NetSquared teaming up with Sun Microsystems to produce global Hack Days. Sao Paolo, Brazil was a success on October 1, stay tuned for an update. Next up, China!
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NetSquared: Doing rather than thinking about doing
Love Compumentor, their people and the whole basic idea behind NetSquared.
And would like to pose a challenge: conferences and "Gala events" are to often about thinking rather than doing. I challenge the folks in this community to spend the next 196 days doing. And spend the conference and gala celebrating what has been done.
I wrote a paper a bit ago talking about Web 2.0 Collaboration for Nonprofits. The basic thesis is that Web 2.0 Collaboration is about "Moving to a culture where the first question is “how can others leverage what I’m doing” rather than “how can I protect myself from other leveraging what I am doing.”
At the Social Source Foundation, we built the CiviCRM software to provide nonprofit-specific constitutent relationship management functionality. We answered the question "how can others leverage what we're doing", by integrating it with Drupal/CivicSpace, the software that runs the NetSquared website. We also published an open API that allows people to develop new software using the core CRM functionality of CiviCRM.
We would like to spend the next 196 days working with folks to deliver some "doing." What might be good doing? We might work with volunteer match to use APIs to integrate their wonderful volunteer recruitment system with CiviCRM, allowing a nonprofit to "automagically" store CRM information about VolunteerMatch volunteers.
We're already working with LINC (Low Income Networking and Communications Project of the Welfare Law Center) to build a robust, free and open source CRM solution specifically designed for grassroots organizing groups.
We'd like to work with you on radically improving constitutent relationship mangement in the nonprofit sector. We've taken the first step by publishing our documentation, specifications, APIs and code under an open source license. Now we'd like to actively help others leverage what we're doing. Visit http://www.openngo.org/ for more information and drop me a line if you'd like to join us in celebrating Web 2.0 achievements in 196 days.
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I'm OK with biblical...
Did I mention I love the Compumentor crew?
Daniel is exactly right, lets get specific (though I kind of already did above).
To get specific, people need to engage us on what they use CRM functionality for. Did you always want case management functionality that "automagically" interfaced with your donor management? Did you always want to have a record of what events people attended, but their interest areas because they attended an event?
Basically where is your CRM pain? Where are the CRM gaps? What do you need and can't get?
From that discussion, we can identify specific and achievable collaborations. Some examples:
Our job is not to know in advance what you will use CiviCRM for. Our job is to build software that has open documentation, APIs, etc. that allow you to use CiviCRM for common nonprofit and non-governmental organization tasks. Drop me an email at dgeilhufe AT socialsourcefoundation --DOT org and we'll talk possibilities.
One side note... my challenge is not to Compumentor to change the format of the NetSquared event. My challenge is to the participants to change the way they plan to interact with the NetSquared event.
Lets get some "doing" users together to complement the inevitable "thinking" users and create a nice, rich, diverse ecosystem of folks doing, creating, thinking, etc.
In a Web 2.0 world dynamic and messy are good things!
Some CMS serendipity
Hi David,
I went to the NTC Boston Conference the other day (and blogged and vlogged it) and I ran into someone I haven't seen in ten years, Bob Doyle. When I knew him, he was doing digital video at a time when many people were still trying to set the clock on their VCRs.
He has started something called CM PROS, the content community of practice. Perhaps, you've already connected with him -- maybe he would be a good "doer" to also thread into whatever.
Beth
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In the end, was the beginning
David:Marnie's reply quotes
David:
Marnie's reply quotes from our site, but I'll quibble with our own words. It says, We'll be hosting a conference in April, 2006 in San Francisco. Don't think of that as the end, though. Think of it as the beginning." I think it'd be better to say "Think of it as the end of the beginning."
I completely agree with your sentiment that we should not just "think about doing" for the next 196 days. We should start doing now. The goal of this project is NOT to host a conference. It's to start a broad and deep movement in the npo sector to greatly extend the adoption of new internet tools, in order to make npos more effective, have greated impact, and bring greater social change. We believe that a conference can be a useful step in catalyzing that movement. We hope that during the next 196 days, we can do a lot to gather together participants, figure out how to accomplish the big long-term goals, and start doing the work, all at the same time. We certainly want the conference to be a celebration of the successes of the first 196 days, not just a beginning of the real work.
Mark Liu
Net2 team