I finally write about my visit to the first Socialcamp in Germany.  There were activists, campaigners, NGOs and many others who shared their work, experiences and visions with an open spirit. Particularly, the mixture of participants from the traditional German nonprofit sector (social welfare), newer NGOs and activists were quite inspiring. This kind of mingle, which makes it very creative, happens all over again after the Socialcamp in England. The hub in Berlin offered their location and both days were filled with sesssions.

Examples

Saturday, May 31st, "green geeks" will get together at GreenDevCamp at the Green Building Exchange in Redwood City, CA to talk about:

* How can companies, big and small, make their operations, code, practices, etc. more sustainable?
* In what ways can technology make our lives more green?

They are also hoping to walk away with concrete projects:

A bit late I write my feedback from the Social Innovation Camp (sicamp08), which luckily had the chance to join. I first heard about it from Dan McQuillan, who is one of the initiators and also has a great blog.

The third annual BarCamp, BarCampBlock, will return to where it began, SocialText's offices in Palo Alto, and expand down the block traveling between SocialText, Edgeio, IDEO, and iMeem.

If you are wondering what a BarCamp is, check out this entry on Wikipedia.

You can register for BarCampBlock on the EventBrite Signup page, and add your name to the wiki once you are registered.

Last night 20-30 people gathered at Citizen Agency's Citizen Space (Thanks Tara Hunt and Chris Messina!) to hear Larry Halff talk about Ma.gnolia, and Nica Lorber report back from RootsCampSF.

The evening started out with Larry showing us a demo of how to create a group in Ma.gnolia by his creating a NetSquared group. He described the difference between del.icio.us and Ma.gnolia as that Ma.gnolia's primary goal is to bring information to a group and to create community. (You can read more about, Why is Ma.gnolia Different on their site).

In addition to the NetSquared group, other social changey Ma.gnolia groups you might want to check out are: Nonprofit Technology (nptech), Coworking Group, Green Development Environmental Nonprofits and Charities, and Philanthropy You can subscribe to any of the groups' bookmarks or discussions via RSS.

Larry also showed us a number of ways the bookmarks can be shared, such as publishing links into a sidebar of a blog. Tara Hunt pointed everyone to an organization they worked with, The Inspiration Festival, whose Ma.gnolia links were published on their site and reformatted to match the site's branding.

While Nica set up her laptop to talk about RootsCampSF, Chris gave us a quick history of BarCamp, which RootsCamp is based on. You can read some of the story here. The first BarCamp, "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment," was created in six days by a handful of people in response to the invite-only FooCamp. 300 people showed up to the first BarCamp, and since then there have been over 80 BarCamps all over the world, and the model has taken many forms, including RootsCamp.

RootsCamp was created by Zack Exley after a conversation he had with Nica at a New Organizing Institute (NOI) training this summer. The target audience for RootsCamp is everyone involved in campaign organizing from the volunteer to the campaign manager--everyone's experience is valued equally.

Nica helped to organize the SFRootsCamp during the November 11-12 weekend. Notes from the event are available here. She described SFRootsCamp as an experiment in using techie tools to organize a non-techie group. Although she feels that the event was a success, there were challenges with the non-techie folks using the wiki, and the political organizers, unfamiliar with the BarCamp model, kept asking, "What's the agenda?"

"It's really hard to make organizers not organize," she said.

In addition to RootsCampSF, Andrew Hoppin organized a RootsCamp in Second Life November 8-14, which will most likely continue once a week through 2008, and other upcoming RootsCamps are: New York City. Nov 18, Bloomington, IN. Nov 17 and 18, Washington, DC. Dec 2-3, and Columbus, OH. Dec 1

The next San Francisco Net Tuesday will be on December 12 from 6-8 PM at Citizen Space (425 Second St. #300). Richard Cave, IT Director, and Barbara Cohen, Executive Editor, of PLoS (Public Library of Science) will speak. PLoS is a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS is helping to shape the global open access movement--which includes scientists, funders, publishers, librarians, patient advocacy groups, lawmakers, and many others.  UPDATE: Our speakers have changed for this month's Net Tuesday.  Matt Flannery, CEO and Co-Founder of Kiva.org, the first Web site to let anyone with a PayPal account be a "banker to the poor", and Pim Techamuanvivit (Chez Pim) a food blogger who raised $17,000 for UNICEF with her 2005 Menu for Hope campaign wil be speaking.  More info here.

This weekend, August 25-27th, is BarCampEarth, where BarCamps will be happening simultaneously all over the world to celebrate BarCamp's one year anniversary.

If you are asking yourself,

What is BarCamp?

Here is a great vlog by Ryanne Hodson that explains it all.

 

Tomorrow, August 15th, the Los Angeles NetSquared Meetup group and BarCamp Los Angeles will be meeting together for a joint Net Tuesday at Buca di Beppo (1442 2nd St.) in Santa Monica.  You can RSVP here. 

 

A late recap on June's Houston NetSquared meetup (sorry guys!):

We enjoyed a laidback evening, sans speaker or formal presentation, that included a meet and greet session of local technology and non profit advocates, as well as a review of recent technology events.

Some topics discussed:

 

• Barcamp Houston event - what happened, who attended, next steps, how similar non-conferences benefit non profit technology interests

• Consolidated Houston technology calendar and Web site plans
• Various content management systems
• Accessibility for not only the disabled, but non-English speakers and the elderly 

 

I'm Sarah Pullman and I'm blogging live from the session on distributed grassroots marketing. The speakers are Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, Chris Messina, and it's being moderated by Marnie Webb. I'm definitely not catching everything and it won't all be totally correct but I hope you'll forgive me and find it useful anyway. :)

Elisa Camahort of BlogHer Conference

Speaks about how they made the website badge for BlogHer, and people totally took them and ran with them. Made up all kinds of spin-offs.