries with love from my friend the interwebs.
jump around, jump around, jump up, jump up, and get down!
Originally uploaded by jwlphotography
Happy Friday - here's to an Ab Fab weekend and an awesome next week.
Sans crappy people.
Amen.
