Our hope is that this blog will soon be home to many self-introductions from participants at the TechSoup Global Contributors' Summit, Feb. 15-16 at the Microsoft Campus in Mountain View. http://tsg-summit.wikispaces.com/Welcome

Let me get the self-introductory ball rolling.

Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy was kind enough to publish the talk I gave at the European Foundation Centre's conference on their Social Media for Philanthropy panel. You can see find it here:

http://www.tacticalphilanthropy.com/2010/06/punching-at-your-own-weight-in-social-media

This is a post I put on the Alliance Magazine Blog;  keep in mind that it is directed at the readership of that magazine—which consists of people involved with European Philanthropy. They’re the “you” in the post.

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What a rich conference this has been. I had a lot of fun organizing my “punch at your own weight” thoughts on social media and philanthropy for a Wednesday panel and was immensely gratified at the response received. I’ll be writing up my remarks and offering a link to same.

I haven't used this blog for three years, but the time seems ripe for return.

We--13 people from TechSoup Global--are in Brussels this week to participate in am ambitious project staged by the European Foundation Centre, which is roughly the equivalent of the U.S. Council on Foundations. Foundations in Europe and the States have both similarities and differences. You can find my somewhat mordant thoughts on the differences in this blog entry for Alliance Magazine, whose blog team Rebecca Masisak and I were honored to be invited to join.

http://alliancemag.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/a-tale-of-two-cultures/

Whoops. There was an unintended consequence to my 'updating' my slate yesterday which is that Leo Romero has compiled a chart to list "experts'" (aka Net2 staff and advocates) choices,

http://www.netsquared.org/blog/leo-romero/how-experts-are-voting

so when I changed my list based on the last blizzard of entries on April 6, I inadvertently 'demoted' some great projects from Leo's chart.

I asked Jonathan, former of OSI, now of Internautconsulting.com, for his recommendations and he wrote back:

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/newstrust

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/light-money-and-politics-ma...

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/building-a-community-of-mod...

http://www.GenocideIntervention.net/

http://www.netsquared.org/projects/proposals/digital-divide-datas-projec...

On the day before nominations ended, I posted my ten choices of the time. Little did I know that 50 projects would come in on the last day. Also, I've been reading the arguments advanced in the various slate posts and been influenced thereby.

In an email, Siegfried Woldhek of Nabuur just wrote to me:

"What an interesting experiment this is turning out to be. Implicitly at least three new criteria were added to the official, sensible list.
- The size of the mailing list
- The activism of the inner circle

On behalf of the N2 team, thanks for this post, Partha:

http://www.netsquared.org/comment/reply/5074#comment-form

To introduce myself, I'm the founder (in 1987) and president of CompuMentor/TechSoup, the parent organization of NetSquared. That said, we're committed to an open, transparent process and my votes will count as much and no more than anyone else's. And *that* said, we are facing a nice problem, but a problem all the same, and this blog entry is an attempt to address it.

We're having a "heaven help us from getting what we wanted" experience and we're making some people unhappy.

We don't want people to be unhappy but we think we've acted in good faith and creatively Here is an attempt to be transparent about what has happened so people can understand the situation. And it's also an attempt to suggest a pathway toward a shared goal.

When we first started planning Net2, less than a year ago, we knew we were taking a big swing at a ball we couldn't really see. Our premise was very simple and pretty vague. We believed that unlike other tech fads, Web 2.0, or as we prefer to call it, the social web, was only going to get bigger and, even more importantly, represented a profound opportunity for nonprofits, NGOs and those committed to social change.