Oh, climate change. Oh, the UN. A giant concept and a giant organization, both with limited access points for the public, guaranteed to make you feel small, disempowered and unheard. Well, it’s that time of year again: it’s the UN Climate Change Conference, and this year it’s happening in Poland!

Kidding. That’s an excerpt from last year’s post about the UN Climate Change conference, when we did a case study of the Polish website (and Avaaz). It’s just that, when it comes to climate change and making UN information accessible, so little has changed since last year that everything’s feeling, well, a little recycled.

Dr. Adrienne Burk convened an amazing conference last month on behalf of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, and I was lucky enough to get a chance to speak on one of the panels. The conference was called Witnessing the World: New Possibilities for Citizenship and Social Change, and while it was an intimate group, there was a wide range of speakers. The day ranged from discussions about the ancient Greeks’ definitions of witnessing all the way to multimedia presentations about citizen journalism as a tool and technique for progressive social change – some day, I’m going to write more about these presentations but the honest truth is that the ideas presented were so complex that I’m still wrapping my head around them.

It’s no coincidence that 2012 (the latest in a long line of disaster movies from director Roland Emmerich)  is timed to release during one of the worst weather months North Americans experience. Yep, November is storm season, bringing with it power outages, floods, snow, wind – and that’s only on the west coast. We’ve written a bit about crowd-sourcing disaster information before, but now seems like the perfect time to get back into disaster preparedness. (More...)

There’s something about the grey depressingness of Hallowe’en in Canada that brings out the zombie in everyone. Trying to make your next presentation a thriller? Need some (ahem) braaaaaains to help you through your new duties as social media champion?

Help is on the way with free, open sourced tools and methods from Open SoSi and "When Bad Presentations Happen to Good People" (More...)

The wonderful Alexandra Samuel and I were both interviewed about how one goes about becoming a social media strategist – you can check out the Toronto Star version of it here.

For more advice, you might want to check out (More...)

The Vancouver Blogathon has raised $37,000 in under 24 hours, and they're not done yet. Find out how they did it, and suggestions on getting your own blogathon started here. 

Capital campaigns are a big deal, because, well, you’re trying to raise a building here. You need a campaign that will catch people’s imaginations, make them want to stick with you for the long haul and hopefully, donate more than once.

This sounds like a job for…social media! Everyone's talking about social media campaigns as the way to fundraise, but what does that look like in practice for a non-profit?

It looks a little something like this.

Over the last two months, I’ve been settling into my new job at Social Signal, a social media firm based in Vancouver, BC. I’m their new social media strategist! (Remember when we blogged in 2008 about how we wished that job existed? Turns out it does…)

Just across the newswires… uber-geeks from Google, Twitter, MeetUp and other high-tech companies have shipped out to Iraq.  No, seriously.

Between April 19-23, a gaggle of executives visited Iraq as part of a U.S. State Department tour.  The department said that “the executives would offer ideas on how new technologies could help foster transparency, strengthen civil society and generally empower people and local groups by providing the tools for network building.”

It’s election fever in British Columbia right now.   Interesting to see how the three major parties are handling their web presence…see how the 3 major parties stack up. Read more