Brian Kerr

Road trip to Chicago for Omidyar conference

Two-and-a-half day open space unconference + community mashup. Leaders and organizers, activists and instigators will be discussing issues important to them and networking. See last year’s proceedings for an idea of what might happen, although the contents of this year’s proceedings will be determined by whomever shows up.

• Where: Oak Park, IL
• When: July 14, 15, and 16
• How much: as cheap as we can make it

Logistics

2 confirmed Ann Arbor attendees, wanna be #3?

About open space

Open space is a way of running a meeting that lets attendees do the things they want, and is worth checking out just for the experience.

About the Omidyar Network

Omidyar Network is a mission-based investment group committed to fostering individual self-empowerment on a global scale. The Network funds for-profits, non-profits and public policy efforts that promote:

• Equal access to information, tools and opportunities
• Rich connections around shared interests
• A sense of ownership for participants

And here’s the official invitation to this conference.

(tags: invitations)

This is weird — if you post a list of color constants as a URL to del.icio.us like this:

color:000,fff,c00,800,f4f4f4,ddd

then you get something like this:

It’s a directory of feeds emitted by School of Information folks. Use this to aggregrate, republish, remix, and etc. the mighty works of SI-bloggers. But remember: “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should” — in other words, expect a wildly uninformed and hostile response to any world-readable exercise involving these feeds!

Please send your ideas for additional feeds or fun things to do with them.

(tags: umsi weblogs)

Earlier this week, I spent two days at the Michigan Nonprofit Association’s annual SuperConference. Ed Vielmetti and I went with our University of Michigan / CIC hats on; on the first day, we discovered that two other SI students — Andy Peterson and Sunny Beach — were there as well.

Warning: since I am still trying to decide how I feel about much of the experience, this post will be maybe unhelpful to someone who was not at the conference.

The conference design was pretty challenging. Take hundreds of people representing nonprofits of all most sizes and flavors, foundations, funders, levels of government, etc., wrap them all in stuffy dress, and seat them facing in the same direction: towards a podium. There were nine workshop tracks, filling almost every moment of both days with passive listening (granting a few excellent exceptions) and leaving very little time for networking or productive hanging out. Also: no (free) wifi, no tagging, no bloggers, and exactly three laptops spotted in hands of attendees — all SI affiliates.

I can only imagine what might have happened if the tremendous expertise and passion in that room was self-directed inside an open space, instead of towards the podium.

I went in order to (1) absorb the vocabulary used at this particular level of organization within the sector, and to (2) identify the key moving parts in the overall situation. Succeeded on the first task; the second, not so much. There was plenty of discussion of problems and challenges facing Michigan nonprofits and the general nonprofit sector, but I feel like the discussion was more about symptoms than the underlying disease.

The real highlight of the planned conference was a speech by Sterling Speirn, the incoming president of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Speirn took some of the narrow yet important concerns of the day — such as finding best responses to increased visibility of and pressure on the sector, and overall concerns about process buzzwords such as sustainability — and hinted at some tools for building a more explicit futurity into the sector’s work.

Ed maybe inadvertently piqued my interest in “the” social enterprise.

I still have a bunch of notes to process, and a few books to work through.

Rest assured: after I figure all of these problems out, the solutions will be posted here.

(tags: nptech)