There are big changes in my future. I've spent the last nine months or so championing the use of Web 2.0 technologies in promoting the nonprofit community in general with an emphasis on the arts. A big part of this has focused on the convergence of different technologies in mashups. These have included:

1. Drupal
2. Flickr
3. Revver
4. YouTube
5. Twitter
6. SecondLife

I see myself as a trainer, writer, technologist, zealot, and missionary. I take part in Nonprofits in Secondlife and have been posting to Techsoup's forums. I like to share knowledge.

I'm happy to say that the change in my life has me moving from my position at WESTAF in Denver to pingVision in Boulder. pingVision is a creative design studio that specialises in Drupal site design, DVD authoring, and graphic design.

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In my intersection with other nonprofits through the NPSL group and on the TechSoup site I am expanding my focus to deal with emerging technologies in general and how they can be utilized by the nonprofit community as a whole. My background is in the arts, so expect to continue to see some bias for that industry but my personal experiences over the last two years have shifted my sense of self toward social justice (although being Canadian probably has something to do with that too.)

So, while the focus has been shifting over the last six months, expect it to be more apparent--including the updated header.

Most arts organizations are non-profits with limited resources. Some are public agencies like city or state run organizations—often low on the funding totem pole. What this means is that resources deployed carefully with little risk. Thoughtful dissemination of money, people, time are essential to protect any non-profit’s investments. While this behaviour can protect what an agency has, it does not encourage risky behaviour.

Ironically the agencies that can most use Web 2.0 are those least capable of deploying such systems.

Web 2.0 is in its infancy. The tools have consistently become better and better over the last three years. To best utilize the tools, you are best off using a variety of different tools as you can embed assets from one set of tools into another through the use of widgets. Widgets allow a user to generate a little chunk of code that can be placed on a page, in a block, on a blog, in a wiki that embed content onto that page.

You may notice that some of my older posts on the blog are now listed as "admin". I had been using the default admin account to post, but one of the things that were were taught this past week as to never use user "0" as your main account--that you always should set up an "admin" role and assign a new account to that role.

To that end, you'll see that my older posts now are listed as "admin". I may re-set the author on them.