The Nonprofit Technology Conference, centered on the theme “Reinventing Politics: Creating Social Change From the Ground Up” looks to be the real deal – over 1,000 attendees and 80 break-out sessions.

I’ll be arriving in DC on Wednesday afternoon and will leave Friday evening. Outside of the NTC conference I am arranging meetings related to spreading Issues Forums everywhere, hope to connect with those involved with the momentum filled TheOpenHouseProject.com and I’ll be visiting Ashoka staff on Thursday over lunch. On Friday, I invite conference attendees to join my breakout session at 1:30 p.m. with another new Ashoka Fellow, Charles Best with Donors Choose (see session details below). At the conference, I’d be glad to introduce folks to the open source GroupServer tool as well. Tell me where to be.

If you would like to connect in DC or will be at the NTC conference, please drop me a note: clift@publicus.net

Also, on Wednesday afternoon (Apr 4) at 4 p.m., I am tentatively planning to gather our DC-area contacts interested in launching local Issues Forums with E-Democracy.Org. Drop us a note if you can make it: team@e-democracy.org

Cheers,
Steven Clift
e-democracy.org
dowire.org

Session Details
2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference
April 4 – 6, 2007

Session Tags: Planning
Start Date & Time: Apr 06, 2007 1:30 pm
Session Type: Breakout

New Approach to Social Change: Technology and the Social Entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. While a business entrepreneur might create entirely new industries, a social entrepreneur comes up with new solutions to social problems and then implements them on a large scale. Increasingly, many organizations are turning to social entrepreneurship—one of the most highly leveraged approaches to social change—to ensure the sustainability and systemic impact of such change. Many new entrepreneurial endeavors, like DonorsChoose or e-democracy.org, are driven by the power of technology – often in different and surprising ways. In this session, you will hear brief case studies about how social entrepreneurs are using technology to create social change, how social entrepreneurs approach problem solving, and sources where you can learn more.

Takeaways:

1. Learn what Social Entrepreneurship is.
2. Learn innovative approaches to using technology for social impact.
3. Share experiences and insights in technology implementation with a “more than the sum of its parts” approach.

Speaker List

* Charles Best / DonorsChoose

Charles Best leads DonorsChoose.org, a simple way to fulfill needs and foster innovation in public schools. Charles founded DonorsChoose in the spring of 2000 at Wings Academy, an alternative public high school in the Bronx where he taught social studies for five years. Under Charles’s leadership, DonorsChoose has enabled citizen-donors to deliver more than $7 million in funding to more than 10,000 teachers in 4,000 public schools. National media such as Oprah Winfrey and The New York Times have hailed DonorsChoose as “the future of philanthropy.” In 2004, DonorsChoose received a Technology Laureate, and in 2005, DonorsChoose surpassed 1,000 other organizations to win the Nonprofit Innovation Award conferred by Stanford Business School and Amazon.com. Charles graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale in 1998, and then spent a year studying wood sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Guadalajara, Mexico, helping to train Tzotzil Indians as teachers in Chiapas, Mexico, and teaching Spanish literacy at a farm/orphanage in the Nicaraguan highlands.

* Steven Clift / E-Democracy.Org

Steven Clift is an online strategist and public speaker focused on the use of the Internet in democracy, governance, and community. For the last decade he has worked to fundamentally improve democracy and citizen participation through the use of the Internet. He seeks to change the world one e-mail at a time. One of world’s leading experts on e-democracy, he is actively networking people around the world determined to make a difference with this new media. A frequent media commentator, Steven Clift speaks publicly with meaning, energy and enthusiasm while providing accessible and useful information. He has presented hundreds of times across twenty-three countries.

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