Gregory Heller Get in touch

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The blog

725 posts on careers, communication, technology and civic life, since 2005.

  1. Unconferences in the news

    Kaliya Hamlin pointed me to this article about Mashup Camp (not to be confused with MashPit the Mashup hackathon that Chris Messina envisioned and has been involved with.) Mashup Camp is an unconference utilizing open space strategies like the law of two feet. Apparently unconferences are becoming so popular that “Doug Gold and David Berlind, the organizers of Mashup Camp, hope to turn unconferences into a business.” Um… I guess. The business will be one the organizes unconferences. Seems a bit strange. I know it does take work to line up sponsors, locations, etc… But one of the things that really makes the unconferences i have been to so great is the “of the people, by the people, for the people” nature of them.

  2. CivicActions launches HightowerLowdown.org

    CivicActions launched HightowerLowdown.org on Monday. This site follows on our launch, earlier this year, of JimHightower.com and last year’s Hightower Roadmap , our first project with Hightower’s team.

  3. Images in email M&RSS weighs in

    M&R Strategic Services did a quick little study on the effectiveness of images in advocacy emails. Basic idea is now that so many people block images in their mail clients, or their mail clients do it for them, images may hurt, rather than help the organization. You can read the 4 page study here . From what I gather, the numbers don’t prove the case “images hurt you now.” And the study doesn’t answer the question in the title “Do Images Help or Hurt?”. The number say “The effect of images in email are really statistically insignificant.” The differences in open rate or response rate were all withing a few hundredths of a percentage point, which given the unreliability of email metrics like open rate tracking and click through tracking, I would say are within the margins of error.

  4. Identity Open Space event in Vancouver

    Kaliya Hamlin , a friend of mine from various converenences, is involved in the planning/convening of an open space conference in Vancouver about single sign on, identity related issues. What do I mean by that? Well, I think Kaliya can explain it better . I agree with her that it is important for folks from our sector (social source, progressive technology) to be in on these discussions. The identity layer will really propell our experience of the internet to the next level.

  5. Drupal Camp Seattle June 28, 29

    CivicActions is co-sponsoring Drupal Camp Seattle with Vancouver Drupal ASP Bryght and Rain City Studios (also based in Vancouver) on Wednesday and Thursday, June 28, 29 at the Richard Hugo House . I’ll be facilitating and co-facilitating sessions for non-coders on e-campaigning with Drupal, boot-strapping your site with Drupal as a non-coder, CiviCRM for power users and a quick tour of the views module.

  6. Wardriving with Arthur

    Arthur Foelsche and I take a few minutes away from the rest of the CivicActions June Off Site in Geyserville, CA to troubleshoot and fix a mail issue for a client. Geyserville is a rather small town, no internet cafes. So we made due, after about 10 minutes of wardriving, we found an open wireless signal near the railroad tracks.

  7. More Drupal Mapping from Development Seed!

    Had a quick Skype with Eric Gundersen of Development Seed . Eric and I catch up every week or three to talk about developments in drupal development. Particularly the modules that our shops are working on (and modules that other shops are workign on too!). We’ll be having a call sometime soon to talk about their seed campaign module, our mapthing module, and forward and send. Basically this is my dream recipe that does viral e-activism with maps! Eric pointed me to this blog post about some google based geotagging work they are doing. “[They are] working on building a new geocoder module for Drupal to make syndication of content to maps and Google Earth easier.”

  8. MeCommerce from GoodStorm

    GoodStorm , the Drupal Powered on demand T-Shirt printing service, is launching a new service called “ MeCommerce ” (see article here which will allow bloggers (and other websites) to include an ecommerce widget which will: allow bloggers to insert product listings in a javascript and iframe box on their sites and keep 50% of the retail mark-up for themselves. Blog readers will be able to purchase books and CDs inside the box without leaving the blog page they are on. Blog publishers can populate their boxes by tag or with specific items of their selection.

  9. From Worldchanging: Crowdsourcing

    From Worldchanging Crowdsourcing describes the substitution of extremely low-paid or volunteer labor for what were formerly paying jobs: for instance, the substitution of computer science students and volunteer coders working on an open source project for paid software engineers working on a proprietary project. It should be noted that sometimes far more jobs are created overall in such a transcommercial approach .

  10. An Inconvenient Truth

    Last night I went to see An Inconvenient Truth , the Al Gore movie about Catastrophic Climate Change. I saw it with a group of friends and we went out afterward for dinner. Go see the movie. Every American should see this movie. You cannot watch it and wonder how things would be different if Mr. Gore had faught a little harder after the election of 2000. But that aside, seeing images of the Katrina Aftermath made me cry, literally. I could not watch it. I had a dream last night about the movie, in which I was moved to tears by the facts laid out so eloquently by Mr. Gore.