Tech for Good #watech4good rocks!
On Friday, NPower co-sponsored with Microsoft a gathering of 200 nonprofit leaders to talk about the future of technology. It was an awesome event, with great opportunities to see lots of my good buddies and plus meet many new collaborators.
Originally posted on community.npowerseattle.org/npowering on February 7th, 2011.
On Friday, NPower co-sponsored with Microsoft a gathering of 200 nonprofit leaders to talk about the future of technology. It was an awesome event, with great opportunities to see lots of my good buddies and plus meet many new collaborators.
A few of my personal highlights:
Akhtar Badshah, Senior Director of Global Community Affairs for Microsoft shared a great presentation about the trends in technology -- Akhtar’s presentations always do 2 things for me: inspire me to learn more and simultaneously freak me out. Just as I start to think I’ve got a handle on it, he’s sharing new stuff. The key takeaways for me were:
- Harnessing disruptions: I love this concept. I spend a lot of time thinking about how we do things differently and how technology offers us a unique opportunity to disrupt our “normal” ways of doing things. Are we taking advantage of this to challenge ourselves to be more impactful?
- Technology is changing who is an expert: We are creating and consuming data at record amount through the use of technology, and it’s redefining who is the expert.
- Relationships: Technology offers a new opportunity to deepen relationships, to have more options
And finally, one of my key takeaways was we, as a sector, need to innovate! We should leverage the investments of companies like Microsoft, not wait for the corporate sector to tell us what to do.
Beth Kanter—If you aren’t reading her blog or following her on Twitter, you’re missing out! In addition to sharing a genius road map for social media strategy (Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly—tied to one of my favorite Martin Luther King Jr. quotes), Beth also highlighted some local social media successes:
- MOHAI Minutes as an example of “micro content”
- Symphony’s Flash Mob
- NW Harvest’s Facebook campaign to break the record for the biggest food drive
I left her session feeling so proud of our community.
Speed Geek sessions -- How can you not love this? 20 minutes of quick tech support. I don’t know about you but that fits my attention span perfectly. I sat in on the Outlook optimization session and learned helpful tips about Office 2010, including how to simplify my inbox by using conversations. Though I didn’t attend, my friends John and Don led a stable and secure session, Ash led an email best practices session, and local social media rock star Shauna Causey did a social media boot camp.
If you weren’t there, we missed you. You can check out the slides from all of the presentations on our website.
-Alison
P.S. - On a personal note: I installed MS Security Essentials on my home computer on Sunday night. It was fast and helped me sleep better knowing I had good security in place. (And it was free for home use!)
