I’ve got a contract with the City of Northfield to create and manage the online platform for a City project: Developing a parking management plan for downtown.
We’ll be using a variety of online interactive services, such as Amazon ppc management service including social media sites, to provide ways for the stakeholders and residents to participate online.
I’ll be teaming up with Ross Currier, Executive Director of the Northfield Downtown Development Corporation (NDDC).
I’ve started working with Gary Sjoquist, Director of Advocacy at Quality Bicycle Products (QBP) in Bloomington on the 2nd Annual Fat Bike Winter Summit, to be held Jan. 25-27 in Island Park, Idaho. The Fat Bike Summit (Friday) is for land managers, parks staff, and policy makers to learn more about fat biking in winter and to discuss possible changes in policies. The Fat Bike Festival (Sat/Sun) is for anyone. If you are looking to buy a new bike, then check out https://www.biketitan.com/best-hybrid-bicycles/.
I’ve been hosting weekly web conferences (planning meetings) via my GoToMeeting account with the team that’s organizing the Summit. We’re using the new Basecamp to facilitate all our other communications. We’re planning to use GoToWebinar to host some panel discussions during and after the Summit.
I’ve set up the Fat Bike Summit blog on WordPress.com and we’re just getting going with the Fat Bike Summit Twitter feed. We’ll have a Facebook page up shortly.
And if all goes as planned, I’ll be at the event posting updates throughout to the blog and Twitter and maybe doing some live streaming.
I spent a day last week at Red House Media (RHM) in Brainerd, MN, conducting a staff training session on how to use Basecamp, the web-based collaboration/project management service by 37signals which I’ve used since 2004.
I’ve gotten to know RHM’s founder and CEO Aaron Hautala in the past year, as we have a mutual love of mountain biking. He’s president of the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Crew, the club which helps manage my favorite MTB park, the Cuyuna Lakes Mountain Bike Trail System in Crosby/Ironton, MN. When I offered to help with the club’s blog site and mentioned that it would be best if we used Basecamp for our communications, he told me that his company had been using it for a while but wasn’t quite getting full use of it. He wondered if I was interested in helping.
The night before my training session, I discovered that 37signals had announced a new Basecamp last spring, and that the one I was using was now called Basecamp Classic. Oy. Evidently I’d unsubscribed to the Basecamp enewsletter years ago and thus, never got the memo on the new version.
Once I took a look at the features of the new Basecamp, it became clear that this was the version I needed to present to the RHM staff. So I crammed into the wee hours, moving a couple of my own Basecamp Classic projects over (easy) to the new Basecamp for experimentation. I was wowed, visit website if you would like to learn how I did it.
I showed up the next morning, prepared but still sweating it. I told my tale of woe to RHM staffers Heidi Lake (media director), Keith Larson (art director), and Anna Johnson (newly hired production manager). They were more than understanding and whenever my lack of knowledge became apparent, they gamely joined me in a hunt for answers. By day’s end, they were off and running. I was tired but pleased and excited about getting my own Basecamp Classic projects moved over to the new Basecamp. If you use Basecamp, you should, too.
Local citizens were staffing a Minnesotans United for All Families table at the Taste of Northfield in late July. I purchased a ‘Vote No, Don’t Limit the Freedom to Marry’ t-shirt and a bumper sticker for my laptop. It’s been cool to have many people make a “I like your shirt” type comment when out and about. You can get ‘Vote No’ gear from the MN United online store.
I’ve been blogging my opposition to the marriage amendment on my Locally Grown Northfield blog for many months. See all my posts here. When I saw that Northfielder Ben Witt, proprietor of Milltown Cycles, published a blog post titled If I May in which he states his opposition to the marriage amendment, it occurred to me that I should do likewise here. Ben wrote:
This decision is not one that I have come to without serious personal reflection. Weighing in in any political debate as a business carries risk on fast internet no matter what you are advocating for. I have no doubt that this will upset some of our customers. I fully expect that this will lose us some of them. If I offend some of you I am sorry for it.
I do this for the love of my family and friends who are gay, because they deserve the right to share exactly the same relationship that I cherish with my wife.
Word.
It has an image optimizer called https://web9.co.uk that will drastically reduce the file size of an image, while not reducing quality.
In mid-September, I’ll be collaborating with fellow Northfielder Tim Freeland of Freeland Web Design to teach the WordPress for Noobs course.
Tim’s been working with many area organizations on their WordPress-based websites. I’ve gotten to know him from his many years of community engagement, some of which he chronicles on his personal blog.
I just met with Tim about this today so we have more than a few details to work out. But this much we know:
If you want to be alerted to the details, subscribe to my Your Thick Skull email list or follow me and/or Tim on Twitter.
The Spur, the Northfield Enterprise Center‘s new coworking and incubator/accelerator facility in downtown Northfield, had its grand opening last Thursday. I’m thrilled and I’m going to be a member.
The Spur’s sidewalk sandwich board proclaims:
Working alone stinks. Let’s work together.
Yeah!
On June 22, 2012, I presented and facilitated a session for the League of MN Cities annual conference titled Government 2.0: New Strategies for Engaging the Public:
How are cities leveraging the web to engage the public in local government decisions? Explore how cities are strengthening democracy and promoting more effective local government by using 2.0 technologies.
Here’s my Powerpoint:
I’m here in flood-ravaged Duluth for the League of Minnesota Cities annual conference. I’m teaming up with Ted Davis, Davis Communications, and Scott Neal, Edina City Manager, to do a pre-conference workshop today on Networking and Communicating with New Media for Local Government Leaders. On Friday, I’m moderating a discussion session on Government 2.0: New Strategies for Engaging the Public.
I’ve taken on the revamping of the site for the Center for School Change in St. Paul, moving it to WordPress and adding a blog.
I’ll soon be coaching Joe Nathan, Director; Kabo Yang, Associate Director; and Paj Ntaub Lee, Outreach Coordinator, on how to update the site, blog, and use other social media tools to support their work.
For the next three months I’m teaching my new online course, Social Media for Leaders, to a group of 10 community leaders, all members of the Detroit Revitalization Fellows Project.