Well, alas no FreetheNet here at the YWCA on Beatty Downtown Vancouver so will limp along with the delayed coverage of Kris Krug and Rob Cottingham's spiel to a crowded room of PR and Marketing minded peeps.

6:31
Okay, the intros are starting at the Vancouver High-Tech Communicator's Exchange meeting. VHCE HTCE are an organization with about 440 people on the contact list and they put on events inexpensively, run by volunteers, with top notch speakers form the community.

6:33
HTCE Members get a discount on Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo's book "Getting to First Base" a contemporary guide to savvy marketing.

6:34
Upcoming events focus on convergence, lead generation (getting sales and marketing working together) and more workshops to help these PR pros get new media savvy.

6:35
Lovely intro for Kris (he has a great speechwriter ;-)) - ditto for Rob (who came recommended from Darren Barefoot who's garnered 3 mentions already despite being in Morocco).

Rob and cohort Alex are top notch strategic consultants as Social Signal. Pro speech writer Rob doubles as a funny guy - stand up and comic writer - he has a cold to go with his dry and intelligent sense of humor

6:36
I wave hello as they introduce me as the token citizen journalist (that's me on the floor in the front).

Featured Bryght VPS Site, ChangeEverything.ca was named a Webby Award Official Honoree. Congratulations! If your Bryght Light or Bryght VPS site has won an award, please let us know!

FROM ChangeEverything.ca is named "Webby Award Official Honoree" | ChangeEverything.ca:

QUOTE

ChangeEverything.ca has been named as one of the 'Official Honorees' in the 11th Annual Webby Awards. Of the more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 11th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an 'Official Honoree'. This honour signifies an outstanding caliber of work. This is a huge and very exciting for us!

END QUOTE

Rob Cottingham's followup to my ChangeEverything.ca Featured Site post gives us more insight into the success of the ChangeEverything.ca community. Read the whole thing!

FROM ChangeEverything.ca: Setting the stage for participation | Social Signal:

QUOTE

So for your online community to take off, you have to design for participation, starting with your concept. In the case of ChangeEverything.ca, that meant the simple idea of allowing people to think about the changes they wanted to make, and then blog about them.

But don't count technology out. We needed a clean, easy way for users to link blog posts to changes... and that's where some techno magic comes into the picture.

Enter Khalid Baheyeldin, one of the greats in Drupal development. We contracted with him to create the custom module that lets users link pieces of content ("nodes" in Drupal-speak) in lists – and Drupal, Khalid, our client and Social Signal being who we all are, the resulting module (with a little extra work by Khalid) was released to the community.

Between Khalid's work, some solid advice from Bryght on data architecture and Courtney Miller's theming and interface tweaks, the result was a platform that was designed from the ground up for participation.

So yes, there was some technical mojo, but all of it in the service of, and strictly applied to, getting people to take part in the community. We were setting a stage – which is just a venue for the actors to shine.

And shine they have. Kate Dugas, the site animator, has been brilliant, in turns charming, warm and provocative. The community members have responded in kind, to the point where I now regularly turn to ChangeEverything.ca myself for ideas and inspiration. Community, enabled by technology: that's what this is all about.

END QUOTE

Act locally, think globally. That's one of the premises behind Bryght VPS site, ChangeEverything.ca. Community members (anybody in the Vancouver and Victoria, BC area) on ChangeEverything.ca submit "changes" (things they would like to change in their lives and communities -- implemented as a custom content type using Drupal's content construction kit) no matter how large or how small and the community works together to help accomplish those goals.

ChangeEverything.ca is illustrative of an online community truism: after you have a solid and reliable technology infrastructure like Drupal to build an online community upon, the social i.e. the people part of the community matters more than the technology part.

And the people part is hard to do even if you have done this before. Accordingly, the Vancity team (the organization behind ChangeEverything.ca), led by William Azaroff, did some very smart things. First, they hired Social Signal who have oodles of online community experience to coordinate the site and community design. Second, Vancity hired Kate Dugas who administers and nurtures the ChangeEverything.ca Community with a deft hand.