It is my great pleasure to announce that the executive summary for the Association Social Technologies survey project is now available! You can download it here. (For your information, the actual URL is www.socialtechsurveysummary.org.) And while you’re there, don’t forget to reserve your copy of the full project report and qualify for pre-release pricing!
If you’re going to be in San Diego, we will have a limited supply of print copies that you’ll be able to get from Ben, Lindy and me, as well as our friends and partners at Omnipress. If you’re planning to attend Sunday’s “secret session,” there will be copies available there as well.
The full project report will be available in October. Keep reading the P.I. Blog for more details!
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On October 15, the second Blog Action Day will take place. As the event site describes it:
Blog Action Day is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers, podcasters and videocasters, to post about the same issue on the same day. Our aim is to raise awareness and trigger a global discussion.
Last year, the Blog Action Day theme was the environment, and this year we’ll be focusing on poverty. The P.I.Blog was part of Blog Action Day in 2007, and I’m proud to participate again in 2008. I want to invite all of my fellow bloggers to join me this year. If you’re not a blogger, you can visit the Blog Action Day site to learn about other ways to get involved.
There will be one more post today, actually a P.I. Mobile Podcast, but following Maddie’s lead, I want to do one final update on everything that is going on for me in San Diego. Here goes:
1. Check out my schedule for the meeting, which now includes my participation in the UnBloggerUnCon (or whatever B-Mart called it) on Monday from 5 pm-7 pm.
2. Don’t forget to bid on my Silent Auction prizes, including any of the four very affordable “Buy now” offers that could really help your association!
3. This weekend, we’ll be releasing the executive summary of the Association Social Technologies Survey. Keep watching the P.I. Blog for an announcement!
4. We’ll also be doing a soft launch of the A-List Bloggers Network. Once again, keep watching this blog for an official announcement when the site is live.
5. I’ll be on both the Twitter and Mozeo backchannels, Twittering and blogging the conference, recording mobile podcasts and posting photos to my Facebook account.
I’m hoping to squeeze in a little time to sleep as well. I’ll let you know if I succeed. Travel safely everyone. Looking forward to seeing many of you there!
ASAE & The Center’s Annual Meeting is almost here (I leave tomorrow morning), and one of the challenges attendees often face at large gatherings of this kind is a shortage of business cards. Fortunately, a great new solution to this annoying problem is now available.
I signed up for Dropcard a few weeks ago, and I think anyone going to a conference or meeting should consider doing so as well. Just in case you ever find yourself without a card, you can use Dropcard to text someone your contact information, including links to Facebook and LinkedIn profiles if you have them. All you need to do is create a free profile on the Dropcard site and you’re ready to go. And just to make it even easier, Dropcard has created some shortcuts so you don’t need type @ symbols or even certain e-mail domains, including Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail.
The service is completely free (there is an enhanced $9.99 per month option that I’m considering), which makes experimenting with it a no-brainer. If you’d like to see what a “dropcard” looks like, just send me an e-mail and I’ll shoot one to you. I hope some of you will send me your dropcards when we meet in San Diego!
This is the official (I’m Ron) Burgundy “You Stay Classy San Diego!” Limited Edition ribbon that I will have with me on-site at ASAE & The Center’s Annual Meeting. If you want one, come find me beginning on Saturday. Supplies are extremely limited…it’s sure to be a collector’s item. Uncle Jonathan’s corn-cob pipe!
Yesterday, Jamie posted his self-described rant about the new strategic planning article in the Journal of Association Leadership. I’m really glad that Jamie wrote that post because it saved me from having to do it. I think everyone already knows where I stand on this topic, but just in case, let me reiterate the bottom line:
Tomorrow will not be like yesterday.
All the so-called “consensus guidelines” in the world can’t change this simple fact. Strategic planning is over…done…finished because tomorrow will not be like yesterday. This conversation is no longer about configuring strategic planning in new ways to “make it work.” We will never, ever, everembrace the revolution and create 21st century associations through strategic planning. I can’t make it any plainer. It’s time to move on.
As I wrote in my recent post for association CEOs, we “must strive to design strategy-making as a whole system collaborative learning process to which everyone can make a direct and meaningful contribution from anywhere.” Strategy-making is about fostering creativity and unleashing the imagination. It’s about wide-ranging exploration, continuous discovery and collaborative innovation. These are the ways of thinking and being we must cultivate in our organizations to ensure our long-term vitality and success.
How to Save the World blogger Dave Pollard had an excellent post a few days ago called, “12 Tools That Will Soon Go the Way of Fax and CDs.” It is a list of legacy technologies and practices that Pollard believes will disappear with the next generation, and so-called “best practices” are #3 on the list. Dave writes:
It’s natural that people want to hear what the leading companies and individuals in any area of business endeavour are doing, but the sad truth is that most “best practices” are so devoid of context, of the knowledge and history that explains why they are so effective, that they essentially become unactionable. Show, don’t tell, and discuss, don’t proclaim, are the information behaviours of the future. Less efficient, perhaps (stories take a while to tell, and voice is harder to browse through for fast learning), but much more effective.
I am rooting hard for Dave to be right. As regular readers of the P.I. Blog already know, I long ago consigned the idea of best practices to File 13. Every so often, another blogger will push back against my hard line view, but basically I think I’m on the side of the angels on this one. For all of the good intentions that accompany best practices in concept, I believe the focus on them has diminished our organizations by building a dependence on faint copies of what has worked for others as the basis for serving our stakeholders. We have not challenged ourselves enough to author the original idea or discover the truly creative solution, and now when innovation really matters to our success, we’re totally unprepared to make it happen. We must correct this shortcoming right now. Fortunately, we still have time.
Go read the rest of Dave’s post to see if you agree with the other items on his list. It’s a good one!
(Hat tip to Stephen Abram for pointing to this post on his blog.)
With ASAE & The Center’s Annual Meeting rapidly approaching, I’m getting prepared to do some mobile podcasting from San Diego using an excellent application on my Blackberry called VR+.
VR+ is a really great tool. Not only does your purchase price ($30) include online storage for recordings, but it will also post them directly to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and Blogger sites. There is also an option to have recordings transcribed automatically. It’s really cool! I’ve had VR+ installed for awhile now, but never really used it. The current version includes all of these new features, which makes it incredibly simple and valuable, so now it’s going to be one of my must-use applications.
Anyway, if you would like listen to my mobile podcasts, you can find them at http://tinyurl.com/pimobilepodcasts. The first one is already posted! Please share your feedback in comments to the blog. During the Annual Meeting, I’ll be posting announcements of new mobile podcasts on Twitter primarily, so stay tuned!
Last month, I was asked by my friend, Greg Fine, of the Association Forum of Chicagoland to share some thoughts via video on the future of association membership for a board discussion on the topic. Association Forum edited down what I sent them, and posted a shortened version to YouTube. You can view it below.
As much as I despise the way I look on video, I want to thank Greg for inviting me to participate in this important conversation and for posting some of what I shared to the Web so that others can connect with and contribute to the dialogue. Be sure to check out other videos on the future of membership on Association Forum’s YouTube channel, and please share your feedback on my video in the comments below.
