This is the age of perpetual beta. New features, tools and applications are being developed at such a rapid pace, that it’s more efficient to adopt a rapid & agile approach to development and implementation than to try to perfect it before going live. You might notice that Gmail and Flickr are still noted as “beta”.

Today things move quickly, and being agile and nimble is more important than being perfect.  The consequence, however, is that without a defined end point or beginning, we might forget to pause and reflect, or to fully embrace a new beginning.  When we’re constantly evolving, and continually focused on what’s next, do we lose the opportunity to get the most out of this moment, and what we’ve accomplished? It’s always hard to carve out the time for reflection, but every time I do it, I am reminded that it’s worth its weight in gold.  Looking backwards in an age of constant innovation might seem counter-intuitive, but it is critical for future success, happiness and improvement.  This is true whether it’s a new release of some widget or gadget, or a birthday, or Rosh Hashanah.

The cycle of the Jewish year is important not only for giving us reason to stop and reflect, but also for giving us a reference point for that reflection.  I often remember my thoughts, feelings, regrets, hopes and thankfulness of last year, or the year before at Rosh Hashanah.  The intensity of the holidays, the unique feeling of walking into the synagogue on that day, and even the words and tunes of the prayers evoke those memories that were etched into my being a year, or two, or three ago. The power of the day is not in what I’m thinking or feel at that moment, but how much has changed over time.

I once read a book, Managing Transitions, about how organizations and people navigate change.  The take-home message for me was that change is situational, like a light switch.  You close a factory, you require your staff to use a new database system, or the calendar tips from 5770 to 5771.  But transition is psychological, and is a process.  If we only see the change, and don’t engage in the transition, has anything really changed?  If we are truly going to embark on a new beginning, we must take the time to close one chapter before we can transition into the next phase.

I’ve always been fascinated by the word “beginning”.  Seemingly a noun, the “ing” gives it this little boost of a verb’s energy.  Maybe it’s just a noun in perpetual beta.

I totally get the premise of the summit, that women are underrepresented in mainstream media and blogs and conference panels, that we need to break down barriers to women’s participation in the technology sector, and the need to create a network of women in technology who can be called upon as experts in their field.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “only about 11% of U.S. firms with venture-capital backing in 2009 had current or former female CEOs or female founders, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource. The prestigious start-up incubator Y Combinator has had just 14 female founders among the 208 firms it has funded.”  Women Who Tech is not the only women-focused event on the calendar. In December, the influential technology conference TED is holding its first women-focused conference.  (More stats and resources about women in tech are available here.)  I applaud these events, not for their sometimes interpreted as “affirmative action for women” approach, but for their celebration and encouragement of women who are breaking down perceived (as well as actual) barriers.

The thing is, I grew up in a different world, where my CEO-of-educational-technology-startups mother worked long hours to excel at her career, make the world a better place, and be a 100% mom at the same time.   It’s possible that she worked harder than her male colleagues, or had more to balance with her roles at home, but from my point of view as a kid and young adult, women could do anything. The fact that I have chosen to work in a tech-related field isn’t because I am trying to change percentages, or represent my gender in high level decision making.  It’s because it excites me, and I’m good at it.  Gender never played into my decision (if it had, I would be doing something else?), and it rarely presents itself as an issue in my professional life.

That being said, there are definitely times when I look around the room and find myself in the company of mostly men.  I like to think I’m rather Zen about it.  I take note, and then move on.  Recently, I’ve been putting together a panel for a social media session at a major national Jewish conference.  I’m struggling to find a man for the panel, you know, just for the sake of diversity.  So in my world, thankfully, the experience is not as one-sided as the venture capital statistics seem to say.  (Note to self: I wonder how different is actually is in the nonprofit world – reflecting on my experiences at NTEN conferences, the presenters are heavily weighted towards women.  Currently seeking the latest stats).  The goal here is not 50/50 equality all the time.  The goal is to recognize both real and perceived barriers, and to abolish them.

While others may interpret events like the upcoming Women Who Tech and TEDWomen as equally sexist as the venture capitalists whose decision making percentages they quote, I think the greatest power of these events is to give women who didn’t have moms like mine a similar sense of “anything is possible.”  Further, as women, we do face unique challenges (as me sometime about the weeks leading up to announcing to my clients that I was pregnant for the first time, or how I paced around the house with a newborn in a sling, the wireless phone clipped to my hip, and a headset on – someone should have taken a photo).  But most of all, these events are tremendous for one main reason: they showcase tremendous talent, all in one place.

The Women Who Summit event is an easy-to-swallow $20.  Really.  So mark your calendar for September 15th, from 11am to 6pm Eastern time. All you need is an internet connection and a phone line.   Check out the schedule and register online.   There are even after parties in a handful of major cities.  I might try and get myself to the New York City one.  Anyone care to join me?

Plus, I’ve got 2 passes to give away.  Leave your comment here with your thoughts on gender and technology and I’ll pick two winners before Rosh Hashanah (September 8th).  But go ahead and buy your pass now.  You can always give it to the nice gal (or guy) down the hall.   With a pink bow around it.  Or not.

As I’ve worked with many Jewish organizations, I’ve learned that few are tracking data in useful ways, and even fewer are using this data to improve their programs, communication or allocation of resources.  Data collection and analysis goes far beyond what funders may ask for in grant reporting, and productive data usage requires first and foremost that you’re asking the right questions.

In this TED video, David McCandless shows the power of data visualization.  While the raw data may be overwhelming and not particularly useful, visualizing data may bring important patterns and relationships to light, and laying data sets on top of one another (frequency and geography, for example) can uncover important stories that otherwise would have been invisible.  This “knowledge compression”, as he calls it, makes data useful.  For those of us not yet collecting much data at all, these new ways of looking at the data may inspire us to start!

David says the word in the street is that “data is the new oil,” meaning it’s ubiquitous resource that can be used for different purposes.  He adapts this to “data is the new soil”.  And data visualization is flowers blooming from this fertile foundation.  Check out the video from TED for more, including a few laughs:

The New Year is quickly approaching and with that comes the deluge of new calendars.  Synagogue calendars, school calendars, board meeting schedules, and soccer schedules.  Like me, you are probably used to dedicating an afternoon around this time of year to entering all of these lists of dates into your personal calendar.

Those days are over.

Set up a calendar for your organization in Google, post it to your website or blog, invite your members.  One click and voila, each event on your organization’s calendar is instantly imported into their personal calendar.  The events show up in a new color, so your organization’s events are easily distinguished from other entries on the user’s personal calendar.  And the best part- as you add events to your organization’s calendar, they automatically show up on each individual’s personal Google calendar.  You can even use it to send invitations to your events and collect RSVPs.  It is all both cost free and ad free.  For those that don’t use Google calendar, they can easily view events right on your website or print the calendar in any of three formats:  weekly, monthly, or agenda.

To get started on setting up the calendar for your organization, you’ll need a Google account.  Then go to Google calendar and select “Add” in the “My Calendars” section.  The investment of time is quite minimal.  Spend a few minutes entering the events and then embed the calendar directly to your website.  To try it out from a member prospective,  visit a sample calendar at Kesher Jewish Community After School Program. Then just hit the + at the bottom of the calendar.  (You can easily remove it later.)  Note that for Mac users, Google allows you to add a link to allow them to get the calendar through iCal too.

Ellen Dietrick is the new Director of Early Childhood Education at Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, MA, and is famous for her creative and practical uses of technology at her previous position at Congregation Beth Israel, in Charlottesville, VA, and through the Covenant Fellows program and the Jim Joeseph Foundation Fellowship.

This time last year, the most I knew about anything wiki related was Wikipedia, a site that I went to if I needed a quick, and hopefully accurate, background on something.   In a few short months, and with the help of my talented and incredibly patient Darim coach, my approach to wikis and web tools has changed dramatically.

I was working at the Partnership for Jewish Life & Learning, whose mission is “Transforming Community through Education.”  One of the Partnership’s most innovative projects is called CE21: Congregational Education for the 21st Century.  This is an initiative in which 6-7 congregations participate at a time and engage in a complete overhaul of their approach to congregational education, something that many people would agree is a broken system.

Any innovative project for the 21st century needs to include the power of technology tools.  Our goal was to showcase the most cutting edge technologies both as a tool for the congregations, but also as a model for them to use in their own congregations.  Although I was tasked with injecting this project with web 2.0 tools, I considered myself moderately capable in the use of social media, hardly the expert that I wanted to present myself as!

I was lucky enough to find out about the Darim Online program which provides excellent technology coaching for Jewish educational organizations.  As described below, through my work with my Darim coach, Caren Levine, we created something that I am really proud of, and most importantly, is helping congregations transform their communities.

My goal was to create a forum for communication between seven congregations involved in CE21.  They are all local to the area, but  getting together at the same time for meetings or calls is a challenge.  Through exploring what would be the best option for them to communicate, Caren and I came up with the idea of creating a wiki using Wikispaces.   My most important criterion was usability for the target audience, who I knew might not be tech-savvy.  Wikipedia is already very familiar to people, and that served to make people comfortable with the idea of a wiki from the start.

Once I knew that I wanted a wiki, I had no idea how to create it or how to make it effective.  The following six months opened my eyes to how to create an incredible web resource.  The best part is that I have learned a lot through the process.  My lessons are listed below, with some explanation, and hopefully some instruction about how becoming comfortable with wikis and web technology is really about so much more.

1. Be patient with yourself: learning how to speak a new language is never easy. My first few sessions with the Darim coach were all about learning the language of the wiki (like what “wiki” even means!).  I wanted to know a lot immediately, but it took time to get used to the format, the language, and the tools that made information appear the way I wanted it to.  I learned that there are web tools to help us become more comfortable with other web tools like the Common Craft video on how to use wikispaces! Taking a few minutes to invest in learning the right way to do things from the beginning pays off tremendously later on.   That investment turned into the use of  some really cool tools that we integrated into the Wikispace.  Our goal was to make it as user-friendly as possible for our members, some of whom were not very tech savvy.  We installed a navigation bar which serves as a Table of Contents for the site and was constantly visible on every page.   We tagged pages with key words, and then created a tag-word cloud below the navigation bar to make it easier (and more visually pleasing!) for members to find pages relevant to certain themes.  The more frequently a word – or theme – is tagged, the larger the word appears.  I also knew that our site is very text-heavy, and I was looking for a way to make that more appealing to the user.  With the help of Caren, I learned how to code the text so that within each page, we included a table of contents to help the user navigate the page.  These small tools – all of which I learned through practice, practice, practice – took the site from a warehouse of information to a resource that was very user-friendly.
2. Practice makes perfect, or at least makes it passable. As with anything, the more you practice, the better you become at it.  The key for me to remember in creating the wiki was that while my end users were at a level that required a certain amount of knowledge to use it effectively,  I did not need to know everything about Wikispaces.  Sometimes the perfectionist in us gets the better of us, but the truth is what was really necessary was for me to meet my clients’ needs and make this tool helpful to them.  What they needed was a forum for communication and a resource for information.  A wiki was the perfect medium for that because it allowed them to exchange information and communicate without having to coordinate a specific time to talk  with each other.  The user-friendliness of  Wikispaces made the experience really enjoyable.  It also served as a model for how members could use a Wikispace with their own congregations – as one did.
3. You have friends who can help you – whether at Darim Online or at the Wiki help desk. Questions would come up along the way as I continued to build up the wiki with more content and more features.   Could it do this?  Could we see that?  The good news is that a lot of these questions were generated by the wiki members – which is exactly what we wanted!  Rather than try to figure everything out on my own (which I probably would not have been able to do anyway), my Darim coach was always ready with either a really nifty solution, or the right person with whom to be in touch for assistance.  I don’t think anything came up that we couldn’t answer with a little bit of patience and creativity!
4. Communication is what makes us human. Our ability to exchange ideas and collaborate has the potential to lead to greatness.  Wikis make that even easier by providing forums for users to post their ideas and create content, building a site that is the woven fabric of the community’s ideas.  The primary difference between a traditional webpage and a wiki is that content can be more easily generated collaboratively by members without an intermediary such as an administrator or webmaster.  The CE21 Wikispace – and the ideas and research there – is the product of the communication of the seven CE21 congregations.
5. Congratulate yourself on your successes. In creating a wiki, not only did I learn something new – a skill that I can bring with me wherever I go – but I know that I am helping my local congregations make their communities better.  This means individual members will have an enriched Jewish experience, which is really what this is all about.

Miriam Stein is the Director for Jewish Life at the Charles E Smith Jewish Day School in Rockville, MD.  She worked on the Wikispace for the CE21 project for the Partnership for Jewish Life & Learning.   Miriam lives in Washington, DC and when she is not working on cool web 2.0 projects and teaching, she is the proud wife of Andrew and mother of Aviv.

BJENY-SAJES and JESNA’s Lippman-Kanfer Institute invite you to submit a short video that communicates your response to the following question:

As we move toward a world where learning happens anywhere and everywhere, authored by anyone, what could Jewish learning and life look like in the future?

Those submitting the top three responses will be flown to New Orleans on November 7-8, 2010 (all expenses paid) to present their thinking at the Jewish Futures Conference.  The Conference will be held on Monday, November 8, 2010 as part of the General Assembly of Jewish Federations of North America.

High profile presenters, combined with up and coming innovators from the Jewish and general world, will each be given 10-18 minutes to describe their vision for the future of Jewish learning in the context of emerging new digital and social technologies.

Submissions will be accepted in the form of 4 minute videos by August 27, 2010 and should be sent to:  futures@bjeny.org

Questions? Contact Rabbi Arnold D. Samlan:  samlana@bjeny.org

What are you waiting for? Come on over and check out submission and event details here now!

What’s your vision? Share a preview in the comments below!

Attendees of the Academy will be able to:

• Articulate the value of technology in their organization for themselves, funders, and other key stakeholders.
• View technology as integral to every department in their organizations.
• Recognize options for funding IT projects in their organizations.
• Staff technology effectively.
• Manage the organizational change that technology can produce.

Topics include:

• Future of IT in Nonprofits / Presented by Edward Granger-Happ
• IT Planning and Implementation / Presented by Steve Heye & John Merritt
• Introduction to IT and Systems / Presented by Andy Wolber
• Information Management Systems / Presented by Laura Quinn
• Effective Internet Presence / Presented by Katya Andresen
• Evaluation: Technology ROI / Presented by Beth Kanter
• The Human Side of Technology / Presented by James Weinberg
• Weekly Ask the Experts sessions including Charlene Li, Founder of Altimeter Group and Auther of Open Leadership

The Academy is being offered through the generous support of Microsoft and will run from September 29 – November 22.

Learn more about the Academy and guidelines for application here and if you qualify and are interested apply here!

Don’t miss out – the deadline for applications is  Friday, July 30th.  Applicants will be notified of their status by August 6, 2010.

Throughout the short and intense blitz, Old Spice had uploaded over 180 videos for its campaign, which have generated over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments. (Source: Network World).

The campaign is fascinating for its viral success.  This chart from Visible Measures shows it’s relative success compared with President Obama’s victory speech, the video of President Bush’s dodging of a thrown shoe, and Susan Boyle’s surprising vocal performance on TV, all major viral hits.

The secret? While Old Spice Guy responded to regular folks (Johannes S. Beals tweeted a request for a marriage proposal to his girlfriend), he also focused many of his responses to questions posed by sports stars, celebrities and major publications.  For example the online tech site Gizmodo asked via Twitter, “will anything surpass the loofah as the predominant body wash-applying technology?”   The response was this.  And of course, Gizmodo posted the response video on its website and other channels, amplifying the views even more.

George Stephonopoulos and  Justine Bateman got responses, as did Perez Hilton (669,000+ views) and Ellen Degeneres (284,000+ views).  Alyssa Milano has enjoyed a series of flirty virtual courtings, including a delivery of flowers from the Old Spice Guy.  Guy Kawasaki (Silicon Valley venture capitalist and social media maven) got a humorous reply, playing off his name:

The first key lesson here is about connecting with your audience personally.  While Old Spice is only responding to a relatively small number of questions, Mustafa is speaking directly to individuals, seemingly person to person, rather than logo to consumer.  There’s a big difference.

Second is knowing how to use your influencers.  Isaiah’s first videos responded to bloggers and journalists that had written about the Old Spice commercials. He then moved to celebrities, and chose random individuals whose questions or comments would make for great entertainment (like the marriage proposal).  By responding to people (and companies) with large audiences, Old Spice is able to leverage their brands to exponentially increase their own success.  And when the campaign starts to get viral, everyone wins.  Gizmodo, for example, is thrilled to have gotten a video response (and a few million people may have just learned about Gizmodo for the first time), and Old Spice is thrilled Gizmodo posted is on their own site (reaching millions of their readers).  It’s a win-win for all.

Third, make it fun! If people are enjoying engaging in your campaign (tweeting, sharing, talking about at Starbucks or at the gym), it will intensify.  Whether you’re selling Old Spice or trying to get people to come to Jewish Trivia Night (my favorite tweet comes from @SixthandI Synagogue: “Test your knowledge to the tune of ‘Let’s get quizzical…quizzical’  I see you dancing 80’s style in your cubicle,” followed by a link to their event.

Want to learn more?

Rick Bakas gives a good overview of why this social media marketing campaign is so effective including a reminder to have fun.

ReadWriteWeb shares the inside scoop on how marketing firm Wieden + Kennedy created and executed the campaign, including all night filming sessions in Portland, OR, where they averaged 7 min of production for each 30 second response.

FastCompany interviews the team that orchestrated the campaign.

And a guy from Reddit asked for the audio to create an Old Spice Guy voicemail message.  He responded with many audio options to create the message.  Now you can have your own.  http://www.oldspicevoicemail.com .  While the 2 day blitz of video responses may have ended this morning, it’s fascinating to see how others have picked up the ball and run with it.

How are you empowering and energizing your community to support your mission and goals?  While the Old Spice campaign may seem leagues away from nonprofit endeavors, the lessons learned from this success surely apply.   Use your influencers.  Make it personal.  And remember to have fun.

On the first, we need to learn how to be more nimble — learning new skills, evolving our decision making processes to be able to move more swiftly, and being able to adjust structures to keep the machine humming when the outside world shifts.

But all of this is only possible when we are successful with the second.  Leading through change is a great challenge, that involves not only good business strategy, but excellent communication, team building, listening, and attention to the psychology of change, not only the logistics of change.  If the Jewish community needs one thing, it’s people who are superb leaders in times of change.

Several years ago, when Darim was shifting from our original work of building web sites to a focus on training, coaching and consulting, I read a powerful book, Managing Transitions, by William Bridges.  The take home message:  Change is situational (like a light switch), but transition is psychological (a process).  We need leaders who know what change needs to be made to thrive in the “new normal”, but those same leaders also need to facilitate a transition, which requires a whole different set of skills.

If you haven’t noticed, the Jewish community isn’t the only one recognizing this need. (It’s comforting to know we’re not behind the curve on this one!)  A flurry of new books are hitting the shelves focused on change strategy and management in today’s world:

• Switch, by Chip and Dan Heath (from Amazon.com): In a compelling, story-driven narrative, the Heaths bring together decades of counterintuitive research in psychology, sociology, and other fields to shed new light on how we can effect transformative change. Switch shows that successful changes follow a pattern, a pattern you can use to make the changes that matter to you, whether your interest is in changing the world or changing your waistline.
• The Power of Pull, by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, Lang Davison (from Amazon.com): In a radical break with the past, information now flows like water, and we must learn how to tap into its stream.  But many of us remain stuck in old practices—practices that could undermine us as we search for success and meaning. Drawing on pioneering research, The Power of Pull shows how to apply its principles to unlock the hidden potential of individuals and organizations, and how to use it as a force for social change and the development of creative talent.

Coming out soon:

• Open Leadership, by Charlene Li (co-author of Groundswell) (from Amazon.com):  “Be Open, Be Transparent, Be Authentic” are the current leadership mantras-but companies often push back. Business is premised on the concept of control and yet the new world order demands openness-leaders do not know how to be open and be in control. This must-have resource will help the modern leader understand how to lead in the new open world-where blogging, twittering, facebooking, and digging are becoming the norm. the author lays out the steps that leaders must take to transform their organizations and themselves into being “open” -and exactly what that will mean.
• Empowered, by Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell) (from Amazon.com): Fueled by data from Forrester Research, Empowered is packed with the business tools and information necessary to move your organization several steps ahead … and lead … your people (who are) armed with cheap, accessible technology, and are connecting with customers and building innovative new solutions.

What are your strategies for managing change?  Where have you been successful?  What’s hard?  Do you have advice or other resources to add to the conversation?  Onward!

One organization that is leading this trend in the Jewish community is the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland. Its app, Jewish CLE, features a community calendar, interactive maps, a community director and links to the Federation’s YouTube channel, twitter feed and event photos.

JewPoint0 caught up Steph Dlugon, director product marketing of iNomadics, creator of Jewish CLE, to learn more about how the app came together.

How did Jewish CLE come to be?

About a year ago, iNomadics had this idea about creating apps for places like nonprofits, and community and arts organizations. Because nonprofits always have events or time sensitive information that they need to get out to their constituents, we felt they needed to develop a mobile presence. We approached the Jewish Federation of Cleveland with the idea of developing an app. The Cleveland Federation thought it was a good idea and we started working with the people there to figure out what their needs would be and to develop the best features. A year ago was early on for nonprofit organizations to be thinking about the mobile web. One of our challenges was to find a forward-thinking group that saw the benefit of a tool like this. Even though it took some time to hash out the details, initial talks with the Cleveland Federation were really promising. They seemed to get the idea, the benefits and usefulness of having an app right away.
What’s so important about a mobile presence?

I think about the Internet of the 90s, when everyone scrambled to have a website. That same trend is happening now with going mobile, and it’s happening much faster than in the past. It’s important for organizations, if they want to stay viable, to adopt a complete mobile strategy. And the ones that do will be able to stay relevant and thrive.

What was it like working with the Cleveland Federation’s leadership? We had talks with different groups within the organization throughout the whole process. Because the app was a pretty new idea, we had a bit of a challenge trying to explain its benefits to different groups in the organization. If we ever got stuck, we would regroup and bring in other people to help make it work… If there is one lesson learned it’s the importance of open communication from the beginning so that everyone understands what is happening.

What is Jewish CLE all about?

There are a couple layers to it. First is the news feature, which just gets information to people, and that is why I think its being downloaded all over the world.  Second is the events piece, which has events from entire Jewish community, not just Federation events. That is an engagement piece that is really important. A lot of organizations in the community can benefit from the app, which should help to bridge all gaps in community. Another piece to the app is the call to action stuff. We’re trying to direct people to different ways to get involved. Not just directing people to the Federation to donate. We are helping people learn more about the Federation, which helps to connect people and get them on the same page. If the end result is information or donations either way to us it’s awesome.

How are you evaluating or tracking the impact of the app?

There is not really a formal evaluation process on our end. I’m sure the Cleveland Federation is tracking usage and downloads. We are looking for feedback from users from the Federation on how to improve it. But, measurement and evaluation is an interesting concept. Consider: do we look for ways to justify the printing of calendar, or of owning a phone system? No, that is just the basics of running a business. We have to get past the question of ‘should we or shouldn’t we?’ to the question of ‘should we do it this way or that way?’

So, readers: Have you downloaded the CLE app?  Thoughts?  This way or that way?