I was fortunate to inherit some tickets to a Net Change Week panel called “The Future of Web and the World” at the MaRS building. During the presentation, featuring Dr. Gerri Sinclain, Dr. Lucy Bernholz, and John Thackara, there was much discussion of Crisis Camps (mainly due to Dr. Bernholz). If you’re familiar with Left Button Solutions, you know that we’ve been involved as participants in CrisisCamp Toronto, and also as a sponsor, supplying coffee, snacks, and blog hosting.

Following the panel discussion, I was able to offer a plug for the Toronto group, and invited people to talk to me about the program, and how it works. I handed out a few business cards, all of which point here, so I wanted to list some of the resources people might want to check out for further information regarding Crisis Camps, and Crisis Commons.

• CrisisCamp Toronto - our blog can be found here.
• CrisisCommons (the organizing body) lives at CrisisCommons.org
• CrisisCommons Wiki is where all the project, camp, and organizing information lives.
• There are also Google Groups for CrisisCommons and CrisisCampTO but all major happenings will be blogged or tweeted.
• Speaking of Twitter, you should follow: @CrisisCommons, @CrisisCampTO, @HeatherLeson,  and of course, @leftbutton

As stated in at the panel discussion, the next big thing for CrisisCommons is an upcoming international congress, happening in Washington DC in July. There, the group will develop some governance, some policy, and some direction to help refine the global effort that has mobilized more than 2,000 volunteers in more than 25 different cities.

Again, thank you all for indulding the shameless plug… feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

Following the earthquakes that devastated Haiti, humanitarian aid is hugely necessary in the country. Not everybody has the money, the time, or the resources to fly down there to help offer medical attention, aid in the rescue efforts, or volunteer in some other capacity. CrisisCommons.org, however, has created opportunities for techie folks all over the world to pool their resources and volunteer efforts to create useful projects to help those in need.

Left Button Solutions has gotten on board with CrisisCamp - Toronto, the local chapter of CrisisCommons. So far LBS has built a blog to use as a central coordinating location, but in the future efforts could expand to a wiki, or other multimedia projects. LBS is happy to be on board, and grateful to CrisisCommons.org for making the opportunity to get involved so simple.

The Toronto group is headed by Heather Leson and plans to have their first meeting on January 24, 2010.

Do I write this in the first person, or the third? … Third

Brian Chick, Director of Technology for Left Button Solutions, has been invited to present alongside Jennifer Flynn, from the Legal Education Society of Alberta (LESA), at this year’s Association for Continuing Legal Education (ACLEA) Conference in Salt Lake City, Utah.

On July 27, 2009, they will lead a conference session called “Are Wikis the Solution to the Online Publishing Dilemma?” based on LESA’s recent wiki pilot project. Left Button Solutions was contracted to turn an 800 page Real Estate Conveyance Manual into a shared, online, knowledge base that anybody with an account could edit. Video tutorials explaining the new wiki and how to use it were also designed and provided by LBS.

Brian is looking forward to this opportunity, and for the chance to continue working with Jennifer and LESA.

For more information, click here for the conference brochure.

Left Button Solutions is proud to announce the completion of a pilot wiki for Service Alberta. Taking a 90-page correspondence manual and turning it into a wiki, complete with images, downloadable sample documents, and internal links, LBS was able to deliver a product that blew away the expectations of the client.

Sandamali Senaratne, Manager - Ministry Advisory Services for Service Alberta’s Ministerial Correspondence Unit said the wiki was extremely well-received at her official launch. She is anxious to see the progress and growth of the project over the course of her six-month pilot project. By the end of its first day, users had already begun to make edits and updates.

Left Button Solutions also eagerly awaits the feedback from this pilot project, so we can learn and continue improving our high level of service. If you have any questions, or think that your company might like to try a wiki, or other Web 2.0 based solution, feel free to contact us.

There is a revolution happening right in front of our eyes. This page is a part of it. Google is a BIG part of it. And many of you, whether you realize it or not, have likely taken part in it. It’s called “cloud computing” and it’s where everything is headed.

As the diagram above shows, the Internet is like a cloud. This is a long running geek-joke taken from many early tech diagrams indicating that various network lines all connected to the Internet in its varied and complicated network of connections and protocols (always represented by a cloud). So the cloud represented the world wide web, chat, e-commerce, e-mail, FTP data exchange, newsgroups, and anything else happening out there on “the internets.”

As time went on, however, the capabilities of the cloud were continuosly expanding. Things like virtual storage, unlimited email boxes, and blogs became a way for people to use features on the Web to perform some of the things that were previously restricted to a home PC. For example, Hotmail and Gmail offered their services at reading POP3 email, a function previously served by a desktop product like Outlook. Blogs and wikis changed the way people edited websites. You no longer needed Dreamweaver or Front Page to make edits; you didn’t even need to know HTML; you could just log into the cloud and type. Sites like Flickr took the burden of photo storage and made it free and easy to use. Google Docs opened up the ability to do basic word processing online, and also introduced the ability to collaborate with fellow users.

All the things we did on our home PC have evolved to things we now do on the Internet. So what does that mean for our home PCs?

It means they can get dumber.

For the last decade, we became obsessed with power. Faster chips, bigger hard drives, water cooled motherboards, and enough RAM to run a Pixar studio were all being packed into the latest Dells and HP desktops, that were then sold for $1500 or more. But thanks to cloud computing, we’re letting the Google and Flickr servers do all the work. We don’t need gigs and gigs of space because we can leave everything in our email, or on our online storage account. We can edit our documents, crop our photos, and listen to music all without much computing power at all, thanks to all the wonderful cloud-based applications. So our computers don’t need to be built on power; they can be built on portability and battery life.

Enter: The Netbook. Originally based on the concept of the $100 laptop for developing African countries, the netbook was built on a free open source operating system (Linux) and stripped down hardware deemed excessive (no DVD drive) to save on cost, and some outside of the box thinking solid state drives to preserve battery life (like a USB key) and a decent WiFi card to attach to nearby networks. With enough power and features to get video off your digital camera and upload it to Youtube, the netbooks have become a stripped down, low cost version of a standard laptop. While the cost never got down to $100 a piece, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, and many others are now selling these uber-tiny, super-useful laptops for less than $400.

I’ve recently found a use for netbooks in my life. Most of the websites I build these days are built on some sort of web-based content CMS like Wordpress, MediaWiki, or something like that. Once the initial design is done, all of my edits and uploads can be done ON the website. No need to have a full scale development PC; all I need is internet access. When I have to go back to update an older site that still requires downloading, editing, and uploading, I curse the fact that I’m on a PC that doesn’t have the tools I need. When the tools live on the cloud, life is so much easier!

While graphic designers and hardcore gamers will still require their RAM-thirsty power PCs, the rest of us who want to surf the web, send some emails, and upload some photos to Flickr will soon all be well served by a smaller, cheaper, and more battery efficient netbook. As the cloud becomes more powerful, look for netbooks to become more popular.

So save $1000 on your next PC purchase. Think about going small.

With the calendar flipped to a new year, people always spend the first few weeks of January trying to preserve the resolutions they made under the influence of one-too-many holiday cocktails. My resolution this year is a little cliché, because it seems to be the product of Al Gore and half of Hollywood. But in 2009 and beyond, I resolve to be more “green.”

Those of us comfortable in the digital world ditched paper a long time ago for most things. Personal communication, commerce, and banking have all evolved to be accomplished online using things like websites, email, and PDFs. But then I look around my office and I wonder… why do I still get paper statements from my credit card companies, cable and phone companies, and banks?

Do I really need 3 printed pages and an envelope from my credit card company so I can go to my computer and pay my bill through online banking?

I’m going to do my best to be green by first canceling all my paper-bills for any company possible. There was never a good reason not to, except “I never got around to it.” I’ll continue to walk to work and ride public transit (a simple choice when you live downtown in a big city). I’ll continue to recycle all waste possible at home. But in any instance possible, I will make a conscious decision to be more considerate of the environment than I was last year, or the year before.

While many Left Button projects are aimed at putting paper content online, the benefits far exceed the ability to search, edit, and instantly access your material. One current project is going to allow an organization to avoid printing thousands of copies of a 600-page manual. Saving paper is a healthy side effect of the digital revolution.

Is your company wasting paper on manuals that could live online? Are you wasting postage and paper on communication that could easily be digital? Think about that as the year progresses, and perhaps we can help your company be a little greener too.

Happy New Year!