The A Spot

Last Tuesday was Town Meeting Day here in Vermont – a State holiday that allows voters in small and mid-sized towns to get together and debate the coming year. In my rural town, more than half of our 903 residents turned out to discuss the annual school budget, the purchase of a new fire truck, and how much support we should offer to a library in a neighboring town. Children colored and played in a near-by schoolroom, and in the middle of the meeting the town recessed to share a lunch of shepherd’s pie and jello salad.

The discussion was civil and orderly, governed by Robert’s ubiquitous Rules of Order. Everyone who wanted to have a say on a given issue, for or against, was given the chance to speak and make their case. The whole affair was eerily reminiscent of the Norman Rockwell painting Freedom of Speech, in which a weatherbeaten rural citizen — with more than a slight resemblance to Abraham Lincoln — rises to speak his mind at a public meeting, the rest of the crowd leaning in the better to hear him.

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ISC - UCAN Playing the Social Media Game 2

Originally uploaded by ISC ALC
The participants in the Social Media Strategy Workshop loved the social media game and we had a lively discussion about how they would implement these tools as part of their strategy.

So I have been struggling about what to write about in my first post to the A Spot. First it was a biography post, then a top 10 list post and finally I settled on something with a bit more meat that I think folks will be interested in…a social media workshop in Kiev with NGOs.

Today I facilitated a workshop for staff from NGOs in Ukraine on strategies for using social media tools. This was part two of a series of workshops sponsored by the Ukrainian Citizen Action Network which is a USAID funded program based in Kiev but serving all of Ukraine. My organization, Institute for Sustainable Communities, is the parent organization to UCAN. The first workshop was an all day event introducing the basic tools and concepts of social media. For this second workshop we decided to go deeper by focusing on the strategies for using these tools. A third workshop is planned for later in the spring which fill focus on one or two specific tools.

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