Another event to add to your planner - Social Tech Training is geared towards training social change-minded organizations in using the web to activate, communicate and inspire.

Web of Change is not your typical tech conference. This conference (now in its 7th year - this year September 19-23, 2007) takes place in an idyllic setting at Cortes Island in the heart of British Columbia. It's a retreat with a veritable "who's who" at the intersection of social change, online strategy and technology.

Bryght is a sponsor of Web of Change and our president, Kris Krug, attended in 2005 and will be there in 2007.

The Web of Change Drupal connection took off in 2005. In 2005 Drupal and CivicSpace came on strong, with a noticable majority of more technical attendees mentioning it in their opening introduction as the thing they were the most excited about. Conference head honcho Jason Mogus notes: "In my 5 years at that time of running Web of Change we had not seen any one technology platform with as much sustained excitement".

The momentum was so much so that in 2006, the Web of Change conference re-launched their new website using Drupal.

After NTC and Penguin Day in Seattle, I drove East accross Washington to Spokane and then north back into Canada to keynote at a cool new tech conference called Switch On put on by a non-profit called TechVillage. TechVillage is funded by Western Economic Diversification Canada and the Kooteney Association for Science and Technology with a mission to "flourish as an enterprising non-profit that strives to be nimble and responsive to the needs of digital media, software and IT members in this region by providing professional development, consulting, networking, and project opportunities to members."

My presentation was titled "The Evolution of The Internet: Web 2.0" and was a primer on new and emerging tools and trends online. I talked about markets as conversations, RSS, social software, free and open source tools, and building communities and connecting with your customers and constituents online. There were tons of questions and in the end they had to cut me off (after giving me a small time extension already). There were about 75 local business owners here consisting primarily of software developers and web designers and there is a ton of interest in these topics. I saw a couple people shooting video so hopefully the footage of the session should be up eventually... I'll link to it from here when it comes out.

After NTC and Penguin Day in Seattle, I drove East accross Washington to Spokane and then north back into Canada to keynote at a cool new tech conference called Switch On put on by a non-profit called TechVillage. TechVillage is funded by Western Economic Diversification Canada and the Kooteney Association for Science and Technology with a mission to "flourish as an enterprising non-profit that strives to be nimble and responsive to the needs of digital media, software and IT members in this region by providing professional development, consulting, networking, and project opportunities to members."

My presentation was titled "The Evolution of The Internet: Web 2.0" and was a primer on new and emerging tools and trends online. I talked about markets as conversations, RSS, social software, free and open source tools, and building communities and connecting with your customers and constituents online. There were tons of questions and in the end they had to cut me off (after giving me a small time extension already). There were about 75 local business owners here consisting primarily of software developers and web designers and there is a ton of interest in these topics. I saw a couple people shooting video so hopefully the footage of the session should be up eventually... I'll link to it from here when it comes out.