Managing Your Website with Today's Tools

Steve Backman and Laura Quinn

Need a way to update your website, but not sure where to start? In this action-packed session, we'll talk about today’s software alternatives that allow non-technical staff members to update a website, including: What are Content Management Systems, and what advantages do they offer nonprofits compared to sticking with a traditional site?, What affordable options exist for maintaining my website? What are my options for adding popular additional interactive features, such as news feeds, blogging, or calendars to a site? Can I add a 'members only' section to my existing site? Can I add a blog without starting over? What does it take to get started with these tools? To update your existing site to work with them? Takeaway: Resources for further research and a worksheet for getting started in planning.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Roadmap

Sura Hart and Katie Winterbottom

The SEO Roadmap workshop will provide a practical introduction to SEO fundamentals, guiding participants through the three basic steps necessary to launch an effective SEO campaign on the cheap including: 1) keyword research, 2) keyword placement, 3) and link building. And a bonus step – working with Google Adwords.

HAVA Great Idea? (HAVA stands for Help America Vote Act)

Tom Kelly

This workshop will cover the timelines/mandates/implications of Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed by Congress as a consequence of the 2000 Presidential recount in Florida. It will also include a brief overview of who has access to voter information nationwide using Massachussetts state law and Florida law as examples. Ideally all attending the conference will consider to creating a third political party for the purpose of gaining access to voter databases across the country and creating a nationwide voter database that would be accessible on the Internet similar to www.florida-voters.org which has all 10 million plus voters in the State of Florida.

Organizing the Organic Internet

Alfredo Lopez, Jamie McClelland, Benjamin Melancon and Ross Glover

In this gathering, activists will join together to examine and discuss one of the largest, most important and powerful human movement in recent history. With over a billion people engaging in a collective activity, today's Internet is one of humanity's largest social movements, reflecting the kind of social interaction and collective achievement activists like us struggle for world-wide: fundamentally collaborative, democratic and based almost entirely on tools and software that has been produced collaboratively, developed by large, democratic communities and distributed freely. It is truly international and resilient against constant attempts to control its direction and curtail its positive growth. In this gathering, we seek to collaboratively write an Internet Justice Bill of Rights. Modeled after our successful workshop at the US Social Forum, we will break the audience into groups of 4 - 5 people. Each group will speak with one voice via a "scribe" who will be tasked with entering the group's proposed rights of the group into a web-based system. A dynamic, projected display of the current state of the Bill of Rights is visible to all.

Helping Your Computer System Grow Up

Adam Frost, Computer Care and Learning
www.ComputerCareandLearning.com

In this participatory workshop, we will explore ways to make your organization's computer system stronger, more reliable, and more effective in achieving your mission. Participants are encouraged to bring detailed descriptions of their computer network for discussion and improvement. We will demonstrate our educational approach to computer improvement, and we will help you make good use of the tools our team uses to help foster good computer care: how tos, backup logs, budgets, maintenance guides, security guides, and equipment lists.