A colleague asked me for my thoughts on trends in social media today. I can sum it up in one word: convergence. From the communications sector, to measurement, policy, social data, and job responsibilities, the sector is converging. In this blog post, I walk through how social media is converging in these areas, and the forces behind convergence.

Sarah Francis of MomsRising.org and Loren Drummond of the Washington Trails Association shared their experiences and practices moving fans to real world action at the Nonprofit Technology Conference April 13th. The session was a mesmerizing, fascinating peek into how two brilliant organizers recruit, motivate, inspire, and engage online fans to drive change. This blog post captures their advice on how to offer value to fans, move them up the ladder of engagement, bring them into the organization, and develop a successful real world campaign.

What if everyone who works at an organization, or cares deeply about a cause or organization, acted as a network weaver? How would that change the way that organizations communicate? How would that change how and the extent to which organizations raise funds online? That was just the conversation that I had in mind when my colleague Scott Remington and I presented a working session at the Jewish Federation Young Leadership Conference. We had one overarching goal: to empower every person in the room to become a network weaver. In this blog post, I overview the presentation and its five primary segments: redefining leadership, developing your own brand, mapping your own network, the network weaver and online fundraising, and two case studies of network weavers succeeding with online fundraising.

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."