EchoDitto

I feel as if I am in a secret club.

Backstory: One of my best friends, Sarie, works at MoMA, and pretty much anything I know about contemporary art is due to our friendship. Things like: the new Olafur Eliasson microsite that user Flickr to sort user-generated photos, or the fact that you can get AudioGuides on your iPhone or on iTunesU, or PopRally. Aka the secret club.

PopRally describes itself as

a program of events at The Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center that features collaborations with artists and musical acts, performances, film screenings, receptions, and special viewings of exhibitions at moderate prices.

MoMA hosts amazing events featuring art, film, performance and music, with free booze for $8, aimed at a younger, hipper audience.

In honor of Earth Day today, we at EchoDitto are joining with individuals around the world who are committing to do something to combat climate change. Most of us already walk, bike, or take public transportation to work; we're adamant recyclers; and we use environmentally-friendly cleaning products from Seventh Generation. But today we're especially proud to contribute to the fight against global warming with the relaunch of 1Sky.org.

1Sky was created in 2007 with one primary objective: to harness the power of the millions of Americans who are concerned about climate change in order to pass federal legislation by 2010 that can reverse global warming. Since its founding, 1Sky has built a platform of specific solutions, partnered with organizations and allies around the country, and activated a network of over 50,000 citizens who are actively lobbying for policy change and garnering support for the 1Sky solutions in meetings with their members of Congress.

A few weeks ago, I read an EchoDitto Labs blog post about Dorkbot DC, which prompted me to search for a NYC equivalent. Bingo! Dorkbot NYC meets the first Wednesday of every month only a few blocks from our office. Perfect, for someone like me who is essentially lazy.

What is Dorkbot?
dorkbot-nyc is a monthly meeting of artists (sound/image/movement/whatever), designers, engineers, students, scientists, and other interested parties from the new york area who are involved in the creative use of electricity. dorkbot meetings are free and open to the public. Since we started dorkbot-nyc in 2000 many other dorkbots have sprung up around the world. See them all at: http://dorkbot.org

I just flew in from Barcelona, and boy are my arms tired!

Well, not really - actually I got back about two weeks ago, but what with finalizing development and launching President Clinton's newest site and the Bears beating the Packers, I haven't had a lot of time to collect my thoughts and set them down via an interblag. Well, now that things have calmed down slightly, I figured I'd give it a shot.

First of all, Barcelona is an amazing city. It's incredibly metropolitan - sort of like New York on a smaller scale and with more spanish, although most people with whom I interacted spoke great English. It's really easy to get around, which was good since the conference was taking place at CitiLab Cornélia, on the outskirts of the city.

I started my professional life as a student teacher at James Blair Middle School in Williamsburg, Virginia. Teaching has always been in my blood; I absolutely love learning, which is the other side of the coin. My grandmother was an amazing teacher; you can still buy her textbooks on Amazon. And for the last year and half, I've taught a class in the Johns Hopkins University Graduate School of Communications on digital communications. This semester, I'm teaching the class entirely online, remotely, with no face-to-face meetings.

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

Being the early-adopting nerd that I am, I've gone through my share of widgets. I've tinkered with every site- and PC-based widget engine from Konfabulator to Yahoo Widgets to Google Desktop. At work I use a Mac, so I got to experiment with those guys, including an ill-fated Christmas Countdown widget. But as much as I love fun technology, the overwhelming uselessness of widgets thus far has tainted my expectations for the platforms that enable them. The fact is, I've never had any stocks to check. If something's really important, I'll place the RSS feed or bookmark somewhere prominent within Firefox. And don't get me started on how many different ways I can check the weather.

Which is why I owe Katya Andresen thanks for her Net Squared DC presentation last night for changing all of that and making me realize their potential again.

This last Saturday, I was at DrupalCamp here in New York. I went because I:

It was wicked fun, and I have some musings about what I learned later. Skip this paragraph if you already know about Drupal...in case you don't know what Drupal is, it's a feature-rich open-source web Content Management System that simplifies publishing web content. For example, it has a What-you-see-if-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) content editor, so you don't necessarily have to learn HTML to publish web pages. Several organizations, notably MTV UK as well as certain clients of EchoDitto, like the Pearl Harbor Stories Project, use Drupal. I should note that Drupal can be a partial alternative to the packages that the two companies Michael talks about in this post, although there are pros and cons to making that choice.

Just announced moments ago, we're not yet entirely sure yet what this means for everyone, but we know two things:

1. Twenty-five percent of the fully integrated eCRM/CMS market just disappeared, reducing options to three very different providers: Convio, Blue State Digital, and Kintera (not counting open-source solutions and a myriad of other tools of course)

2. This is likely to have a pretty dramatic impact on the nonprofit and social change technology space. Will this encourage more healthy competition from the other vendors and providers? (I hope so.) Or will Convio innovate less due to their massive new market share and potential perceived lack of competition? (I hope not.) And will this make open source solutions even more attractive to potential clients and users? (I think yes.)

Michael and I attended RootsCampDC this weekend. It was an amazing conference with an equally exciting vibe. The attendees were all remarkable people with great stories and experiences to share. They included 2006 campaign workers fresh off the trail, a candidate for U.S. Senate and leaders of the netroots community.

The idea of the conference was to bring these ideas together to progressive ideas to reality, and I think it really worked. The sessions I attended were filled with lively discussion and some great ideas were shared.