Networking, Networking, and, uh, Networking...

As I attended various discussions at the NTEN Conference (08NTC) today, Networking seemed to be the word of the day:

• Networking as in the standard way an IT geek uses it, which is the Local Area Network or Wide Area Network. This is important because for networking to be done in other ways, a good solid network infrastructure needs to be used in an organization. This will become more apparent as the the other type of "networking" starts to be used...


• Networking as in Social Networking, or as the more geek-inclined among us call it, Interactive Web or Web 2.0. Web 2.0 requires that an organization that attempts to use this type of technology in fundraising and outreach needs to be very secure, with a solid network architecture that can handle both the bandwidth requirements (internal AND external) and the real-time communication and collaboration requirements.


• Networking, as in meeting your colleagues from around the country and listening to what they're doing and how they might be resolving the same issues that you might have. This is always the best way to hear about what others are doing and discovering what works for them and allowing you to think about how it might work for your Social Profit organization.

I have also been working on how best to utilize Web 2.0 at GMHC for the last year. One thing that I've noticed from my research is that an agency really needs to examine it's mission and core values to determine how or whether to use this technology. My mantra in IT (and in all enterprise processes for that matter) is "how does this forward the mission?" If the answer is positive, then the next question is "how can this be implemented with best practices for the most impact and greatest value to the organization?" It is at this point that the team that will implement the process convenes and produces the project.

By the way, I want to compliment the NTEN team for their innovative use of just such Interactive Web technologies. This blog post, via the tag, is being collected with a number of other blog posts on the event using technorati. Also, although I did get sick of the constant "tweats" on my cell phone, their use of Twitter has been a great success and a wonderful idea. This is a technology to reckon with in the future, as you may have seen it just earlier today being used successfully to gather war protesters in real-time.