Best Of NetSquared N2Y4 Conference

Today was the second, and last day, for the N2Y4 NetSquared Conference hosted at Cisco in San Jose. Awhile back I received an invitation from Amy Sample Ward, whom I met at SXSW this year. I attended N2Y4 not because of the "mobile" theme of this year's competition but because I wanted to gain inspiration for Signtific.org, and listen to how non-profits are utilizing "social media," and budding forms of technology, to connect with established and prospective donors. This conference was also an opportunity to do research for an upcoming event I'm producing with the Institute for the Future. We're currently calling it "Community Engagement 2.0: A Social Impact Technologies Futures Conference." You can find more information about it here.

Out of the 14 featured projects, all clambering for big money ($25k for First Place, $15k for Second Place, $10k for Third Place), Digital Democracy, Equobility, FrontLineSMS, IJCentral, PublicStuff, SlaveFree, and The Extraordinaires inspired me the most. I encourage you to click through and read more about their efforts, strategies, and needs.

Learnings:
    * As my colleague Jackie Copeland from IFTF said, it's hard for start-up, grass-roots projects with no money or technical guidance to compete against more established and seed-funded companies. It's as if these should be completely separate voting pools to give a more fairly weighted opportunity for the prize money (i.e. The Extraordinaires vs. Ipeace).

    * Chris Messina doesn't disappoint! He discussed OpenID AND said *asshole a couple times during his presentation. All "assholes" aside, I'm inspired to incorporate his thinking on Identity and Standards into the Signtific.org platform.

    * Alexandra from Social Signal and Peter from Social Actions taught us how to reverse engineer success stories to get results for non-profits. IMHO, they had the most engaging session, complete with hand-outs and *real* audience participation.

    * Erik from Wikimedia has similar outreach goals, UI issues, and quality of data submission problems as Signtific. Looking forward to potentially collaborating with them and learning more about how they address and engage their community of volunteer experts.

A huge thanks goes out to Amy Sample Ward for the this step in the right direction!