Alexandra Samuel's blog

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Social Signal is hiring a Business and Project Manager

Social Signal is offering an unusual opportunity to come in on the ground floor of a business with the experience, reputation and credentials to go sky-high. If your enthusiasm for technology is matched only by your passion for social change, you'll find that the joy of working with kindred spirits can be matched by the thrill of helping communities use the Internet in ways they never imagined.

WHO WE ARE: Social Signal puts the web to work for social change, helping organizations turn online communities into a powerful force for progress. We have extensive experience in the non-profit, public and private sectors, and a large network of local, national and international colleagues and clients that you'll be working with on a regular basis. While you expand your professional network and skills, we also hope you'll enjoy being part of our personal network of technology leaders and community advocates in Vancouver and abroad.

WHO WE NEED: We're looking for a organized, progressive, tech-friendly person whose project management skills can make our work even more effective.  This fourth member of our team isn't just there to justify taking a four-person table during our meetings in the local Internet cafe. We need a boss: someone who can manage our business affairs, major projects and our team itself so that we make the most of our resources. The right person will enjoy our company's informal, friendly vibe but will help us balance friendliness with professionalism and efficiency.

WHAT YOU'LL DO: You'll business manage our business, project manage our projects, and prioritize our priorities. Your primary responsibility will be to manage our work priorities -- everything from client work to business development to financial and legal affairs -- to ensure that everything is getting done. You'll also help structure our client engagements by consulting on project scope, breaking down tasks, and assigning responsibilities. You'll know you're doing your job if everyone else on the team is clear about theirs.

Specific responsibilities include:

  • managing business operations including h.r., finance and legal affairs
  • project managing web development projects
  • writing or editing project proposals
  • identifying work priorities and assigning tasks
  • maintaining friendly, productive relations with our clients (including non-profit organizations, governments and socially-minded businesses) and suppliers (including designers, web developers and hosting companies)

WHO YOU ARE: You're the person who gets things done: organized and detail-oriented while keeping your eye on the big picture. You're confident, diplomatic and a born problem-solver, with a gift for getting along with people even when deadlines are looming or computers are crashing. You like knowing that the work you've done each day has made a real difference – to your colleagues, your clients, and the world.

You're passionate about social change, and your community or activist history shows it. And while you're not a programmer, you're as psyched as we are about the web's ability to make that change happen: your idea of excitement is mastering a great new online task management tool, discovering a smart progressive web site or writing a particularly sharp blog post.

Your real-world and computer desktops are as simple and uncluttered as a Zen rock garden. You're able to point to projects you've guided to completion, chaos you've turned into order, and cats you've herded into neat little rows and columns.

This is a full-time mid-level position. You've already demonstrated your capacity to plan, organize and manage complex projects; now you want to put that capacity to work in a role that will engage and challenge you.

HOW TO APPLY: Please e-mail a résumé, cover letter and salary expectations to [email protected] by September 15th, 2006. Tell us why you’d like to work for Social Signal, and please describe your relevant skills and professional or volunteer experiences. We want to hear about your community, advocacy or public service experiences as much as about your project management and organizational skills and experience. We're particularly interested in hearing about your:

Skills:

  • project planning and management
  • personal organization and time management
  • solid writing and communication skills
  • attention to detail
  • tech skills (Mac/Windows/Linux, software programs you know, web tools you use)


Experience:

  • projects where you've been responsible for planning and coordinating (examples might include event planning, office management or web site development)
  • writing for work or fun, on a regular basis; proposal/grant-writing
  • situations where you've worked independently with minimal supervision
  • work that has involved client relations or working with the public
  • jobs that have required you to organize not only your own work but also to keep track of other people's responsibilities and deadlines
  • volunteer work for community organizations or causes
  • situations where you've gone the extra mile to get the job done


Interests:

  • commmunity groups, projects or issues you're involved in
  • web sites you like or web tools you're excited about


Bonus points for:

  • having your own blog
  • telling us your favourite tech tool for managing time or organizing tasks
  • a strong opinion (pro or con) about Getting Things Done


Compensation will be commensurate with skills and experience. Please note that this is a mid-level position.

We look forward to hearing from you!



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Blog for Vancity -- and collaborate with Social Signal

We're thrilled to be working with Vancity on a new online community project that will be unveiled this summer. The project will create an online community where people in the Lower Mainland & Victoria can find information, tools and connections to inspire and support change in their own lives, their communities, and the world.

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Now en route to NetSquared

Rob and Aaron are both heading down to San Jose this week for the NetSquared conference. For the past eight months, we've been working with the CompuMentor/Techsoup team that is behind this event. 

The conference aims at pushing nonprofit engagement with the "social web" (aka "web 2.0") to the next level. The web site (which we helped develop) has built an online community around the same agenda, and will now link the online community to the San Jose conference through a two-day remote conference.

I'm holding down the virtual fort from here in Vancouver, but look forward to hearing updates from Rob & Aaron. And if you're going to be at NetSquared yourself, be sure to say hello.

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May 30 & 31: NetSquared's online conference with nonprofit leaders

as posted on Corante's Civic Minded blog

Where can you find inspiration for online advocacy, guidance for online faclitation, and gossip about online politics? On Tuesday May 30th and Wednesday May 31st, NetSquared is hosting a remote conference featuring live chats and Q&A sessions with leaders from across the nonprofit web.
Find me at the Net2 Remote Conference

The remote conference is happening at the same time as a two-day confab in San Jose. After eight months of work on the NetSquared project, I'm heartbroken that I won't be there in person (something about not travelling in the ninth month of pregnancy, mutter mutter grumble) -- and absolutely determined that the online event will be so fabulous that when my colleagues return from San Jose, they're going to be jealous that I was the one who got to hang out in the chat room.

And what better way to get over that morning-after-the-Memorial-Day-before feeling than to spend the day chatting with leaders in nonprofit technology -- leaders like:

  • Judith Feder on "Health care and web 2.0 patient communities"
  • Rolf Kleef of Greenpeace
  • Micki Krimmel of Participant Productions on "Media that Mobilizes: An Inconvenient Truth, ClimateCrisis and more tales from Participate.net"
  • Beth Kanter on "Tagging in the Nonprofit World"
  • Robyn Deupree of Bloglines Lisa Stone of BlogHer
  • Alexandra Samuel of Social Signal on "Building Online Community: Behind the Scenes at NetSquared"
  • Mike Linksvayer of Creative Commons on "Leveraging Technology for Free Culture and Your Nonprofit's Mission"
  • Enoch Choi of Palo Alto Medical Foundation on "Tech Tools in Medicine: Personal Health Records, Mobile Devices, Blogging,Podcasting, Health Search & Tagging @ Google Co-op"
  • Boris Mann from Bryght on "Open Source and your non-profit"
  • Scott Heiferman from Meetup.com
  • Nancy White of Full Circle on "Online Facilitation Open Discussion"
  • Edward Vielmetti from the University of Michigan School of Information on "Superpatron: viewing libraries from a patron's point of view"
The remote conference is open to anyone with an Internet connection. And feel free to drop by the conference hallway for even more remote conference-y goodness.
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Now downloadable: Hacktivism & The Future of Political Participation

As announced today on Civic Minded:

I'm making my complete dissertation available for download, beginning today. Depending on your interests, you might want to download the whole enchilada, or to look at selected chapters:

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On Civic Minded: Jane Jacobs drew the map on online community

From my Civic Minded blog on Corante:

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Online community camp, May 25th in San Francisco

Forum One is hosting a one-day Online Community Camp in San Francisco on May 25th. According to the preliminary schedule, planned topics include:

 * Community management issues;
* Online community business models and ROI; * Online community marketing;
* Online community performance metrics;
* Review of community tools;
* Tactics for smoothly changing community platforms;
* Online communities and advertising;
* Technical standards to allow communities to share members;
* Effective use of volunteers;
* Reputation and ranking strategies
* Legal issues
* Using online communities to enhance interaction within physical communities like neighborhoods, towns, and cities. 

While registration is almost full, there are some spaces yet (and some scholarships still available), so if you're interested contact Jim Cashel asap.

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Ode to Aggregator2 on WorldChanging

How your organization can use Drupal to monitor social and mainstream media

I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default:

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Social Tech Brewing Vancouver: May 4 at the Whip

If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas -- and beer!

Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.

The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from one of the members of the Habitat Jam team about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from Steven Forth of the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.

The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.

We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org 

 Event details

Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Thurday, May 4th
6pm-8pm
at
The Whip (map)
209 6th Avenue East (at Main), Vancouver

RSVP on Upcoming.org 

Any questions? Email [email protected]

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RSS, tags & social bookmarking: building blocks for nonprofit collaboration

I'm currently at NTen's Nonprofit Technology Conference in Seattle, where I was part of a panel yesterday on "Blogging, Tagging, Flickring for the cause: New tools and new strategies." Along with Victor d'Allant of Social Edge and Ruby Sinreich, I gave a kind of crash course/overview of how nonprofits can use the latest generation of Internet tools to work more effectively.

Social Signal on...

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Work Smarter with Evernote

Get more out of Evernote with Alexandra Samuel's great new ebook, the first in the Harvard Business Press Work Smarter with Social Media series!

Available on Amazon, iTunes and HBR.

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