My Five Reasons for Attending the NTC in 2007
April 3rd, 2007 by mcg
I thought it might be interesting to share my reasons for attending the Nonprofit Technology Conference in Washington, DC this year. I was promted to write these up by a question posed on the conference mailing list. Here are my five objectives:
(1) Journal of Information Technology in Social Change: I’m coming to the NTC to promote the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change and the things it stands for, including innovation, evidence based practice, peer review, and the decommercialization of our work together. The first issue of this Journal is a joint project of The Gilbert Center and NTEN. Every attendee of the conference will get a free copy - check your packet for the download information. There will be a panel on Friday, where we’ll have at least half a dozen fast paced presentations on cutting edge research in our field.
(2) People with a Systems Vision and a Mission of Empowerment: I’m coming to the NTC because I love the people who do this work. Like those who think about capacity building, the health of civil society, collaboration, and related issues, the people who work on information and communication infrastructure often see the systems and connections that others miss. The mission of empowerment that goes with that vision continues to inspire me.
(3) Blogging the Conference: I’m coming to the NTC to see if I can actually blog a conference of this size, where I know that - Twitter-like - I will be pulled in a hundred directions at once. I’ve subscribed to every RSS feed that I think is likely to have a high proportion of NTC related posts (yes, even the NTEN Twitter feed), although I doubt very much that I’ll be able to keep up. I’ll be looking to see how the backchannel segments, whether it does so in ways that are useful to participants, and how well the backchannel supports presenters and others who’ve donated their time. I’ll be blogging about all this and more at http://with.gilbert.org. (I’ll be linking to the best bits from Nonprofit Online News.) You can check out my first post already, which has a map of the online connections between some NTEN members - the NTEN social network, so to speak.
(4) The Gilbert Author’s Network: I am coming to the NTC to find new authors for the Gilbert Author’s Network. Last year, I finally started to pull together a network of my own peers, for whom I serve as something of a first reader or, at least, number one fan. There’s only four of us in it right now, but I have high hopes for the coming year. If you know of someone you would like to recommend, please let me know. Or if you yourself are interested and - after taking a look at the authors we have already - think you could contribute well to the network, also feel free to get in touch. I’m looking for original voices with a passion for good work, in all its forms.
(5) Advice on a “Secret” Project: I’m coming to the NTC to get advice about an under-the-radar web application of mine.. Among the new projects I’ve been working on over the last year is what might be called a Web 2.0 approach to information about organizations. I’ll say more about that - and even do a little pre-release demo - to anyone who’s interested. Drop me a line if this teaser intrigues you at all.
[...] First of all, my paper Online Volunteers: Knowledge Managers in Nonprofits has been accepted to be published in the first issue of the new Journal of Information Technology in Social Change, that is going to be presented at the 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference by Michael Gilbert (along with the people at The Gilbert Center and NTEN, who have worked together to make it happen). [...]