This is the time of year when all the nonprofit geeks gather at NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference and when the rest of us who feel techincally savvy realize we’re probably just geek-wannabes. 🙂
Even if you not in San Francisco, it’s very easy to keep up on what’s happening. To see the conference’s Twitter stream, simply search Twitter for the hashtag #09NTC. That stream will be up long after the conference and it’s worth checking out.
There are also many folks who are live blogging from the conference. (Well they’re trying to. Apparently the San Francisco Hilton didn’t prepare for increased wifi usage so internet access has been down most of the conference. Wouldn’t that be one of the first things you prepare for when hosting a tech conference?!)
One of those bloggers is Kivi Leroux Miller. In her post, Here Comes Everybody – Lessons from Clay Shirky at #09NTC, she shares thoughts from one of the conference keynotes. Here are some nuggets from her post:
- With sharing on social media, “a problem solved by one person is now solved for thousands of people.”
- People can organize without having an organization. And they don’t need your org’s permission to organize around something related to your organization.
- Flash mobs – social media is not just a source of information, but of action. Flash mobs started as a way to mock the participants and now it is a real tool for organizing with an enormous variety of uses – users control what happens with social tools, not the designers. Take twitter – who cares what you are eating, but look how people are using it now!
- ”Failure for free” and “fail informatively” – this is the attitude that organizations need to approach social media with. Try it. Need lots and lots of experimentation to make sure that we get something good out of it.
You can read all of her takeaways at her blog. (I highly recommend you adding her RSS feed to your blog reader.)
You can also follow the comments throughout the day on the Twitter search for #09NTC. Even better, you could plug #09NTC into a great tool like TweetGrid. TweetGrid automatically refreshes so you see tweets as they come in.
