Come on down, folks! This one'll be great and I'd love to see all the Vancouver peeps there.

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver

Border-Busting: a conversation with Katrin Verclas

July 17th, Radha Eatery

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a July 17th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

Our July 17th event will feature a conversation with Katrin Verclas, the incoming director of The Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network (N-TEN), an American group that works to support the diverse people and organizations who help nonprofits employ technology effectively. We've booked a great quiet space in which to have this conversation, conveniently located above a great spot to drink beer.

Katrin will lead an informal discussion about whether/how US npos can work more effectively here in Canada. She'll also introduce us to a new project from the N-TEN Technobabes Community: "BraCamp," which we're hoping will lead to a broader conversation about gender issues in nonprofit technology.

Katrin's presentation and Q&A will start at 7:15 and wrap by 8, so please plan to arrive on time. If you're early, folks will gather underneath Radha at the Brickhouse for a brew or two. And if you're still hot to talk after we wrap, we'll be moving back down to the Brickhouse again for another hour of libations, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

Please RSVP on Upcoming.org.

We hope to see you there!

Details:
Date: July 17 2006, 7:00-9:00pm
Venue: Radha Eatery, 730 Main Street, Vancouver, BC. (Map here)
Cost: Free!

Only 8 days until I fly to California – it's been pretty much a year since my last visit and oh am I excited. (For those who don't know, I spent four months down there early last year, near Santa Cruz, and I miss the place. I loooove California.)

It's going to be a whirlwind of a week, I'm realizing. I arrive early Thursday morning, and will probably spend Thursday and Friday in San Francisco. Looks like I'll be spending the weekend at WineCamp, though I haven't yet registered and I'm fearful of geek-overload. I think it would be lovely to spend a fun weekend with cool people I'd like to meet, talking about social change and geekery, but I fear that combined with NetSquared the following week, my brain might turn to mush. Who knows, though. Maybe I'll just blast off into a different dimension of zen-ness with my laptop. Or maybe I'll spend the weekend having fun with real people and won't feel like it was a geek-out? That sounds wonderful.

I'm hoping to squeeze in a night at Mount Madonna, where I used to live, but that'll be tight, since NetSquared starts on Tuesday. And I'm excited. I'll be wearing a couple of hats – my Web of Change conference coordinator hat, and my DeSmogBlog Community Manager hat. Eager to recruit new WOCers, and eager to get great advice on how to help the Blog go next-level!

I've been poking through the session offerings at the site. I have a feeling it's going to be a 48-hour case of FOMS – Fear Of Missing Something. But some of the sessions that sound interesting to me are:

• Gender and the social web: new tools, same...stuff?

• From a Voice in the Wilderness to the Wisdom of Crowds: Citizen Journalism, Nonprofit Organizations and Social Change

• Social networking systems - chat rooms on steroids or a real tool for social change?

• The distributed grass roots marketing team... letting your community, advocates, evangelists, and fans do the heavy lifting

• I tag the hand that feeds me: examining aggregation and tagging in the nonprofit world

Phew. Participants have been encouraged to comment and add thoughts and questions to the topics... so far I'm feeling too overwhelmed by my actual obligations to get into it. But I think I'll try and contribute something in the next week.

So that's it from me... watch for an exciting announcement in the next day or two. Okay, it's probably more exciting to me than it is to the general public. But I'm *stoked*.

Well, I did it. I applied and was accepted as a volunteer at the upcoming NetSquared conference, which entitled me to discounted registration to a completely sold-out event. I'm pretty excited - and I'm going to spend a full week in the Bay Area around it. Whoo hoo!

I really would like to blog more about why I'm excited, but I am running out the door to leave for Salt Spring Island, for a weekend reunion with my Yoga Teacher Training class. Which will be good for me! So till next week... see ya later, laptop. :P

Lifted directly from the brilliant Alexandra Samuel, because she'll say it better than I could if I wrote about it myself...

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver: May 4 at the Whip

by Alexandra Samuel – April 19, 2006 - 4:28pm

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.

The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from Gayle Moss, the Director of International Marketing for Habitat Jam, about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from one of the folks at the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.

The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org

And on the topic of Social Tech Brewing... Check out the new podcast on the Rabble network.