A great day out at #barcampnonprofits

Last Saturday was barcampnonprofits an event bringing together people interested in the social web and how it can help non-profits. Normally an early bird, this wasn't an ordinary Saturday for me and I turned up just in time for the second session.

The talks kicked off for me with a look at social media search tools from my friend Anna. She really managed to keep things simple which was perfect for the audience. For anyone who wants to know more about the tools which are out there for tracking social posts, you can check out http://wiki.kenburbary.com/. I think that socialseek looks cool as far as free tools go. Anna's top tool is Socialmention. Of course, if you want the best in paid social media tracking, look no further than yours truly...

Next up was Val Redchenko with his interesting project kick-off. Hopefully I'm going to help him out testing a machine-learning twitter app which can make recommendations on which tweets to read. It was a lot of fun talking about the capabilities of this type of programme without having to get too worried about the mechanics of the machine-learning process. Any suggestions for a name for our app are more than welcome...

After lunch I was taken on what I will describe as a left-brained charity appeal. Credit goes to Toby Ord for coming up with such an inventive way of promoting charitible causes and doing such a lot of good work. The basic premise is that you use the same method which the NHS uses to define which drugs they should pay for to decide which charity you should support. Turns out that you can buy the most years of quality life for people by sending your money to fight neglected tropical diseases. You can find out more at http://www.givingwhatwecan.org/

Finally the day was topped off by self-confessed minor internet celebrity Ben Walker aka @ihatemornings. He was refreshingly untouched by his notoriety and a good time was had by all.

Thanks to Voice and the other sponsors, this was a really fun event and we made a satifying splash on the interwebs.

Superpower Nation - I've been experimented upon by the BBC...

This afternoon I went to check out superpower nation. This was a live online/offline forum for people from around the world to come together and talk about anything they liked both by speaking and typing. The language barriers were removed using Google Translate.

The plan was it would seem to avoid prompting conversation and allow it to just happen. You can check out some of the results on

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/superpower/spn.shtml

The technology certainly did it's job but the absence of any kind of common theme to the conversation led essentially to noise. It also appeared that there were more experimenters than there were guinea pigs.

It would be easy to say this chaos was predictable from experience of human nature, or reading about Douglas Adams' Babel Fish but I would like to be a lot more positive. The more interesting question is where could this technology be used to come to conclusions, make the world a better place? Could micro-events be linked up for the next climate-change negotiation for example? Some form of global debate? I hope such things will evolve organically as we become more used to the technology being available.

Another interesting way to use voice translation would be management training in large global organisations. In my days as a grad student I spent a very rewarding couple of weeks at a graduate training excersise, solving problems working with people from completely different disciplines. An international element would have really put the icing on the cake.

So in conclusion, many thanks to @RoxDog for an intriguing invitation, plenty of hope for the future of Google translate but quite questionable what genuine insight was gained from the Superpower nation experiment.

Perhaps it's just me though, Google and the BBC where pretty happy... Did anyone else go along? What where your thoughts