Session Notes

Day 3 of Social Tech Training kicked off with a specially recorded video address from world renowned digital futurist Don Tapscott.

The author of Growing Up Digital and Wikinomics sent a special message to the leaders of STT participating organizations, executive and communications directors, who are often from a different demographic than their web teams. Don drives home the critical importance of culture change and adaptation, and posits that our rapidly shifting world demands those qualities of any organization that hopes to be successful in the digital age.

During STT 2008, Jon Warnow presented on the key factors every campaigner needs to consider in developing effective online communications. Here are the highlights from his presentation.

Ricken Patel is the founder and Executive Director of Avaaz.org, the world’s largest online advocacy organization with 3.3 million active members (320,000 in Canada) just over one year into its life. Avaaz recently ran the fastest growing petition of all time, gathering 1.5 million signatures over Spring 2008 in support of Tibetan independence. Avaaz is also recognized for its now-famous campaign at the 2007 Bali climate change talks, which mobilized over 300,000 people in 72 hours.

Web 2.0 carries a vast potential to transform social change organizations and galvanize supporters into meaningful actions. But to enable that potential, organizations need to commit to a shift in values and culture that can as big as the their work on the ground.

Kris Krug of Raincity Studios and Beca Econoupoulos of Greanpeace provided some key tips for organizations during the 2008 STT.

Keeping to the spirit of the event, the Open Everything Retreat at Hollyhock utilized an event wiki to make all resources about travel, attendees, sessions and agendas availabe to all. The wiki continues to be available at http://openeverything.wik.is/Retreat_wiki.

Day 1 of Open Everything at Hollyhock has passed and I’m now up far too late blogging about it.

Numerous insights, but possibly the most interesting occurred during the spectrogram exericse where we asked participants to physically locate themselves along an axis (in our case a piece of tape along the floor) in response to questions we asked them.