As some of you may know I’ve been working with the folks at the Inspire Foundation on a contract basis for some time (since October last year) specifically focused on their recently re-launched Reach Out service in Australia, and soon overseas.

Zumio provided and managed the development team over most of that period – and the launch effort explains a good part of my silence here and on Twitter of late. (I hope to post more on the re-launch soon…)

During my time on the project the team at Inspire asked me if I’d be interested in joining the team on a more permanent basis to work with them to help develop Inspire Digital, a social venture established within the Foundation with the dual goals of further developing some of the Foundation’s services and also to provide consulting services to other organisations where there is alignment in mission to Inspire’s broader goals.

I recently accepted Inspire’s offer and as of today have commenced with them in the role of Head of Social Technology. It is an exciting new role that will no doubt evolve rapidly in the coming months as the venture develops.

Both Inspire and I hope that I can continue to work in the area of social media and networking providing workshop, presentation and consulting services, now under the Inspire Digital banner.

For the foreseeable future I’ll be continuing to blog here about all things social- and web-related (hopefully with a bit more frequency I might add!) – so no need to update any bookmarks. I’m looking forward to sharing the new adventure with you :)

Presentation notes

Thanks again to everyone who participated in the Melbourne and Sydney workshops. As promised, here are the presentation slides, along with my notes (PDF 14.78 MB) from the presentation component of the day.

Of course, I can’t include all of the great discussion that took place, but hopefully it will help jog the memory as well as provide some further details on some of the topics we covered.

Workshop materials

The material generated by workshop participants is also available for download:

• Melbourne: Risk & opportunities – transcribed (PDF 65 KB)
• Melbourne: Other workshop materials (PDF 21.2 MB)
• Sydney: Workshop materials (PDF 1.1 MB)

The remainder should be up by Monday.

Other follow-ups

Two follow-ups from the workshops:

1. There was a question about RSS in Outlook: one that I’m aware of is NewGator Inbox [Update 21 June 2011: as far as I can tell this product is no longer available, so I've removed the link], although it seems that Outlook 2007 has an RSS reader built in.
2. I mentioned the “Government 2.0″ Google group in (I think) the Melbourne workshop also. I’ve also come across a Government 2.0 Australia Ning community (they are different groups, but exploring similar themes. Neither are specifically focused on social networking, but may be of interest all the same.

If any readers have other related resources to suggest, it would be great if you could do so in the comments.

Thanks

I wanted to say thanks to a number of folks who participated in the workshop by being so generous with their time and insights (in alphabetical order):

• Fi Bendall (Bendalls Group), Peter Buckmaster (Care Network), and Katie Hart (Amnesty International Australia)
• Priscilla Brice-Weller (ANTaR)
• Marc Lehmann (Saasu)
• Helen Mitchel (CPA Australia)
• Mathew Patterson (Campaign Monitor)
• Deb Shaw (Amnesty International Australia)
• Georgina Swan (Choice Australia)

Your input and generosity was greatly appreciated by the participants (and especially by me!) Some of the video and other materials from the case studies should find their way into blog posts in the not too distant future…

Thanks also to Penny Hagen who assisted in preparation for the workshop. And last, but not least, Maxine, John and the WDS team for organising such a wonderful event and presenters’ dinner. It was a wonderful opportunity that I deeply appreciate…

Just wanted to make a quick post to thank all the participants of the Web Directions South (WDS) Roadshow Engaging social media workshops that we did in Melbourne and Sydney this week.

I personally enjoyed them a lot – the energy of the folks involved was fantastic. From the feedback I’ve received it sounds like y’all enjoyed and valued the experience too. Thanks also to those of you who pointed out things that could be improved – your points and insights help tremendously.

I’ll be collating the materials generated through the workshops and tweaking the presentation materials for distribution early- to mid-next week. The WDS folks will be in touch via email with details as soon as they’re ready.

P.S. my preparation for this workshop, along with preparations for a major delivery for Inspire, have meant it’s been awfully quiet around here of late. I suspect May will see a bit more posting in these parts…

Just a quick note about the WDS09 Roadshow workshops that I’m facilitating in April. Plans for the day are starting to take shape, and I’m in the process of organising some interviews with folks doing interesting things in the social networking space so anyone that comes along won’t be listening to me all day long ;)

Not that that would have been the case anyway – my friend and colleague Penny Hagen has been lending a hand working out the flow of the day – the aim is to keep things “hands on” and practical.

I hope to have a bit more to post as we get closer to the date – but in the meantime a reminder that you can get a discount if you use the code “WD-GY” when you register, reducing the price to $499 for the day.

Zumio is proud to support the Australia Tibet Council (ATC).

I feel truly blessed that the last four donations I’ve made are to organisations I have a personal connection with through friends and colleagues. ATC is no different – my long-time friend Ashley Brown and his wife Tahne are very heavily involved with the organisation.

Both they and the volunteers and staff at ATC have done a tremendous amount of work to increase awareness of Tibetan culture in Australia, including participating in the organisation of visits by the Dalai Lama, as well as advocating for the human rights and democratic freedoms of the Tibetan people.

This included last years team up with GetUp on the Olympic Silence is not Golden campaign.

Please consider supporting ATC so that they can continue their good work.

For those that don’t already know, each quarter Zumio donates 1% of nett profit before tax to progressive causes. ATC is the recipient for the Oct-Dec 2008 quarter.

I’m very excited to be participating in the up-coming Web Directions South Roadshow. I’m facilitating the Engaging Social Media workshop in Sydney and Melbourne on 21 and 23 April.

It’s a great program – I feel privileged to be amongst the well known names that are on that list. Most of all I’m looking forward to the opportunity to learn more about what people are doing in the social media space and helping them overcome some of the roadblocks and challenges they face. Should be a lot of fun :)

Update: If you use the discount code “WD-GY”, the price for the workshop drops to $499 :)

As I’ve mentioned previously Zumio’s charter is to donate 1% of net profit to organisations doing good things in the community.

OpenAustralia.org

For the July-September 2008 period I chose OpenAustralia.org.

OpenAustralia.org is a volunteer run organisation that makes the workings of our Parliament more transparent, by transforming the (inaccessible) Hansard transcripts of Parliament into a more accessible (both technically and socially) form.

Ever since I first heard about OpenAustralia.org, when I met Matthew Landauer at Jelly Sydney) I’ve been excited by the project – I see it as a really important part of our Democracy and am dumbfounded why this isn’t something the Government already does.

OpenAustralia.org is not yet established as a charitable organisation as yet, so I hope the funds can go some way to helping them achieve that goal.

(You can follow OpenAustralia.org on their blog or via Twitter.

ANTaR

For the October-December 2008 period I chose to support ANTaR (Australians for Native Title and Reconcilation). My friend Priscilla has been working there for some time and I’ve been impressed with their grassroots advocacy work, more recently around Indigenous health.

little and LOUD

On a related note, my wife and I, along with members of our families, don’t do gift giving for each other at Christmas; instead we collectively donate our funds to a chosen organisation instead. This year, we chose little and LOUD, a charity co-run by Rhoda Lazo – a friend and colleague who I met when we both worked at Digital Eskimo.

little and LOUD is “… inspired by children and their natural ability to creatively express themselves in a way that communicates beyond borders and spans all backgrounds, cultures and ages. This is how Little and LOUD began and how it continues to this day.”

They are currently running a project with Fote Primary School in the Solomon Islands. While not directly Zumio-related, I wanted to give little and LOUD’s work a shout-out here as I’m a fan of what they do.

I’ve had a lovely time in Adelaide the past two days – it’s a lovely city (I’ll have to come back sometime soon). Thanks to CPA for inviting me (and putting me up in such lovely digs at the Sebel Playford).

The reason for my visit was to present to a CPA Congress session on “Maximising Opportunities in the Online Marketplace”. Whilst similar to the previous sessions I presented, I did shorten and restructure things a little.

You can also download a PDF of the slides with notes (PDF 10.4 MB).

Bonus link: Laurel Papworth’s talk from the Congress is also available online.

I’m a big fan of sustainable design – especially when designers turn their hand to addressing problems such as preventable disease reduction in the developing world.

Some time ago I came across what I consider an amazing product called the LifeStraw. From the LifeStraw website:

Half of the world’s poor suffer from waterborne disease, and nearly 6,000 people – mainly children – die each day by consuming unsafe drinking water.

LifeStraw water purifiers have been developed as a practical way of preventing disease and saving lives, as well as achieving the Millennium Development Goal of reducing by one-half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe water by the year 2015.

At USD$25 each (for the family version), LifeStraws are a low-cost (by developed world standards) means of purifying water to prevent common diarrhoeal disease.

At around the same time I also came across Project H Design, which:

… is a charitable organization that supports, inspires, and delivers life-improving humanitarian product design solutions. We champion industrial design as a tool to address social issues, a vehicle for global life improvement, and a catalyst for individual and community empowerment.

I saw on Project H a initiative that aims to provide families in Mumbai with LifeStraws – and I thought this would be a great cause to support.

Part of my “charter” for Zumio is to donate 1% of Zumio’s quarterly net profit to a project with social justice or sustainability goals, and for the Mar-Jun 2008 quarter (yes – I’m a little behind!) I’ve put the funds towards this project.

Unfortunately with the Aussie dollar fluctuating so rapidly my donation probably isn’t stretching as far as it could have, but all the same I hope that my small contribution will help…

I’ve just finished presenting two sessions at the CPA Congress Tasmania. Unfortunately I didn’t keep a close enough eye on my timer, and tried to cram a bit too much into each session. Hopefully the extra info was useful enough to warrant the overrun…

The presentations that I made today were very similar (though not identical) to previous presentations which are already up on Slideshare, so I’ve embedded them here.

Maximising opportunities in the online marketplace

Slides with notes (PDF 14.9MB)

Leveraging social networks: Engaging customers in a Web 2.0 world

Slides with notes (PDF 10.6MB)