WOW! What a Difference a Week Makes! Where to start.... Since I began this blog and really launched my serious research into what WYSE needs to do to get our new web presence and WYSE Community Communication System (I just made that up...but I like it) in place, so much has fallen in my lap and I am energized and inspired. Day 1: I did an orientation with two new board interns who were recruited from RVLDP. http://www.lajcc.org/rvldp/index.html They are both women, although we tried to recruit men. These women are like walking/talking gifts to our organization. One of them has extensive web marketing and development experience and connections.

Over at TechCrunch I've been reviewing more web 2.0 startups than you can shake a stick at; while the crowd over there is generally not focused on social change, an awful lot of interesting things come our way that could prove helpful in a nonprofit context. Here are some of my favorites from last week, in order of usefulness.

i would love to figure out how to use all these new technologies to make our work easier and more effective, bu who pays for implementing all these fabulous tools and technologies? Even with open source software, low capacity and grassroots nonprofit organizations like mine still have to identify a staff person or key volunteer to implement, manage and support the technolgy. How do I identify that person? how do i motivate current staff and volunteers to add one more responsibility, one more task to an already overscheduled, overfull agenda? Where do i find qualified volunteers who are both motivated and committed to such a large task? how do I manage and supervise them?I think that many of these tools are merely tools for technoogy's sake - without any real vison about who will actually use them.The real digital divide is between organizations - those of us who deveote all our energy to our programs just don't have the resources to implement new technologies.

I've been wanting to put together some good OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) files all week, inspired by Anne Zelenka's giant Blogher file and the interview with legal blogger Dennis Kennedy about the incredible potential for this medium.

An OPML file is, in this case, a single file you can use to subscribe to a number of RSS (definition) feeds all at once. This means that with one link you are subscribed to all future content from selected sources. I think that selecting a handful of key feeds in certain topic areas and offering those to other people is going to be a powerful way that information-overload gatekeepers help the rest of the world find and easily subscribe to the best news sources available. In this sense everyone who puts together OPML files is like an editor of anthologies; only the authors that the editor selects provide ongoing, dynamic contributions.