Communication

Michaela and Brian at the World of Coca Cola

As we do every year, Forum One participated in the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). This year's event was held in Atlanta April 8-10, and over 1,400 nonprofit tech folks attended. Brian, Kurt, and I represented the Forum One contingent.

We're pleased to be partnering with ReadWriteWeb on an exciting conference this week - "The Real Time Web Summit". If you will be in the SF Bay area you should really think about going!

Over the past month, I had the privilege of being the Forum One Project Manager for a fun, open-source web application development contest: the Apps for America 2: Data.gov Challenge.

Five years ago, CNN and 24-hour news channels and personal blogs captured US citizen dissent at the 2004 Presidential election results (or lack thereof). In 2008 TwitterVoteReport attempted to provide real-time election monitoring as US citizens posted voting experiences to their Twitter feeds. Concurrently the Obama campaign leveraged every social media tool in the book to engage US citizens, empower them with ways they could help, and ultimately contributed to winning the next presidency.

Clive Thompson's article in the latest Wired on "The Future of Reading" is a compelling read. And I found especially interesting his mentioning of "what bibliophiles call book discovery."

He talks about the benefits of both putting book content online *and* also allowing people to engage/comment/mashup the text.

The upcoming Twitter discussion I blogged about on June 1 (see below) took place last Wednesday, here's my top impressions:

First, you can see the full transcript here, posted by the event sponsor Ashoka. Its nice to have a transcript packaged, though you can also see it all by searching Twitter on hash tag #SocEntChat.

While much of the US media has focused on the recent release of Roxana Saberi after being falsely accused of spying in Iran, other cases similar remain unresolved.

I have recently participated as a speaker at several press events: a traditional press conference with newspaper reporters; a recorded over-the-telephone radio interview; and a call-in event for bloggers. While my role was to provide background on higher profile guests, it was educational this time around to be a speaker rather than an organizer.

The topic was similar in all cases -- specific cases of entrepreneurship and environmental action around the world. The results, and in particular the online results, have been interestingly distinct.

With the likely resurgence of Swine Flu (er, Influenze A[H1N1]) this fall, we're giving more thought at Forum One to communications continuity if our 40 staff need to work at home for a few weeks.

I recently updated a presentation I made to foundation CTOs entitled "Communications Continuity: Pandemic Flu Preparation for the Enterprise." It makes two key points: