Creativity

One of the great things about living in Vancouver is the abundance of tech talent.

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[Left: logo of the Chaos Computer Club]

The German hacker club, Chaos Computer Club has recently been in the news for their annual end of the year Chaos Communication Congress at which well-known writer and BoingBoing editor, Cory Doctorow spoke on “the coming war on general computation.” In this post, I will introduce you to the club, their events, and other hacker organizations, events and affiliates worldwide. I will do this via a sort of travellog of the club's Chaos Communication Camp, which I had the good luck to attend this past August.

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I recently saw the wonderful documentary, Eames: The Architect & The Painter, and if you are a fan of the furniture, films or other design of Ray and Charles Eames like I am, you have to see this film when it comes to your town, or becomes available via DVD or some streaming service. Even if you are not obsessed with the work of the amazing couple, you have certainly been exposed to it, and I think we all can learn from the example they set.

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Lots of buzz swirling around about Google+, Google's Facebook-like social networking site.  Much of the buzz surrounds trying to get invited into the test trial, especially as many have received "invites" but not been able to get in anyway.

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On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending (as a sponsor and learner) the Social Media for Nonprofits Conference in San Francisco.

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VolunteerMatch.org (personally, a BIG favorite .org)  recently released their first Video Annual Report and it's AWESOME!!  It's such a great, and low-cost idea for producing a compelling story of an organization's successes.  Getting to make a rich, human connection with an organization's staff and the people/organizations they're helping is amazing. It's moving to hear how the organization is having an impact from the people it's actually helping. The only thing missing in this presentation is the lack of any clickable calls to action.

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The 3rd Annual CLASSY Awards is the largest philanthropic awards ceremony in the country, recognizing outstanding philanthropic achievements by charities and individuals nationwide.

From now until June 19, America can visit www.classyawards.org to nominate in the following categories:

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In my last post I wrote about the important step we took in forming our single, large team into small, focused project teams (called Pods), and how we did that. Once we got the important step of generating Focus out of the way with the Pods, the way was clear, even though we could hardly believe it, to start to apply the Agile/Scrum process.

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In my last post, I wrote a little of the history of the process at CivicActions and how we started to adopt the Agile/Scrum process. The first big step toward that was the formation of what we call Pods, or focused project teams.

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"A Quiet Revolution" is how I can best describe the process by which CivicActions has, over the last two years, adopted the Agile/Scrum process as our means of working with clients, internal teams and one another. And it continues as we learn more, add team members, work with new clients and shift into our own, more functional and agile organizational structure.

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