I’ve been a little preoccupied recently because of a one-day conference I’m presenting at in Hamilton next week. Engage your Community: Using Blogs, YouTube and other Cool Tools to achieve your group’s goals is for community groups, to help them connect with volunteers, staff, and other stakeholders
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In the last couple of years I’ve written materials for New Zealand community groups to help them set up a website: Connect your community, and more recently: Webguide 2.0, a starter kit wiki with information about current Internet tools that can help organisations. That wiki is a starting point — we want groups and other contributors to build on the information that’s there, adding details of more tools, more case studies. There’s plenty of scope.
Next week’s conference has grown out of the wiki, with a strong emphasis on hands-on, practical workshops.
I’m offering a workshop called Keeping up with the Joneses: the easy way to stay in-the-know.
Organisations need to keep up with news of current events and other flows of information that affect and relate to the work they do, both currently and in the future. This workshop will help you learn how to keep up with the flood of information, and get started on efficiently monitoring what’s going on in the world that you should know about. [Miraz will] talk specifically about using RSS feeds and a “technology scout”.
The “technology scout” was something I wrote about a few months back.
I haven’t quite finished my prep yet for the workshop, but as it’s hands-on I’m not too concerned. I’ll introduce the participants to RSS feeds, Google Reader, searches at places like Technorati, Google Alerts and the notion of creating their own RSS feeds.
My big concern though has been the keynote presentation I’m doing to open the Conference: The new Internet: friends, connections and community. It’s a 15 to 20 minute speech, with which I aim to inspire, not instruct. I want to fire up participants with the notion that Web 2.0 technologies can change lives. I’ve spent all week (and more) coming up with my script, locating movies, images and case studies to illustrate my points, figuring out just what my points are.
I finally have a bunch of stuff (Keynote slides) and some text, and my job now is to polish it up, refine it, and make sure it leaves the audience with a couple of clear messages to take away and remember. And I also need to add in the credits for all the images, movies and sounds I’ve included.
Along the way I’ve been using and learning about Apple’s Keynote application. It’s just wonderful! It keeps on giving me the “I rule” experience that Kathy Sierra has so often written about.
Next Tuesday’s the big day. Till then, I’m just a bit busy.
