Scott Heiferman, founder and CEO of Meetup, talks to us about how he learned to value communities, why he wants to make people powerful, and what we have to look forward to expect in the 21st century.

 

Jed Sundwall: Can you talk about the genesis of Meetup? What motivated you to create it?

 

Brian Dear, founder of Eventful, talks to us about how structuring event data is helping people find the events that matter to them and their communities.

What does Eventful do?

Eventful's mission is to help people discover, track, create, and share events. Basically, we want to provide worldwide comprehensive service to help people find events everywhere. We're trying to address a major need that the Internet hasn't met until now, which is basically a search engine dedicated to event discovery.

We're trying to exploit technology to the fullest to help people with one particular niche, albeit a very large niche. On any given day, probably 50 million events go on throughout the world.

The NetSquared, Cisco and the other sponsors put on a great event. Here are some of the folks I worked with at the registration table in the morning.

 

Jayson Fagar & Colleen Nagle, NetSquared staffers, at the registration table.

Just finished volunteering. In time to hear the opening speaker. Now we get to hear a 2 minute blurb from each of the featured non profits. The first one was about "micro" volunteering. Definitely want to check that one out.

Just a quick reminder that if you are at the Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in New Orleans this week, we're having a casual meetup tonight (Wednesday, March 19th) from 5-6:30 PM at Loa Bar in the International Hotel (221 Camp Street).

We'll be joined by folks from the larger TechSoup community, and the Nonprofits in Second Life community.

Hope to see you there!

Photo by me. 

Last night, the Chicago NetTuesday group held its first gathering. About 30 folks met at The Point (thanks Aaron, Andrew, Joe, and Greg!) for food, networking, and an eye-opening discussion about the tech needs and challenges of non-profits. The organizations represented were diverse - advocacy orgs, media trainers, consultants, social service agencies, youth orgs, community dev corps, and more. After a short discussion (next time we’ll leave more time for this), informal networking carried on until nearly 9pm. Co-covener Michael Maranda also blogged about the meeting.

also posted at http://movesmart.org/WordPress/?p=34

photo by Demetrio Maguigad

Co-Founder and CEO of Meetup, Scott Heiferman, will be the featured speaker at the NYC Net2 Meetup group, Tech4Good on Wednesday, December 5. Scott will be talking about how to move online campaigns off-line.

Scott is also Co-founder of Fotolog and the Organizer of the NY Tech Meetup. You can check out his blog at scott.heiferman.com.

 

This summer, Dan McQuillan expressed a need for a NetSquared community in Europe. Four months later, web innovators and social changemakers got together at the Newman Arms pub in London to brainstorm the structure, goals and programming for a NetSquared group in the UK.

According to David Wilcox and Nick Booth's coverage of the night, William Hoyle, Steve Bridger, Steve Moore, Michael Ambjorn, Paul Miller, Simon Berry and Nathalie McDermott were part of the mix.

Sounds like a big focus of the evening was about how the growth and adoption of the social web can not only help nonprofits and NGOs with their work, but change their culture and structure as well.

David Wilcox writes:

"The focus of discussion was not just about how nonprofits could use Web 2.0: in fact Dan - who has recently left an international charity - went so far as to say "the Third Sector is broken" ... I think. I'm sure he'll correct me if that's an overstatement. While some people felt social media could help in fixing, others of us were more interested in the new set of values and ways of doing things bubbling up around social media, unbounded by historic notions of public, private and nonprofit sectors."

Greetings NetSqaured friends, come and join us as we discuss online community tricks and tools tomorrow night, here at our offices in SF.

Come and join us tomorrow night at 7pm at Hotel Biron! See you there!