Salsa Scoop> tag: ”blog:07ntc“

Digital Story Telling Tips

Below are some handy suggestions I pulled from the presentation Age of YouTube: Using Video Online to Reach the Masses which was presented at NTEN’s Technology 2007 Conference. The Serial Approach - Consider offering a series of short videos (2-3 minutes) that explain your issue, instead of making an expensive project video (or in addition to). See how I Love Mountains features short videos about the destructive practice of mountaintop removal on their homepage.

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After NTC

There's nowhere like the nation's capital for turning out nonprofiteers in record numbers, and NTC had the scale of, like, Battlestar Galactica or something: a minor metropolis afloat in the stars. The number 1,200 was murmured, which would be enough bodies to outvote Vatican City. People talked about going the whole 2-3 days without the serendipitous run-in with someone they were hoping to meet. Almost any thematic takeaway for the NTC would be a plausible one, simply because there were just so many different ways to look into the kaleidoscope. My personal version of the theme -- having hit sessions on screencasting, mobile, and radio both online and off -- was multi-channel engagement. It feels to me that the sector is straining against this membrane, looking for the next ah-ha moment, the next breakout into open country. Can we get Internet everywhere? Can we mate it with television, telephones, voice, thought, shoe leather? Can the multiplying tools and gizmos combine and connect? Can it get from niftiness and even effectiveness to really game-changing? We catch glimmers. A citizen video flips control of the Senate -- hybridized data sets present the occasional but isolated dazzling perspective -- rumors circulate of flash mobs on distant shores. The Twitter froth, I suspect, emerges fundamentally from its hint of gathering blogging, texting and social networking into a bridge tenuously connecting meatspace and cyberspace identities. It -- whatever it is -- just isn't quite there yet, and some days it seems it's on the next train after Godot. But the hope for the Next Big Thing might be one of those cases of generals fighting the last war.

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An NTC Kaleidoscope

With apologies that fatigue and connectivity issues (I think every tech conference I've been to this year has had wireless problems ...), a few random snippets from the Nonprofit Tech Conference.
Wednesday, April 4 Vendor fair. No iPods won (note: for a Nano, I'll link to Satan himself), but an adequate haul of swag -- GoLightly has the stroke of genius with shot glasses for which their moniker is singularly apt. (But why do they come containing jelly beans?) DIA and PICnet collaborate on a good way to use them: the unofficial NTC drinking game (.pdf), readily adaptable to all manner of similar events. Our table gives away Salsa. With a smile.

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NTC is Here!

I've got one foot out the door to the Nonprofit Tech Conference, where several of us will be spending a good portion of the next three days. It's not too late to register, and for anyone in D.C. still feeling asea with some of the tech issues -- whether elementary or advanced -- it's well worth it if you can possibly squeeze out the hours. Free for everyone, registered or not, there's a free "science [vendor] fair" this afternoon -- lots of software/consulting/similar companies with drawings for free iPods. We'll be there as well, and with (I daresay) some intriguing raffle offerings courtesy of several members of our user community -- WITNESS, Flex Your Rights and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting. Or, just skip the product placement altogether and get straight to the free libations by hitting one of the several evening socials tonight, including DemocracyInAction's own open house. We even cleaned up for the occasion, and improved the effect with selective photographic cropping: I hope to put a lot of faces to names there. Naturally, there'll be plenty more from this highlight of the nonprofit tech calendar over the coming days.

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NTEN Seeking Online Success Stories for ABC News Piece

Copied verbatim from a message NTEN E.D. Katrin Verclas posted to a listserv, and which has as I've been typing this become a blog entry of its own ... a very short-notice opportunity to share your online success story with the world.
I am seeking some very good stories from YOU for a piece on ABC News/vcast that will feature "technology for good' or how nonprofits are using tech to make the world a better place. Here is what I am looking for: Nonprofits are getting more and more savvy in using tech - and deploying techies who are doing good in the world. In April, more than 1,000 of these "Techies for Good" are coming to Washington DC.

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The Persistence of Time

"For everything there is a season, And a time for every matter under heaven." -Ecclesiastes Seemingly that pitilessly neutral arbiter of our days, time -- or rather, the human relationship with it -- repeatedly reveals itself a contested terrain. The latest (albeit lesser) crater to pockmark that Sea of Tranquility is coming down the pike in the form of a U.S. Daylight Saving Time -- a controversial topic in its own day, and still a hot one in Indiana -- has been pushed up several weeks in 2007, to March 11 (and given a post-Halloween end date, to the delight of candy manufacturers).

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Where's Kintera?

There's a conspicuous absence from the sponsorship credits at the NTEN Nonprofit Technology Conference home page I stumbled upon in preparing yesterday's low-key upcoming events post. A dependable occupant of the conference's logo rolls the past few years, it's nowhere to be found in 2007. It's a fact of no special importance on its own (except perhaps to NTEN!), but easily read as another milepost in the struggling firm's departure from the data management and CRM universe of rank-and-file nonprofits. Naturally said reading is utter speculation; we have no special insight into this from either side of the [non-]transaction.

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Upcoming Events

In a rhythmic cycle as old as life itself, blooming with cherry trees in the warming spring air are the stale danishes, landfill-choking nametags and stultifying panel sessions of conferences. We kid, we kid. Sort of. DIA is representing in various guises at the following technology-related shindigs in the coming weeks. Stop by and say hello if you're in the proverbial house.

March of the Penguin Day

Via the Joomla disciples at PICnet, word that the traditional day-after-the-NTEN conference will indeed take place this year on April 7. A fantastic, free well-worth-the-nominal-fee, creative event focused on free and open-source sof

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Register for D.C. Nonprofit Tech Conference This Week

Just a reminder: Through Monday, you can register for N-TEN's 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference at a $200 early-bird discount. (Be a pal and pick "DIA" from the "How did you hear?" menu, eh?) The sticker price is an absolute bargain, especially since it'll be a while before Beltway denizens can once again do this without airfare or per diems. We're quite excited to have this event taking place in our own backyard and not only because it gives us an excuse to throw a bash of our own. (Details pending.)

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