Digital Inclusion Summit Notes
My colleague Peg Giffels and I participated in the Pacific Northwest Digital Inclusion Summit held at the Olympic Hotel in Seattle last week. It was a great day of knowledge-sharing and discussion hosted by the City of Seattle, Washington Communities Connect Network (CCN), and One Economy. I gave two back-to-back co-presentations that couldn’t have been more different.
The first was with Robert Bole, a driving force behind One Economy’s online media. We provided an overview of Web 2.0 concepts and tools and then, unintentionally, a sort of dueling banjos on the merits of various approaches to using social media. I felt little bit like Andy Rooney next to Rob’s great presentation of the benefits and upside of blogs and social networking and video-sharing. I found myself telling people “you can’t do it all,” “you should think before you dive in,” “don’t expect to increase donations two-fold.” This all seemed strange to me, because I thought going into the presentation that I might come off as hyping the technology. I’m a true believer in the possibilities presented by the Social Web. But next to Rob’s convincing evangelism, I felt like a plodding analyst with a lot of “on the one hand and on the other hand” stuff. Funny.
The second presentation was about tech planning and nuts-and-bolts IT infrastructure with Derrick Hall from the City of Seattle’s Community Technology Program. Derrick does an amazing job of supporting all of the city’s public computers and providing technical advice to community technology learning programs throughout the area. Instead of alignment and engagemnt and messaging we talked about RAM and servers and firewalls. This was my change to be prescriptive and hyped up, while Derrick added the grounding balance.
I enjoyed both experiences and the strong feeling of shared purpose from presenters and audience participants. It was all over much too quickly. The city will be putting up all of the slides presented over the next few days on the Community Technology Program site, but you can grab mine right here: Web 2.0 Presentation | Wired/Tech Planning Presentation.
