I arrived today mid-afternoon in San Jose. Tomorrow NetSquared begins and tonight was a lovely Meet and Greet evening. I was fortunate enough to start meeting up with the Nonprofit Commons folks over hors d’oeuvres at the Hotel. It was such a pleasure meeting the folks I've been working with over the last couple of years but haven't met face to face. The only familiar (in a RL sense) face was Beth Kanter, who I've been friends with for quite a few years.

On May 27 and 28th, the third NetSquared will take place in San Jose California. The idea behind NetSquared is to explore the use of the Web and emerging technologies to foster social change.

Our mission is to spur responsible adoption of social web tools by social benefit organizations. There's a whole new generation of online tools available – tools that make it easier than ever before to collaborate, share information and mobilize support. These tools include blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, podcasting, and more. Some people describe them as "Web 2.0"; we call them the social web, because their power comes from the relationships they enable.

I have been asked to present on Drupal as it relates to social change and the non-profit community. My background is heavily rooted in the non-profit world, having worked for various arts based non-profit companies. I also studied arts, technology, theatre, and non-profit management at Virginia Tech. My presentation will occur on the 27th between 4:45 and 5:45 pm.

I have a long standing relationship with Techsoup.org. First as a consumer of the software deals that they offer to nonprofits through Compumentor. I help moderate one of the Techsoup forums on emerging technologies. The forums have become a vibrant community with many members who freely share knowledge with others in the nonprofit community.

In June, blogs were added to the mix. The Techsoup crew have been adding compelling content consistently since the blogs were launched offering up tidbits that are cross referenced in the forums allowing for community participation.

I was asked today if I would moderate the Techsoup Emerging Technologies Group.  Thanks!  I'm honoured!

Powered by Qumana

If you don't know about YouTube you must be living a sheltered life... YouTube is a video sharing site that has successfully captured a huge portion of the Internet video market. It has come under some criticism for allowing large quantities of copyright material to be pirated and uploaded onto the site. None the less, YouTube is a powerful tool that can be used by the nonprofit community to raise awareness and market.

What do I need to post and tag on YouTube?

1. An account. Signing up is easy. Go to YouTube.com and click on sign up in the top right corner of the screen. Enter in the required fields and submit. You will get a verification email which with a link that you need to click on to activate your account.
2. Upload a video. This presupposes that you have videos ready to go. YouTube accepts a wide variety of different video formats including: .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, and .MPG. Uploading a video is simple. First click on upload videos in the top right corner of the site. Second, enter in a name, description, and TAGS. For the Nonprofits in Second Life site, we are asking folks to use NPSL as a tag to identify it as related content. Choose a category and a language. Click "Continue Uploading". Browse for your file on your computer. Just like on Flickr, you can then decide who can see your video--will it be public or private to friends and/or family. Click Upload.
3. This will bring you to a page with a snippet of code you can use to embed your video into your Web site. In my case this looked like this...

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/04dCZ3Rzsho" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

I've been using Montastic for about eight days now. One of the things I appreciate about the service is the ability to add multiple emails to be alerted when there is loss of service. I currently have a message going to two of my email addresses and it will also send an IM to my cell phone. Montastic can be a little squirelly--it registers false positives when there isn't an immediate response from the server it is checking on. Still, it provides amazingly good service for something free.

Last night it and SiteUpTime.com detected the TechSoup site as being down. Interestingly, the two services showed different amounts of downtime.

Offices are being allocated to the tenants and it looks like we might start furnishing very soon. If you are interested in who is being housed where, check out the Flickr page below and mouse over the image.

NPSL (Thanks Missouri Humanities Council!)

Powered by Qumana

Recently I had an Skype message from a friend at TechSoup.  Susan is the "nonprofit administrator herder" for the Nonprofits in Second Life project.  I have to assume that she was posting to the site, or perhaps reading some recent content.  In any case, she IMed me because the site was down.  I'm acting as the Web master, so this made good sense.  I probed a little bit and came to the conclusion that the server was completely unresponsive.

I sent a quick note to our very good friends at Social*Signal who have generously donated the server space.  It turned out that it was a system-wide issue with the hosting company that they work with.

Today we were introduced to the nonprofit commons and the offices associated with them. As I've written before, Tech Soup, part of CompuMentor, is helping organize an amazing conglomerate, on Second Life, of nonprofits. The land donor, anshe chung studios, has done an amazing job creating a truly breath taking space.

The donation of the land is significant, but add the amount of programming hours that have gone into the sim and then the $200 or so it costs to maintain per month...well it is an amazing gift.

The commons has an amphitheatre for meetings, events and so forth. As you can see, the space is vast and the environment is pretty amazing.

The office spaces are huge. I'm not sure how we are going to furnish ours without the furniture becoming lost.

I think that the final product will truly rock and will generate lots of attention.

So, stay tuned and be ready to take a step inworld. I think it will be worth it.

Powered by Qumana

Today we had our weekly meeting with the Second Life Non Profit group.

Things are starting to come together with the group. The sim is going to be ready for non-profits to start moving in very soon. The group of non-profits is highly diverse as are the members. They range from arts non-profits, like the one I work for, to medical non-profits.

The meeting updated folks on

• The status of the NPSL Web site, which we are building in Drupal
• Solidified a few additional volunteer roles
• Updated the group on the sim.

CompuMentor is one of the primary organizers of the group and have done a pretty terrific job of herding the cats that are non-profit administrators.