open2media

Today, I used Oovoo for the first time to chat to Beth Kanter, based in Boston about her participation in our session taking place this Thursday. Oovoo is amazingly simple to use and see the picture about for a snapshot of what it looked like when speaking to each other. We hope to be using Oovoo in the session or Skype so that Beth can join in with David, Nick and myself to share her experiences with social media and nonprofits.

This may change - and I haven’t really checked with Laura - but at our workshop I expect to be referring quite a bit to the amazing development work my friends over at Ruralnet|UK are doing. Briefly, they are about to celebrate 10 years of providing online services to community and voluntary organisations, rural and urban too. It has been a “walled garden” approach with paid-for services behind a login. They are now re-inventing the whole thing in the social media world where a lot of good stuff is free. What’s extremely interesting is that firstly, they are doing the whole thing in the open, and inviting people to contribute online and in meetings. Secondly,they are rising to the challenge of mixing free tools and paid-for services. More at the links above to items I’ve written, or directly at ruralnet|online here.

I should say I’m working with Ruralnet, particularly with the sort of game we’ll be running at the workshop … so I’m a touch biased. But since it’s all open, you can form your own judgements.

I also hope that Paul Henderson, who is leading the development work, will be at the conference … and that I can tempt him to give a wave from here!

Part of this blog is a follow on of conversations which took place on my blog when I recently asked the question “Social Media for Non-profits - what do you recommend?” in preparation to help David, Nick and myself to be able to collaborate and create a workshop for the UK Circuit Riders conference. In true collaborative social networking style, I asked the question, not only on my blog, but used other networks including Twitter, Facebook and Seesmic too (plus the old fashioned ‘web 0.0′ face to face with small organisations to see what their needs were!).

Using my blog and various networks was a really useful way to reach out to others and I received lots of comments and suggestions back from many people, some who I knew, and others who I had never connected with prior to this which was really exciting, getting an active global conversation taking place using a variety of media.

One example of creating conversation was the reply on Seesmic I received from Brian Rendel, based in Michigan who offered some of his ideas of what we should share in our session to help ICT development workers/circuit riders with helping them understand and join in with social media. Follow this link to see his reply …

Do feel free to comment and participate in this new blog, if you wish to write articles / posts that are relevant or submit information or links that we might have missed, do contact us!