Online Deliberation Events, and Elib progress

Last week I was under the weather and didn't get a lot of programming done, but this week ended up being rather busy with a number of events related to my general research in online deliberation. 

I attended the Seattle Tech Matching Fund workshop on Wednesday Feb 6, and got some good advice about how to write a grant to target the City of Seattle whether for those funds or others (boost). Of particular interest were the ways to network among nonprofits to show support and leverage nonprofit partners. Also cheap software on Tech Soup. 

That night, I went to the LadyCoders meetup which was the largest group of women programmers I've ever met. It was really fun and cool. I'm going to speak for that group next month and I've also been invited to write for their blog. My topic is 'Ranking, Polling , Voting Online: Why Not to Hold Presidential Elections with the Facebook Like Button.' On Thursday I met with ODDI and we went over some future plans since we didn't get the Catalyst Award. The group will continue to meet but we're investigating some new avenues.  

Following the meeting, I went to Dr. Batya Friedman's talk on the future of technology and society. She is profressor of HCI at UW. Very interesting and I felt like her application on the Rwandan Genocide is one of the first applications I've seen to tackle the Conflict Transformation Stream of Practice (as it's defined by NCDD). Nice overview of her research. 

On Monday I went back up to hang out with the Seattle Tech Speakers Workshop which is like Toastmasters for Tech Speakers. I practiced my presentation on Online Deliberation and got some good feedback.