Voting Open on NTEN’s 2011 NTC Sessions

NTEN‘s Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) is a pretty amazing event for nonprofit staff people, consultants and thought leaders working in that sector. The NTC is growing at a pretty strong clip, last year’s conference had over 1300 technologists and nonprofit staffers. The 2011 NTC, which promises to be even bigger will be held in Washington DC, March 17-19.

We’ve proposed a few sessions, and voting is now open. We hope you will take a look and vote for our sessions, and others from the impressive bounty of proposals.

We’ve been hearing a lot of people ask about mobile websites, or mobile apps. Sumit Kataria and Aaron Pava have a particular interest in this realm and Aaron has proposed a sessions specifically on Transforming Your Drupal Website into a iPhone, iPad or Android Mobile App. Aaron will talk about the options that are out there for taking existing Drupal websites and app-ifying them, and why you might want to consider that.

A few months ago, Ian Rhett organized and led a “Barn Raising” through which a website and marketing plan for a nonprofit organization were created.  Ian has proposed a session to explain how he accomplished this feat, and how you can harness the power of the crowd to do the same. Anatomy of a Barnraising: A Case Study in Crowdsourcing for the non-profit

On the topic of project management, Justine Hirsch proposed Skin In The Game: Why You Should Be An Active Member Of Your Web Project Team. We work very closely with our clients, and many have staff members who become a super active part of the team.  This is valuable for countless reasons and we find that it ensures greater success not just during the development phase of the project, but the entire lifecycle.

Jenn Sramek proposed the session: Own the Product: Keeping Your Project On The Rails While Working With an Outside Team that will look at strategies and techniques organizations can employ to ensure a successful project when working with outside developers. Jenn also proposed the consultative session: The Manager’s Couch: Expert Support for your stickiest (Project) Management Challenges (The Doctor is “In”)… This session is designed for project managers (accidental or otherwise) to ask the experts how they would handle various project management situations.

Sadie Honey proposed two project management related sessions as well: Accidental Product Owner / Project Manager is designed to help those nonprofit staffers who have wound up doing project management that they weren’t trained for get their feet under them to ensure project success. Her other session, Managing Stakeholders, the art of managing up, down, and across, will cover strategies for managing stakeholders throughout the project planning and development cycle, including techniques involving SCRUM project management.

We have been long time advocates of free and open source software, and feel it is very important to explain concepts around open licensing and how the open source ecology works. To this end I’ve proposed Understanding What Open Source Solutions Can Do For You , and Aaron proposed a session on Content Management Systems, Open Source CMS Roundtable, that will cover Drupal, Plone and Joomla.

CivicActions will be organizing/hosting the IgniteNTC event where participants will present on a topic using 20 slides that auto advance every 15 seconds for a total of 5 minutes. Stay tuned for the call for submissions and more information about IgniteNTC.

I’ve been a member of NTEN for over 5 years now, and have attended many Nonprofit Technology Conferences. CivicActions is also an NTEN member and has sponsored some of these conferences in the past. It is very exciting to see how the NTC has grown over the years, and how the community has really stepped up to provide amazing content for these events. We are very happy to be a part of that.