Geeks for Good

I’ve just emerged from my first NTEN (Non-Profit Technology Network) Conference, conveniently held here in New Orleans. It was intense, useful and entertaining.

Having attended many vendor-run techie conferences in the past, the NTEN Conference came as a refreshing surprise. This was not just a bunch of geeks, it was a bunch of geeks dedicated to making the world better, and that difference showed in major ways. Instead of sitting down at lunch tables where people focus intently on their food, avoid eye contact and grunt in fright if addressed directly (my experience of most Microsoft Technet conferences), people at NTC sat down with strangers and engaged. There was a high degree of bilingual fluency (techtalk and plain English) and a strong sense of people wishing you well in your own endeavours. That all contributed to an extremely high level of sharing.

As you’d expect from a crowd with such a strong geek quotiant, the backchannel conversation flowed as intensely as the face-to-face communication. Twitter was used as the official backchannel and it worked brilliantly, even if there were some hiccoughs with a few technical details. With more than a quarter of the conference participants using Twitter, there was a constant flow of real-time session reports, conference updates and social organising. By joining in the Twitter flow before the conference began, I arrived on the first day already feeling like I knew at least a half a dozen participants and that made it much easier to feel at home in the 1100+ throng. I tweeted from my laptop during my sessions, and followed along as others were tweeting from concurrent sessions. For quick Twitter updates on the go, I’d switch on my Kindle for reading the tweet stream or use my phone to send tweets. I also gave Twirl a whirl. It’s a desktop application, built on the Adobe Air platform, that provides an easy way to keep track of tweets from those you follow, via a pop-up window. It works on Windows and the Mac.

I love how Twitter works in multiple ways: via a browser, on the phone, through instant messaging, on the desktop. I also love how it ties into other services so beautifully.

One such service is Jott. Jott’s a transcription service - you phone up Jott and leave a message, Jott transcribes your message into text and delivers it as an email or as an SMS (phone text message), or adds it to a list. So, when someone mentions a great book you should read or a site worth visiting, you phone up, leave yourself a message, and it’ll be there in your email or on your web-based Jott account when you get home.

Like the good Web 2.0 app it is, Jott plays nicely with other services, including Twitter. Once you add your Twitter account to your Jott links, you can phone Jott, tell it you want to send a message to Twitter, speak your message and wait for Jott to reply “Got it!” and you’re done. It’s much faster and easier than texting from your phone.

You can also use Jott to take down notes from your browser. That’s how I used it at NTC: I created a Jott list for each session I attended, then typed notes into the list. With Twitter open in a separate Firefox tab, I could tweet and record a session at the same time.

So far, Jott’s only available in the US and Canada. I hope to see that change - this is one of those must-have apps.

Comments

[Richard Ahlquist]

Ah ha so come stateside have you? I bet you dont remember me much if at all. Just stumbled on your blog and figured I'd drop a hello.