Sky's Blog

{File under Pitfalls of Startup Organizations…}

Every unpaid volunteer; every pro-bono professional; everyone working on some project without pay; all of them are investing in their particular futures. This is particularly true for nonprofit startups.

And I mean to use specifically that word—investing—this means they are giving of their talent and time with some hope or expectation that things will work out in a particular (and good) way in the future. They have some vision of what they are working toward. A truth that so few nonprofit CEOs understand is that volunteers are actually donors and they deserve the same respectful treatment as donors. (continue reading…)

I love Joi Ito’s advice about startups. Mostly he is talking about understanding risk. I particularly focused on one section just after 9 minutes into the video where he talks about how it’s folly to spend a lot of time building a business plan when it’s so inexpensive to go ahead and develop your product iteratively and develop the plan after you’ve seen how your customers are reacting to the product. Here’s the video:

(continue reading…)

At LeWeb in Paris (December 2009) Chris Pirillo articulated some underlying principles for creating true (virtual) community. Matt Buckland^[1] recorded Chris’ points in text form. I’m going to make some comments on them now.

Chris started by saying “I don’t have an agenda; I don’t have an announcement…” referring, of course, to the number of companies that had been making announcements on the stage. Probably not unusual, since you want to make product announcements where they will be heard, but it was certainly being noticed this time around.

The full video of Chris’ talk appears at the bottom of this article. I’m going to pick and choose from the points that Matt jotted down.

So, what is the essence of community? Community… (continue reading…)

The Traveling Geeks are at it again. This time the destination is Paris for LeWeb and some other tech meetings.

Organizing a tour for 15 geeks was a nightmarish task for TG Co-Founder Renee Blodgett, who worked for weeks to put this one together – much shorter lead time than for previous tours. And her co-organizers Eliane Fiolet and Phil Jeudy, plus two web developers, did a heroic job.

The online developers were tasked with creating the new web site, but I came in for the last few weeks to preside over one of my (current) specialties -  ensuring that we can mash information together in real time. Here’s what it required and what I learned: (continue reading…)