Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

It was a great week. I got to see lots of people that I only see once a year (or even less often,) I got to meet a lot of new people, I had interesting and deep conversations, and I got to hear a lot about what people are thinking about the nonprofit technology field. I’ve got several posts on tap about specific aspects of the conference, or specific products and such that I’d come across during my time at NTC last week, so stick around.

I want to give huge props to Holly and all of the NTEN crew for putting on a fabulous conference. It was incredibly well organized and smooth running, the food and snacks were great, and the parties rocked. The conference was rich with great speakers and content, and it’s great to see how far things have come. And, as a member of the NTEN board, I’m really proud of what’s been accomplished.

There are, of course, some tweaks we can make to make sure that everyone really can gain value from NTC, and we can sustain the richness that it contains. And I’m already looking forward to NTC in San Francisco in 2009!

Somehow, given that tomorrow is such a big day in the political realm, it seems quite appropriate that I’m headed down to DC to give a talk at the Politics Online Conference. It’s a conference that is an event of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. I’ve never been - online politics has never really been my focus. But I’m quite looking forward to it. I’m giving a talk on the panel on Open Sourced Advocacy, where I’ll be speaking with my colleagues Ryan Ozimek (of PICnet) and Jo Lee (of CitizenSpeak), as well as Michael Haggerty, of Trellon, and Alan Rosenblatt, of the Center for American Progress.

I’m looking forward to talking about free and open source software to this audience.