Doc and I did a panel, led by Jerry Michalski, on the state of markets as conversations. Most of the discussion was around Doc’s Vendor Relationship Management model. Interesting dicsussion with the audience.

(The Supernova “conversation hub” is here. And Isabel Walcott’s thorough bloggage of the session with Doc and me — with Isabel’s commentary — is here. BTW, this is part of the Wharton day, and this track is sponsored by Cisco. )

Now I’m in a session about people doing cool things in the nonprofit domain.

Maria Daniels of WGBH’s American Experience series talks about the Citizen Storytellers Project enables citizens to do video via cell phones. It’s an unfunded add-on to the series.

Howard Greenstein introduces a video of Farouk Olu Aregbe who created One Million Strong for Barack on FaceBook, from outside the Obama campaign. Then we get Farouk on the phone. What has he learned about creating social networks around candidates? One thing is that the regulatory environment is tough. And there are scaling issues. Q: Is your software available for other candidates? A: It’s Facebook and third party software.howard then introduces a video inteview with Rolando H. Brown of the non-profit Hip-Hop Association promoting hiphop as a way to support community values and social awareness. The foundation runs a film festival and educational conferences.

Susan [missed the last name] of TechSoup talks about the Nonprofit Commons Project . The Commons was donated by Anshe Chung, the first SL millionaire. It’s an island for nonprofits. Hundreds of member organizations get free space.One of the 1,300 Wikipedia administrators talks a bit about how its governed. [Again, sorry, couldn’t hear his name.] He’s working on categorization policy. He says that the policy to break categories up into smaller ones was based on the fact that a page can only display 200 linked articles. But, he says, that’s an unnatural limitation. So, he started experimenting with making tables of contents for large topics. Within a week, it was on over a thousand categories. Within a month, it was “accepted as gospel” that large categories ought to have a table of contents. It impressed him that good ideas were accepted so quickly. “Innovation takes small steps. Each has to be an improvement. That’s natural selection. That’s what wikis do.” [Tags: supernova2007 nonprofits npg]

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