happykatie :: katie rocks out the interwebs

Maps and Mashups in the name of the Mountains

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.

Open Innovation - I am making the Future at N2Y3

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:

• Innocentive
• NineSigma
• Your Encore
• Yet2.com - intellectual property, how to sell and acquire it

Flickr as a community builder - N2Y3 session with Gail

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.

N2Y3 - the NetSquared technology love begins!

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/conference/news

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/NetSquared

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/blog/megan-keane/san-francisco-meets-metaverse-3

You can join the conversation by posting comments, and tagging your blog posts, photos and videos with "n2y3" and "n2y3con" (without the quotation marks).

SxSWi 2008 was awesome (aka: pimping)

SXSW Interactive Festival 2008 was super, as always.  While the quality of panel content wasn't as consistent as I would've hoped, the people, events and general camaraderie  were outstanding.  As were the beer, wine, Nuclear Tacos and the 400 times we ate at Iron Cactus.  Also as were (if that even makes sense), the awesome fuzzy pimp hats and bling we indulged in for Ed Schipul's 'Pimp My NonProfit' panel.

I live blogged several panels and updated them this evening with photos, better descriptions and general grammatical edits so as not to appear a complete lame-o poster.  Specifically:

1.  Weird Turn Pro panel with Derek Powazek
2.  Henry Jenkins opening remarks
3. High-Tech Craft session moderated by Natalie Zee Drieu

Feel like you missed out?  Some ideas on getting your SXSWi 2008 fix: Flickr, Technorati,  re-visit Meebo chats or check out Pulse SXSW for video clips.

To all of the friendly new faces I came in contact with, you really made this a special weekend.  Thanks for the giggles, jokes, advice and brilliant ideas - I'm constantly inspired by every single one of you.

Find the above SXSWi 2008 mosaic in my Flickr stream here - also thanks to CC loving Flickr photogs techslut and wangjy!

Fair trade and global shopping - a great Net2 combo

Fair Trade
Originally uploaded by flydown

This month's Houston NetSquared brings more geekery and social issues as Net2 pal Kevin Lacobie chats with our group about Fair Trade.  Kevin is on the board for Ten Thousand Villages - a local gift shop that sells beautiful handcrafted items created by artisans from over 30 nations worldwide.

We talk lots about sustainability and Fair Trade is a great way to provide groups in developing nations with a consistent livelihood to send their children to school, pay medical bills and everyday expenses.  Economic sustainability is a good thing and NGOs like Ten Thousand Villages is a great start to providing good, hard working people with a living wage and a slice of hope for the families' future.

We've got a great RSVP list going this month - hope to see you there!

Houston NetSquared chillout tonight - beer and geekdom with a purpose

Houston NetSquared introductions 3/14, originally uploaded by happykatie.

Tonight we're having another Houston NetSquared NetTuesday Meetup at the Stag's Head Pub (2128 Portsmouth St.).  It's going to be a casual affair - no speaker, no agenda, NO RULES!!  Extreme Houston NetSquared Meetup!!

Seriously though, this meeting will focus on the Net2 conversation that we're trying to promote between non profit advocates and technology developers.

Talk is cheap - no matter how well-intentioned or 'feel goody' it is at the time.  That's where Net2's Next Actions ideas and Non Profit WishLists come into play -- our goal tonight is to come out with actionable tasks and projects for ways we can use the technology we know and love to change lives.

How can we increase awareness of the benefits of online technologies to non profit groups in our area?  What are things that we as geeks can be working on to maintain a instill a sense of community and partnership in our area?  What are our common goals?  Hope to see you there...

As a sidenote, it's really cool to see the NetSquared gang getting some press coverage - check out this great article by MSNBC's 'Practical Futurist' on the Net2 Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago.

On the growth of citizen journalism via social Web tools, Ethan Zuckerman says:

“What we try to do isn’t to speak, but to point. It’s getting easier and easier to let people speak for themselves.”

 

Awesome!

Tags:  net2 | Houstonnet2 | NetSquared