At the North American Jewish Day School Conference, I offered a session entitled "Redefining Community Leadership for an Online World." The session explored how traditional "offline" organizations might open their communities beyond the those tied to the brick-and-mortar building, to include online fans, friends, and followers. In particular, I wanted to grapple with the sticky questions of sharing leadership, merging online community with offline, the value online leaders might bring to a bricks-and-mortar school, and for what purpose. On other words, I wanted to explore the broadest, most generous definition of "community," and the role that community can play in the development and enrichment of a traditional organization tied to a physical and geographic location. In this blog post, I consider who is the "legitimate community," how to identify and vet your online community leaders, and how to support those leaders within your virtual communities. The blog post also includes the embedded slide deck from my conference session.

Today, more than 2,000 bloggers from over 200 countries are collectively writing about The Power of We ​for Blog Action Day, "a celebration of people working together to make a positive difference in the world, either for their own communities or for people they will never meet halfway around the world." One of the reasons that I participate in Blog Action Day is because I believe strongly that blogs have a role in social change: motivating interest and stakeholders, through offering resources and news, inspiring people to share and act, and as a marketplace for ideas and conversation. This post reviews 11 social media campaigns that have leverages "The Power of We" for success. In addition, I'm giving away a copy of Beth Kanter and K.D. Paine's new book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit (donated by Hubspot).

How might we use content to develop and deepen community within our own own social media channels? What content do people REALLY engage with, why is that, and who is engaging? With the right approach, any organization should be able to identify content that engages its community, optimize it, and create deeper community engagement using community-based content curators. Knowing which questions to ask and what data to track is the first stage of content-based community-building. Knowing how to optimize it for community-building is the goal.

I attended the Jewish Futures conference June 4th, and I am still thinking about reimagining community and Jewish life, smashing idols, and rethinking education. I "live-blogged" a few of the sessions, and am sharing them through this blog. The final keynote presenter, Allison Fine, urged attended to "Reimagine Jewish Life in the Connected Age." Temples, she explains, are traditional institutions, with internal default settings and insides and outsides. What is implied is that if there is no inside vs. outside, and how would the institutions look and act differently? My live-blogged notes from her idea-packed 20-minute session follow.

I am at the Jewish Futures conference, live blogging the thought-provoking sessions that are urging us to rethink community. The first session is from Courtney E. Martin, who will speak about "Tweeting at the Campfire: Community in the Age of Social Media, Unprecedented Crisis, and Transformative Opportunity." This was an idea-packed 20 minutes, where Ms. Martin challenged us think about the power of online community to create better world. As my colleague Amy Pollack noted, "Courtney Martin talked about how online community can galvanize individuals into communities achieve previously unattainable goals facilitated by new online tools."