A whole ‘nother level of online community.

I love Open Source software. The self-organizing of people to collaboratively create something they feel is worthwhile is an amazing model.

I’ve written a lot about ChangeEverything.ca here, but I have never written much about Drupal, the platform CE was developed on. This week we launched a small bit of new functionality to the ChangeEverything community called nudge. It’s a fairly simple application:

…you use it to tell the creator of a change or the writer of a blog post that you’re inspired by what they’re doing… and you want to hear more. Click it, and ChangeEverything.ca instantly sends that person an email – including, if you want, a personal message from you.

But the thing I love most about it is that when we wanted to add this feature to the site, there wasn’t a module available that did this. So after custom-developing “nudge” for the CE community, we released it free to the world as a module for any Drupal site.

Now that’s community!

UPDATE: Here’s a post on the subject from Social Signal.

My final thoughts on Finovate.

FinovateI just posted my final thoughts on the presenters at Finovate in a post titled My Finovate Wrap-Up. In it, I try to pull out those products and services that resonated with me, as someone who is passionate about social media and credit unions.

And some photos from the event below…


The building in NY where Finovate happened.


NetBanker’s Jim Bruene introducing the event.


Finovate organizers Jim Bruene and Eric Mattson.

A great time at Finovate.

I had a great time today at Finovate. I gotta hand it to Jim – he ran a good show. The format of giving each presenter only 7 minutes, no powerpoint, no bullets, just a real live demo of their product, was genius.

Maybe it was the curating, knowing that each presenter was invited to participate because they had something to offer made the difference, but every conversation I had was so amazingly useful. I don’t think I have ever been to a conference where I got so many useful business cards.

I’d be curious to know what others thought, but I had a great time.

Now, my vacation begins…