Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT

When you talk about citizen media, use it!

Just sat through a lecture by esteemed journalist and blogger champion, Dan Gillmor . Yes...here in Montpelier, VT. Dan went to school here in Vermont, so came by to visit his old stomping grounds I  suppose.

I'll keep my blowhard critiques about his PowerPoint presentation to myself.  What I will take issue with is how few people were there and how ridiculous the publicity was for this thing.  Cathy posted about it earlier today, while her employer, the weekly 7 Days had an article in the issue that came out yesterday.  Besides that, a few posters here and there around town.  Perhaps there were some buried PR spots in other local newspapers, but I didn't see them. 

Regardless, if your going to come all the way to Vermont during the crappiest season of the year (Mud Season) to lecture on Citizen Media, then use it to get the word out.  We live in an amazingly progressive and civicly engaged state with a burgeoning blogger community - as far as I can see that community was not tapped to publicize the lecture.  With more (hell...any) experienced citizen journalist (i.e. iBrattleboro.com ) present, we could have had a far more engaged conversation about the phenomenon of Democratized Media , rather than debating conspiracy theories.

My apologies for the bad case of the grumps on this one.

Technorati Tags: vermont, 7 Days, dan gillmor, citizen media

Google Calendar has arrived - The On Demand Nonprofit ever closer

Although I've really been digging 30 boxes lately, I'm thoroughly overjoyed and giddy by this AM's news of the Google Calendar launch.  Tech Crunch has the skinny. 

With Google Calendar I am seeing a clearer actualization of  what Steve Wright from the Salesforce.com Foundation has called the On Demand Nonprofit - using integrated web-based services to further a nonprofit's mission by eliminating the expense and complexity of closed and/or client/server systems.

• I'm switching CERF over to Gmail for Domains in the very near future (received an account a couple weeks ago) so we can have both POP and webmail access (and they're integrated no less).
  
• I'm using Thumbware.com's Salesforce.com Gmail Integration tools (there's one other one, but I'm not sure if its public yet). Ian...thank you for all your work.
  
•  I'm using Writely to collaborate on shared documents, using the document URL in the Project area of Salesforce.com

Too much dependence on Google? Maybe... but no worse than the dependence that we nonprofits have had on Microsoft products for over a decade.  The difference is that a service delivery model (as oppossed to software products) breeds competition and keeps inovation sharp and costs down.

Connecting the dot orgs is not all about Google and Salesforce.com.  Anyone at NTC can tell you that application integration is all the talk - how to best leverage the strengths of different systems for the benefit of mission driven organizations. The closed system players of Raiser's Edge, Kintera, Convio and the like are scared by the is new business and technology delivery model - precisely because they have not adapted (and no, the summer release of RE online does not count...its still closed).

There's an emerging ecosystem of players out there - and IMHO, they have far more street credibility for serving the nonprofit sector (and the greater good) rather than taking advantage of it:

• Democracy in Action
• CiviCRM
• Flickr
• CollectiveX
• Skype
• There are so many others...please use comments to list yours.

Technorati Tags: Google Calendar, nptech, salesforce.com, web2.0, nonprofit,