Email Scams

I am not an alarmist, and I don't think that there are criminals lurking at every turn, trying to steal my passwords and bank account information. I do my banking online, make purchases online, share information online and I'm comfortable with that. However, I have gotten some interesting scam emails lately that could have fooled the uneducated computer user. And, lately, I've heard friends and colleagues wondering about security and privacy on the internet.

Here is a video that I think does a good job of describing how to detect a dangerous email and what to do about it.

Leadership in a Connected Age Survey

The Snelling Center for Government and Champlain College's Workforce Development Center are embarking on an exciting new partnership to pilot a workshop series in the spring on 21st century leadership skills.

Please take a minute to respond to this brief survey so that we can create these workshops with your preferences in mind. And, if you read my earlier post but haven't tried SurveyMonkey yet, this is your chance!

Thank you for your interest! Click here to take the survey.

The Edge-Based Organization

Heidi Klein of the Snelling Center clued me in to an article by John Sviokla at Harvard Business Publishing on the power of the edge-based organization. It's a nice follow-up to my earlier posting about lessons from the presidential campaign for nonprofits.

This article talks about how the Obama campaign gave tech tools and decision-making power to those at the "edge" of the campaign, rather than keeping it on the "inside". It's worth reading, as it is an interesting question for all organizations to ponder.

http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/sviokla/2008/11/barack_obamas_edgebased_organi.html

SurveyMonkey

Here at the Snelling Center we are getting a lot of mileage out of an online tool called SurveyMonkey. I thought I'd post a little note about it in case any of you haven't heard of it yet.

SurveyMonkey is a wonderful thing. You can write your own survey and then email the link around. We do this a lot when we want to get feedback about a program, get input on a public policy issue, or even just ask one little yes/no question. It's far easier than getting lots of emails back and sorting through them by hand. SurveyMonkey will tally the results for you and make it very easy to get the answers you were looking for.

Recently, the Snelling Center hosted a conference on repairing Vermont Roads and Bridges, then followed it with a SurveyMonkey survey that gleaned over 400 responses! Not bad... You can learn more about this important public policy work and read the report here: http://www.snellingcenter.org/vermontroadsandbridges/

You can really see the polar bear now

You can really see the polar bear on this link sent in by Lorie Loeb. I'd posted something about this Dartmouth energy-saving project earlier but the site wasn't up and running yet. Now, by going to http://greenlite.dartmouth.edu/portal/dartmouth you can get real data about energy usage from three different Dartmouth College dorms.

Lorie also provides some links to articles about the project.
http://www.wcax.com/Global/story.asp?S=8239473

http://www.dartmouth.edu/~news/releases/2008/04/17.html

https://listserv.temple.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0806a&L=mmc&F=P&P=883

http://www.nwf.org/campusEcology/climateedu/efficiency.cfm

http://www.seacoastonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080511/NEWS/80511010/-1/NEWS19&sfad=1

Lessons from the Obama Campaign

How did the Obama campaign run so successfully? I have been asking myself this question. A recent article in The Nonprofit Quarterly is a good starting point. In a Successful Campaign: Lessons for Nonprofits by Paul Schmidtz discusses 5 best practices from the Obama campaign. We might all do well to look at our own work through this lens. Particularly interesting to me was the fact that online tools were so widely and impressively used, yet they are clearly not the whole ball of wax.

Education action team rocks

The Education Action Team had their third meeting on October 21.

Read their big ideas and take a look at the Wordle!

A book called Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns was mentioned. I'm going to pick up a copy. I like the title.