Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

I’m just back from the annual NTEN conference (well - not really back. The folks at United Airlines are making me wait in the airport for an extra 90 minutes.) Lucky for me, I am using a free tool called Windows Live Writer, which lets me write blog entries offline (and spell check them, even better!) and then post when I have an internet connection.

Some really good stuff at the conference again this year - and not all of it just in the hallways or in the sessions - there was a lot of both.

For instance - I connected with the Salesforce Foundation team - and they are really committed to the nonprofit sector and to supporting the database needs of nonprofits.  Steve Wright was both fun and articulate - and has a strong commitment to improving the tools. And IN session, Steve and representatives from Kintera and Convio talked a lot about their API’s (or lack thereof) - which was a friendly and invigorating debate. The big takeaway from those conversations? Nonprofits really can shape the landscape. If you want or need (or both) to have your Plone website talk with your Salesforce data - the world is your oyster. And while it might be a bit more time in coming - you’ll be able to connect that website to Kintera one of these days, and Democracy In Action, and Convio. It really is very exciting to see progress in these areas - it supports my hope for a nonprofit community that uses technology tools effectively!

It was also terrific to hear that NPower’s “Tech Savvy Communications” guide is a hit - it was mentioned in a pair of sessions that I attended. My colleague at NPower Seattle, Peg Giffels, did a great job putting that toolkit together.

And in a funny turn of events - Sprint had an area wide network outage just before I was due to present at the conference. I was working with Laura Quinn from Idealware, David Geilhufe from CivicSpaceLabs, and Ryan Ozimek from PICnet - the four of us were presenting about Plone, Drupal and Joomla - three terrific open source Content Management Systems. Laura framed the conversation (and highlighted the great research from Idealware on the topic) and then each of us were supposed to demo the tools.

Well - no internet made for a moderately challenging presentation - save for the fact that I’d created screen shots of my presentation late the night before.

I finished the presentation, answered a handful of questions, and then was able to check email a bit later when Sprint came back online - and received a message from my team in Seattle. Turns out there was a Plone fan in my session that sent a message to the Plone world that said I did a nice job - it is a very small world!

It was also great to meet with my NPower colleagues from around the NPower Network, to see our collaborators from ONE/NW, and to make some new friends along the way.

Next year, the conference will be in St. Louis - see you there.