Planting the 2.0 seed

With no idea what to expect, our brown bag lunch appeared to be a success. Folks seemed engaged, which is good, though I hope they left with a healthy amount of confusion and were not totally overwhelmed. Time will tell, but Page put on a great show.

For me, the most important thing that came out of the lunch was the emphasis that web 2.0 is a philosophy. Basically, it’s how we go about our work and may very well open some doors about how we not only collaborate with our partners, but how information is shared. There is an obvious connection between open source and non-profit work. Many non-profiters, live, work, and play in communities—communities being the essence of our work too—and the concept of adding value (or having value added) to existing bodies of work is very appealing. Similar to healthy rivers, open source platforms rely on healthy communities.

There’s a fine line here with too much information, but hopefully the discussion today was enough of a jumping off point to have folks explore some of the online tools, such as Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.

A seed was planted today and as we proceed with the redesign(s), hopefully I can come back and water it from time to time - cheesey I know, but true. The success of our online work may depend on it.