Drupal Professionals Shop Conference Call

We just finished the first Drupal Professionals Conference Call. The Agenda was: 1) Introductions: Rep from each shop introduces and mentions any client funded module development, or other module development that folks might not know about (please limit to 3 to 5 minutes) 2) Discussions: a) Drupal Pros Directory (15) b) Drupal Camp Training (15) c) Contributing Back to the Drupal Community (15) d) Building shared support infrastructure for customers 3) Next Steps (planning next call, smaller working groups, etc) We had 21 total callers according to the conference call service. Aaron recorded these 16 attendees: Gregory Heller, Aaron Pava, Dan Robinson, Kieran (Amazon), Omar (obicke) (and Ararcat in irc), Eric Gunderson, David Geilhufe, Kaliya, Kitt, Noel, Scott Trudeau, Laura Scott (pingv), Rich Orris (Rorris), Zack Rosen (zacker), Ted (m3avrck), John Sechrest The notes and chat script and audio recording of the call are...

Return to sender….

How many times have you received an email from a sender you don’t recognize about a website that you do recognize? More specifically, how many political emails (about candidates or otherwise) have you gotten that are sent by some staffer on the campaign who’s name is generally unremarkable? Well, i get dozens of political emails a week, many from NY State or city candidates. Recently a new name started popping up in my in box. lets just say the email address is “Sally.Smith@s68659.istandfor.com”, but then the from addres in the message header appears to be “Campaign Manager markgreenny@gmail.com”. A few obvious questions: why isn’t the sender email address an @margreen.com address? Why aren’t they the same? a gmail account? What is with that crazy istandfor domain? and why isn’t the name in the from address one that is going to be a bit more catchy? Does the campaign really think that I am going to develop a relationship with this person in they way that I might have in the early days of moveOn with Zack or Eli? The emails I am getting are mostly just press releases, with no personal voice whatsoever. It would make more sense for the messages to come from “Mark Green For AG announce@markgreen.com” have the sender be the same, and have the reply to be “feedback@markgreen.com” or some such. Another campaign that is doing a similar thing is the Hillary Clinton Campaign, Ann Lewis is the apparent sender of the emails, but at least they are written in a personal voice from Ann. The move on folks have been using a new format...

Adding Audio or Video to make your site stickier

Many organizations don’t think about how they can incorporate new types of content into their web strategies in order to compete in the “marketâ€? for their members’ or constituents’ time. The same goes for politicians and candidates. Podcasting and videocasting is really much easier that it looks and sounds. Many organizations already do plenty of things that would translate well to the web. Politicians give speeches all the time. Non profits have member meetings, or board meetings, conference calls. Recording these events, either audio or video, and then making this content available on the web gives site visitors a reason to come back over and over again. A conference call can easily be recorded using Skype and some desktop software. A press conference can be recorded with a digital voice recorder, or a laptop, or digital camera with video recording capabilities. Sites like YouTube allow you to upload video and serve it out to the web. GarageBand and Audacity are two applications that let a user edit audio on the desktop and encode it as an MP3 file. I used my Canon SD450 camera to shoot short videos during the OSCMS-Summit and uploaded them to YouTube and embedded them into our blog on this site. The process was simple. A non profit could record short clips of board members, or members talking about what happened at an event or a meeting, no post production is really necessary, and upload them to the web for people to see. The idea here is not to add more work to the non-profit’s or politician’s or candidate’s plate, but to leverage the things...

World Changing: Open Source Design and more

Every few days, or at least once a week, I scroll through my World Changing feed and read a few articles, forward them to a few friends, maybe blog one. Today I am going to blog a few, because there are a bunch stored up. So here they are: Alex Steffen rights about Cameron Sinclaire’s Ted Prize Wish to create an open source design resource: collaborative solution-seeking is not only our best hope for solving the most profound problems facing our planet, it is our only hope. Last night I was having a conversation with a friend, and her friend who is a part of an elite US Army unit, he specializes in Geo-Spacial Data and Intelligence. We had an interesting conversation. Afterward, my friend and I had that throw-your-hands-up moment where we both agreed “the world is so messed up, how can anything we do change it” and it took some time, and is still taking time to reconcile the reality on the ground with my convictions that we can change it. I spent this last weekend with some folks who are building a housing co-op in Dutches County NY, I was truly inspired by their committment, their values and their work to create a sustainable building as an example to others, and a values based community. We can all make a difference, as cliched as it sounds, if we believe that we can, and we work to realize the change we want to see. This is why I love World Changing, it is filled with articles about people doing just that. And technology, and the open source...

Attention Streams

Distributing the Future has podcast with a segment on “attention streams”. I have been posting on the topic here, including 2 podcasts with Fen. I declare 2006 the year of...