Ferry Beach: 07/10/2010 - social media workshop day -1

Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date and not representative. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

S and I are taking a "working vacation" this week. We're both at Ferry Beach in Maine and teaching workshops. Her workshop is one of the UU RE Renaissance modules--one on worship. My workshop is on using social media tools to run a RE program.

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The UUA has a bunch of resources on using social media, but it's primarily focused on marketing, public relations, and announcements. That's great stuff, but the bigger impact for social media tools on RE programs is their ability to help people communicate, coordinate, and collaborate with communities of volunteers. I've never run an RE program, but I am involved in and run FLOSS communities--there's a lot of overlap between these two domains.

As such, I'm writing my own workshop. I spent most of last week banging out the material based on six months or so of notes and research. It's really coming together, but I still have a lot of work to do. I have full confidence that I can pull this off, though. At worst, I'll wing a few of the sections and codify them into workshop materials after the fact possibly with the help of my participants.

I checked in today and went to the Gardiner porch where I'm running the workshop to test out the Internet connection. It was awful about an hour ago (latency > 700ms); seems a bit better now. I'm hoping it's working well for the workshop hours since I've lined up a bunch of demos and activities.

After I'm done the workshop, I plan to post the materials online licensed under a Creative Commons license. This is going to be an awesome workshop. I dare to say that the information in this workshop will make a huge difference running an RE program and making sense of the chaotic landscape of social media.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.