S5 Presents provides a web-based interface to create and share presentations using the standards-based S5 presentation template. Really a great idea. The owner of the site also shares the full source code for the service if you want to set up your own site for S5 presentations.
Kevin Holland and Lucia Lodato are blogging prior to their presentation Blogging for Associations which will be held at the ASAE Great Ideas conference in Orlando this December. Lots of good stuff on the blog so far. I hope they both keep writing here after the session is over!
Kevin and Lucia both work for the Air Conditioning Contractors of America, which is one of the first associations that I am aware of that publishes an official organization blog (ACCA Buzz).
Eric Meyer has released a simple standards-based slide show system, or S5 for short. This is a very slick way to create a slide show in HTML. I may give it a shot for the next presentation that I do. What I find very exciting about it is that it should be pretty easy to adapt a bunch of existing tools in order to author S5 presentations. In fact, someone has already created a City Desk template that does so.
A Minneapolis blogger got in on the ASAE event blogging, although in a way that I bet the conference organizers didn’t anticipate:
Ooooh, my freakin’ ears. What am I talking about? The American Society of Association Executives (ASAE, I linked their site because that name just sounds too made up), that’s what. They are having a ‘little’ conference outside my apartment. By little I mean they have about four city blocks barricaded and they are all eating, drinking, and networking their heads off. Oh, one other thing. Pretend that you could marry the music of 90’s adult contemporary with smooth jazz; ahh soothing right? Well then imagine a female-male lead singing duo on crack belting out ‘today’s hits and yesterday’s favorites’ (They just did a bone-chilling rendition of Outkast’s Hey Ya). Yeah, and according to the conference itinerary I’ve got a couple more hours to go. Where’s my damn earplugs? Ugh.
That is a pretty accurate description of the party that was thrown Saturday night to open up the meeting. And that easy listening band was truly horrendous.
I came across the post by searching Technorati on Tuesday morning. My plan was to demonstrate the site during a presentation I was doing that afternoon and talk about how associations should start using it to monitor how the blogging world is covering their issues and organizations. What a perfect example! If it’s any consolation, anonymous Minneapolis law student, the attendees in the session seemed to agree that the band was pretty bad.
I also talked about what kind of PR damage that entry could have done if it had been picked up by the local media. Hell, Technorati has a CNN advisory gig so it might go national. OK, that was a pretty low risk, but it could happen. The media seem to love blog-related stories these days.
In the session, I suggested that buying the blogger in question a free dinner or giving him some noise-canceling headphones might be a nice gesture to apologize for interupting his evening and could help turn the story into a postive if it did get picked up. That would have been money well spent to avert a more negative story and at the least would be the right thing to do. Of course, that requires keeping up with what is going on in the blogging world via tools such as Technorati.
In any case, thanks for sharing your neighborhood with us and for giving me a great example for the session I spoke in.
In our session yesterday I had the opportunity to ask Loretta DeLuca of DelCor Technology Solutions what she thought about deploying an AMS and a CMS simultaneously. (Loretta is one of the more experienced AMS selection consultants out there.) She said she wouldn’t recommend it either but for slightly different reasons than I have been yammering on about here. Her main concern was that trying to develop your ‘front-office’ systems (the CMS) while still developing, deploying and configuring your ‘back-office’ system (the AMS) is inviting lots of backtracking and crises you need not have to deal with if you wait for the AMS deployment to be complete before ramping up on the CMS project. Waiting lets the AMS settle down so that it isn’t a moving integration target for the CMS. Makes sense to me.
OK, I think that dead horse is well and truly beaten. I’ll move on to something else soon. 🙂
Made it to Minneapolis with no problems and have settled in at the Double Tree. They give you a warm cookie when you check in. I recommend that all hotels begin doing this. Yummy.
Got our handouts for our pre-con session tomorrow copied at the local Kinkos, since I put the finishing touches on them during the flight. We’re supposed to turn them in weeks before the meeting but that didn’t happen for several very good reasons. Really. Bad speaker! I’ll probably throw a copy of them up on this site next week if my co-presenters are willing.
As I worked on the presentation I read a story about how Hershey Foods tried to implement CRM, ERP and supply chain managements systems simultaneously. This apparently failed in a rather spectacular way: they weren’t able to delivery candy to major customers in time for Halloween in 1999. Ouch. More reason to think twice before implementing a content management system and an association management system (CRM) at the same time.
I’ll be speaking at 2 sessions at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Minneapolis next month.
The first is a preconference session called Building Bridges: IT as a Strategic Partner. The portion of the session I am involved in will focus on how to get IT involved in the overall strategic planning and execution of the organization. The second part of the program will take a detailed look at the current state of the association management system industry, which is the biggest technology investment for most associations (just slightly ahead of the web these days).
The second is a concurrent session called Web Technologies for the Future. The session is built around William Gibson’s quote: “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” Non-profit organizations are typically the last on the technology distribution list, so there is lots of stuff we can talk about that have not penetrated our industry yet.
This week I received the results of attendee evaluations from the blogging session we did back at the beginning of the month. (A copy of our slides are posted on the wiki page.) We had about 10 people on site attendees plus another 16 call-ins. The conference calls could have had multiple people on the line, so at a minimum we had 26 listening/attending.
Overall, the attendees rated the session a 4.3 out of 5.
People seemed to like the general introduction we gave as well as the case study of how we have deployed a weblog network at ASHA.
The most commonly requested change for the program was to provide more balanced coverage of external and internal uses of weblogs. In the session we spent about 10 minutes on external use in response to attendee requests. 50/50 on external/internal use would be a great program and probably be more attractive to wider audience. The main reason we didn’t have more on external use by an association is that I haven’t deployed an external blog yet for our assocation and so don’t have any direct experience to share yet.
I’ll be presenting, along with Glen Engel-Cox, an ASAE Knowledge Network titled “Blogging for Associations” on January 8, 2004. The session will cover how associations can set up a weblog network on their intranet as a low-cost knowledge sharing tool.
To support this session and some other stuff I’m working on, I’ve set up a wiki. You can see the page for the blogging session here and the main wiki home page here. I’ve restricted pages that I want to maintain control over but most of the site is editable. Feel free to add links to the resources pages if you would like to add information for the session attendees to see.
C. David Gammel, CAE 