Weblog
May 6, 04:18 am: Things I should be writing about
I’m a list maker and here’s the stuff I’ve told myself I should write up as blog posts:
- FriendFeed – doesn’t crank my tractor. I mean, I want context not just a stream of info.
- Attention is the marketplace. And social benefit projects have a secret sauce. Twitter friends think it’s about the story (1, 2, 3, 4). I think it’s about the data. And the juxtaposition of that data. Social benefit organizations collect a lot of stuff — how many people need food, get food, need shelter, are seeking mental health assistance, need a surgery, leave near a polluted water source, don’t have access to water. How do they use this secret sauce to make the change they seek?
- Does social networking, and the way it helps you reach out to the like minded, just give us more ways to preach to the choir? It’s the think tank, baby.
- What can Facebook do to be less annoying? Anything? Anyone?
- It’s a post-fact world. How about a post context world? Blogging lost some context. Twitter loses more. Good? Bad? Does it matter?
Whatcha think? Any of those worth more effort than that?
Tags: net2, blogging, lists, friendfeed, nptech, socialnetworking, facebook, post-fact, attention
May 3, 03:40 pm: It's got to be easier than this
Marhsall Kirckpatrick has a great detailed post on putting up an RSS-based microsite. Though this was done to support an event, it’s easy for nptech readers to translate to an issue-based site. Such a microsite could be great for managing information internally or externally.
But what he writes about is hard. Frankly, we need at tool, out-of-the-box, to do some of the basic things he’s suggesting:
- figure out way to measure “popularity”
- get rid of duplicate posts
- measure the various links
Marshall does a fantastic job of cobbling together a variety of tools but should that be necessary?
[From Marshall Kirkpatrick » How to Build an RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project]
Mar 25, 02:58 pm: UN-GAID Session: ICT Entrepreneurs
In front of the room:
Notes:
- David Kirkpatrick: Bias toward entrepreneurship and that for-profit can be the leading driver for change all over the world.
- Kirkpatrick: Idea that there is tremendous power in for-profit models in the most unlikely places.
- Glenn Strachan: encourager of entrepreneurship. use schools to anchor wireless in Macedonia. price of Internet fell from $200 (US) to $20 (US) which lead 30% increase in service in homes. required UN $ and revamping Macedonia regulatory laws.
- (My thought: libraries could be used to do the same thing)
- Emdad Khan: computer represents 15% of the telephone penetration. Right now, neither of the two devices — computers or PDAs — can close the digital divide. So trying to use phone and voice to do that.
- (My thought: works like 511 traffic if you’ve got that in area. Seems like it would be good for getting targeted info but would not allow you to get the benefits of serendipity and finding others or info that you don’t know you want. But maybe those two things are a luxury.)
- Kristin Peterson: Inveneo is a nonprofit social enterprise — get ICT out to the people who need it most. Typically, people in remote and rural areas. They create solutions that are specific to those populations. In the area of education, health care and I’m just not typing fast enough. They create hardware and software. How do you create ICT in punishing environments — lack of power, novice administrators for example. ICT solutions are not enough. Also need to have human structure to that building up an ecosystem of local entrepreneurs in the communities in which they work. Those people do the installation and support for the organizations they serve. This brings the support closer to the end client and creates access cost-effective access to technology. Currently operate in 10 counties — all in Africa.
- Amjad Umar: GEZA — Global Enterprise Zone for All. If you are going to change long range model, you must work with entrepreneurs. Access is not enough. They need to know how to start biz over the internet, how to run their biz, excel and compete in this ever changing global marketplace. Developed a yellow pages of resources and it is ranked. Consolidate existing content and make it available in an integrated fashion.
- David Liu: represents a private internet company in China to provide financial information to investors in China. Put together news, data, prices and send to investors via email. Says they use web 1.0 – one way models. That’s how they started. Kept building to help this. Then opened their platform for anyone to contribute to to provide financial information. Has been a very successful strategy: they have 220K users. They have created an investor-centric community so that everyone can contribute their experiences. Key point is to learn to share with others.
- Glenn Strachan: everything is different now because of using and spreading access. Build it and they will come. Really.
Signing off a little early to get ready for my session.
Tags: un, gaid, conference, notes
Mar 25, 02:03 pm: UN-GAID: United Nations Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs - Notes from the opening
A mix of observations and snippets of quotes. Context and spelling may both be lacking.
- Internet lowers the threshold to start a business
- ICT can allow entrepreneurs to flourish improving the economy overall
- Investment, partnerships required to build robust platforms
- ICT must be spread in the community facilitates national security, law and order
- I think the speaker from Ghana just said their e-govt initiative supported by 13M US $.
- Building a fiber optic backbone in Ghana
- Cannot explain term “emerging markets” but would say “changing geo-global markets”.
- “Never seen so much fast and dramatic change in the economic world order as seen today.”
- “To get things we have partners. For fun, we go to friends.”
- Biz speaker calling for GAID to translate into action and turn the good will into bottom line results
Related links:
- UN Meets Web 2.0 and ICT Entrepreneurs
- Super Friends Hall of Justice (thanks howardgr)
- Ghana’s ICT sector is up to speed
Tags: un, gaid, conference, notes
Mar 23, 03:01 am: A big shout of thanks
To NTEN and Beth Kanter for the kind words.
It’s nice to feel like the work that you do makes a difference to folks and I’m very appreciative of the fact that NTEN recognized that by giving me this year’s NTEN award.
And congrats also to Vince Stehle, for his lifetime achievement award, and Beth Kanter for her people’s choice award.
Mar 17, 05:19 pm: Looking forward to...
- NTC in New Orleans. Getting there Tuesday night.
- Easter Sunday in Washington DC. There for some meetings on Monday and, despite missing my family, I’m going to enjoy spending some time in the city and actually getting to see things.
- United Nations Meets Web 2.0 in NYC. First time I’ve been there and I’m going to be too busy to actually see anything.
- Getting home after 10 days away. I’ll miss both of ‘em.
If you want to get ahold of my feel free to you the regular contact methods or direct message me on twitter
Mar 12, 05:32 pm: Net2 talks to the Yahoo! developer network
Okay. Not all of Net2. But Billy and I did. And we had fun doing it, too!
Tags: net2, video, yahoo, developer, network, outreach, mashups, dyb
Dec 17, 08:50 pm: Stop lecturing!
I’m guilty of it. I do it on the phone with my mother and at meetings. I try not to. But I do.
My name is Marnie and I lecture.
And I do it even though I value the conversation. I do it because it’s damed hard not to.
In The Fine Art of (not) Lecturing reporter Louise Brown writes:
Here in the most daunting teaching venue in the country – a three-tiered, chandeliered hall of 1,500 seats booked with classes from Monday to Friday – the cut and thrust of the Q and A survives against tough odds.If it can make it here, it can make it anywhere – which is good, because it’s the intellectual cut and thrust that opens the brain to deep learning, says Nobel laureate Carl Wieman, Canada’s new guru of science teaching. Wieman, who runs a think-tank on teaching science at the University of British Columbia, was flown here recently to help 500 U of T and York professors rethink how they teach.
His message? Don’t drone. Get students talking and guessing and arguing. Our short-term memory can only process four ideas at a time, he warns, so don’t try to cram whole chapters into an hour. In a nutshell: reduce the load; stimulate the brain.
“I can’t imagine a three-hour lecture, personally, but getting students to flex their brains during class rather than just sit there passively is exactly what we want to see,” Wieman said in an interview.
It’s that interaction – the answering and arguing and persuading – that stimulates protein in the brain, which in turn helps anchor ideas into long-term memory, he says.
So, time what’s going to get your donors engaged? A lecture about the wrongs that need righting? A piling on of statistics? An earnest furrowed brow? Or a question?
One of the big benefit of using interactive tools is to use them to engage people. To ask questions. To get help. But how many folks do that? C’mon. Have you used facebook to get feedback on what your organization is doing? Or do you use facebook to tell people, get them to tell other people?
I taught a workshop with Sue Bennett on web 2.0 tools. It was nice to be in a lab and actually help people signon and search for things that are being said about their organizations. Their topics.
And it was amazing to watch them react to what people were saying. Not what they wanted folks to say. But what they were actually saying and sharing.
I’m just saying. How are using the tools for conversation? For the lively Q and A that will stick in people’s minds?
tagged: net2, nptech, interactions, how
Dec 5, 04:45 am: Why should you be on Facebook?
In an article for Harvard Business, Forrester’s Charlene Li writes:
Let’s start with a fundamental premise – that all business is social and personal. Business involves people and communications and we all prize “networking” skills and opportunities. Businesses don’t strike deals with each other – people do. And we build bonds by talking about everything from sports teams and the weather to our families and hobbies.So we as business people already engage in social networking every day, primarily through phone calls, emails, meetings, and events. The same activities take place on social networking sites – people share the tidbits and moments that build relationships.
She’s writing about business but it’s true of foundations as well: People are the ones doing the work, making the change, calling the shots.
But this line of thinking can too easily lead to fundraising and asking someone to be an ATM is not the same thing as engaging with them. And it’s still hard to figure out what that engagement can look like. Here’s what Charlene writes about that:
But remember: The notion of creating social applications is only 6 months old – we are in the early days here. Business-oriented developers are just now waking up to the possibilities, and the audience that would use these tools are just discovering social networking. It’s going to take some time for these two sides to find each other and develop an ecosystem for business applications.
And that’s the key. Not thinking that every problem is money or advocacy but thinking about other ways to engage and talking with motivated developers about what can happen.
tagged: net2, facebook, charleneli, enterprise, tools, nptech
Oct 5, 04:21 pm: Have you used Mechanical Turk?
I’m interested in ways that people can outsource work (things like translations or doing market research) and the ways that nonprofits can get questions answered. To that end, I’m interested in Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. It’s artificial artificial intelligence. People put in a question or task, provide some value (in dollars to it) and then others respond to the need. There’s more to it than that but that’s the basics.
This is more than social search — it’s applying a product commerce model to services. Have you ever used it rather than finding an individual to contract with or doing work yourself? If so, I’d love to hear about it.
tagged: amazon, mechanicalturk, services, exchange, nptech, net2
