EchoDitto

If you're in DC tonight and you're not afraid of a little rain, come join us in Adams Morgan, where we'll be pimping out Our Voices Together's online presence.

"Pimp my Nonprofit" is NetSquared DC's regular bi-monthly brainstorm session. Instead of installing black lights in an El Camino, we help a featured nonprofit elevate their game.

Through this case-study oriented conversation, everyone will have a chance to learn vicariously from some of the leading technology and communications experts in DC. Thus we encourage any consultants and geeks in the audience to show up and strut your stuff.

I use Google Maps all the time. Housingmaps.com, which mashes Google Maps up with Craigslist listings, has found my last two apartments for me. The GPS built into my Helio Ocean has saved me from getting lost countless times in the short time I've owned it.

If mapping software can do all of this for me, imagine what it can do for nonprofits with causes slightly more noble than geo-tagging my Flickr photos. That's what we aim to find out at this month's NetSquared DC Meetup, Mapping for Nonprofits. Details after the jump.

After living in the DC suburbs for a little over three years, I finally moved downtown to Capitol Hill. If you’re not familiar with the geography of our fair city, I’m in the Southeast corner near the wonders of Eastern Market, Union Station, Barracks Row and all the other exciting places The Hill has to offer. But with all of these great attractions and historical beauty also comes the threat of crime.

Much like my colleague, Chris, I too have been mugged. I’ve also had my car stolen and torched, and had my cell phone lifted on Christmas Eve. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not playing the victim. I know urban living is unique no matter what city you’re in.

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.

What a drag.

Still, it was sort of exhilarating.

Tonight was my one year anniversary of moving to Washington. I spent it at some friends' house a few blocks north from where I live. We ate excellent spinach lasagna while watching some crumby sitcoms. Something about Julia Louis-Dreyfus sleeping with Andy Richter. Everyone had had an intense work-filled weekend, so our brains were throughly switched off. Soon I said goodbye to head home and do a little more work.

I stuck in my earbuds and a few blocks south arrived at my street. By this point I had "Hanningfield Window" by Squarepusher blaring away ( which by the way is an excellent track to get mugged to). I noticed a guy hanging out in a dark, little staircase at the beginning of the street. It wasn't really a spot many people would choose to hang out in, so I thought "man, this guy looks a little sketchy, I'm going to cross the street." So I did, and I figured it was nothing. There are always people hanging out on my street. Either way, my place was about three houses up from where I was.

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.

I shouldn't be surprised, but I can't help but be impressed with how we heard back from the RootsCamp DC organizers only moments after signing-on as sponsors. It wasn't just the typical 'thank you' that you might expect. Instead Roz told us exactly who we were enabling to attend through our sponsorship -- the real name of the real internet director coming off a campaign in CA who wouldn't otherwise be able to participate in this post-election debrief.

The email we received is exactly what we try so hard to emphasize across all of our projects and client work: making clear the true, real-world impact of every action or contribution that we ask of others. And following-up as quickly as possible to close the loop and show how every person's contribution is part of something larger than themself. So Roz's note brought a smile to our--ok, my--face.

Back in the days of Howard Dean, I spent many late nights with our own "Meetup" Michael Silberman building the tools we would use to organize and empower the leagues of Dean supporters at events in all 50 states and at hundreds of venues. It was a lesson in community building not easily forgotten, and I soon found myself anxiously looking for more opportunities in online/offline organizing. The one I found was both obvious and surprising all at once.

My apartment building is big. Really big. It's actually two buildings, with a combined 800 units between them. When I first moved to DC, I had never lived in a building large enough to warrant a laundry room, much less a gym, and I when I first moved here, I marveled at the density of urban living.

For a long time I've been skeptical of the role of video online. I always felt like people just liked watching videos on their television sets - not their computers. Evidence about online video use seemed to support my anecdotal conjecture.

But the last few months have delivered some major blows to my theory. Apple introduced the video ipod and started selling television shows through the iTunes store - and people took to it in droves. At the same time, YouTube seems to have become completely ubiquitous, allowing video publishing and video sharing to completely explode. And I was with a friend recently who now watches the Daily Show via his cell phone every day using Verizon's V-Cast.

Riding up the escalator at Farragut North this morning, I heard someone hawking at the top of the stairs and immediately started thinking about how to avoid them. Even though it was a little early for the LaRouche supporters to be out, I took a defensive stance: eyes down, holding my phone as though I needed to make an important call.

As I got closer, I realized there was something different about the people handing out fliers today. "We only recycle 2% of cell phones! We need to do more," said the friendly but earnest voice. It was enough to get me to look, and by then I'd been handed a flier promoting a cell phone recycling program for Earth Day. The flier explains that cell phones contain "lead, mercury and arsenic" and that tossing them in the trash pollutes our air, land and water with these hazardous and toxic materials. A further scan showed it had a catchy URL — www.recyclemycellphone.org — so it was a keeper.