The Nonprofit Technology Conference had everything you could want: WiFi that worked! Great sessions! Handsome sleep-deprived gentlemen roving the halls and sketchnoting those sessions!

But they also had a puppy to skritch, cuddle and fawn over during the breaks! That was in return for a small donation to an animal charity – a lovely approach to fundraising, and a great way to relax a little before learning more about crowdsourced story-centered fundraising in the cloud. (No… wait… that was last year’s session…)

If I had to draw this again, that python’s head would be at a slightly different angle.

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It was a lovely conference, even from afar (thanks, Maddie Grant and team, for a great online stream!).

A major storm slammed the Midwest, including my wife’s flight home – which was supposed to arrive around dinner, giving us a few hours together before my red-eye to Toronto and then Minneapolis. Then Alex’s flight home was delayed…and delayed… annnnnnd… cancelled. She got herself on another flight.

Meanwhile, I learned at 8:30 pm that my flight the next morning from Toronto to Minneapolis was also scrubbed. Unable to get through to Air Canada by phone (“Owing to greater than normal call volumes,” normally the bullshit line to end all bullshit lines, was probably true that night), I headed to the airport on spec. Thankfully, the Air Canada ticket agent cheerfully found me another flight – later in the afternoon, but it meant that I finally made it to the Nonprofit Technology Conference, bleary-eyed (I had plenty of company on that score) but intact.

Ticket agents, by the way, put up with a lot of crap for circumstances completely beyond their control. Be nice to them.

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Here are my sketchnotes from the 2013 Nonprofit Technology Conference. The sessions I drew include panels on:

• content marketing, led by Kivi Leroux Miller and featuringRobert Rosenthal and Brett Meyer (who’s with ThinkShout; I incorrectly tag him as an NTENner in these notes)
• mindfulness, led by Beth Kanter with assists from Jana Byington-Smith and yours truly
• supporter engagement strategy, led by Chris McCullough and featuring Sarah Francis and Loren Drummond (who started with a photo of marmots; I defy anyone to sketch that session without drawing a big honkin’ marmot)
• social metrics for organizational leaders, presented by Jamie Millard and Chris Oien

And then there were the keynotes:

• Beth Kanter’s panel on Placing Small Bets – which was both a thoughtful exploration of the power and limits of experimentation in the nonprofit world, and a great example of how panels can be more than the sum of their (mighty impressive) parts
• Dan Pallotta‘s Uncharitable, arguing that nonprofits are trapped in a paradigm of self-sacrifice and calling for charities to throw off the shackles of philanthropy as usual

It’s my favourite conference of the year… even if (see next cartoon) I spent an awful lot of this year’s edition in airports, waiting for the weather to clear.

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Pace Scott Stratten, sometimes the QR code saves the kitten from a potentially dangerous respiratory illness.

—

Previously on Noise to Signal:

There is no exact word for this kind of silence, defined less by any notion of “quiet” and more by a handful of conspicuously absent sounds. No ratcheting click of the sweeping sensor antennae on a Qaos Quartet hunter-killer droid. No distant rumble, minutes long, signalling the arrival of another Observatory atop another doomed city. No shambling syncopated steps to tell me that Candace – even Candace – proved as susceptible to the Night Heron’s heterogeneity field as the Night Heron himself. No cries of hope choked off with that tell-tale hum and final gasp, no rattle and clank of battle armour as futile as tissue paper, no inhuman chuckle from the skies.

The word I should use for this silence, I suppose, is “victory.” But tonight, surrounded by crates upon crates of Blue Epsilon that just three hours ago would have commanded a price exceeding the worth of entire nations – crates that would now be worth more empty – “victory” is the furthest thought from my mind.

— from Mayor Subramaniam’s Memories of the Oncoming

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Few people felt the loss of Google Reader as keenly as Alexandra Samuel (and I say that as someone who has fantasized publicly about a code extraction team liberating Reader from the Googleplex before they can deliver the coup de grace.)

My wife and partner relies heavily on Reader as part of her workflow, so when Google announced that Reader is going the way of the dodo, the passenger pigeon and Wave, her anger and grief spilled freely – and eloquently – into her Twitter stream.

I’m not sure if Google’s leadership has any appetite at all for revisiting that decision – it’s not the sort of thing they’ve backed down from in the past. But I hope they’ll consider the fact that Reader can still inspire this kind of loyalty.

Meanwhile, these tweets inspired me to draw this. And while I drew it for her, it’s for everyone who feels this way.

(#GoogleReader OR (#Google AND #Reader)) AND (“shut down” OR closed OR cancelled) AND (sucks OR stinks OR stupid).

— AlexandraSamuel.com (@awsamuel) March 14, 2013

I’ve got that feeling when you wake up sad and remember, oh yeah, it’s cause I just got dumped. In this case, by #GoogleReader. — AlexandraSamuel.com (@awsamuel) March 14, 2013

I’m so mad about the end of #GoogleReader, I’m going to stop googling things and go back to AltaVista. #LookItUpKids — AlexandraSamuel.com (@awsamuel) March 14, 2013

One of our #socialmedia assistants just asked “Why are they closing #GoogleReader?” Reminds me of @lilsweetie asking “Why do people die?”

— AlexandraSamuel.com (@awsamuel) March 15, 2013

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A cartoon for everyone who’s fighting the good fight against feature bloat and scope creep.

Previously on Noise to Signal: Candace’s last-minute change of heart has repercussions well beyond the blast radius, and triggers a free-for-all among the Qaos Quartet. Vasily sees an opening – but the Night Heron moves just as quickly to close it. Has the Crossroads Directorate really anticipated this all along, or is Adriana just a better improvisor than anyone suspected? Either way, it forces Ivana’s hand – the one holding the vial of Blue Epsilon. Akinyele has no choice but to activate the last five sleeper agents… and is as surprised as anyone when the voice at the other end of the comm link is Mayor Subramaniam’s.

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Thanks to a Twitter feature update, you can now include line breaks in your tweets. Judging by some of the reaction out there, t may mean a monetization opportunity – “Read your Twitter stream: Free. Read your Twitter stream minus line breaks and animated GIFs: $50/month.”

I for one like ‘em. (And animated GIFs, actually.) Sure, we’re likely to see a lot of annoying uses. And let me be the first to predict that the phrase “Best. (Insert noun). EVER.” will soon become

Best.
(Insert noun).
EVER.

But in a medium that gives us the Emoji character set, I don’t see this as the straw that line-breaks the camel’s back.

Many happy carriage returns, people.

* * *

Previously on Noise to Signal: In a very special episode, Mayor Subramaniam finally asks Candace the question we’ve all been waiting for – but is it really Candace? Or has the long-predicted Multiplicity Convergence finally struck? That nagging doubt propels Adriana to strike prematurely against an old foe, winning her a new but unwelcome friend. As the Shadow Nations finally take notice, the dive team approaches the Misanthrope‘s wreckage in a desperate race against the Qaos Quartet. Time is the real rival, though, and nobody is expecting the answer Candace ultimately delivers… or the warhead it’s scotch-taped to.

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Instead of the sobbing rant that I feel like writing about Google Reader’s impending demise, I’ll leave it at this: it’s the one service I use absolutely every day. More than Facebook, more than Twitter. A key part of how I engage with the open web has just given notice, and I’m not sure yet how I’ll replace it – especially with something I can use across apps and platforms.

On the upside, I finally have a cartoon that looks like it might be part of the Previously on capsule summaries. (Please note the sidearm pictured fires Chuck-style tranq darts. If that.) My hope is that these two are actually Googlers themselves… and that turns out to be an officially sanctioned mission. It wouldn’t be the first time.

* * *

Previously on Noise to Signal: The abrupt collapse of the Vector Proximity has enemies and friends alike scrambling. Misha’s shaky alliance with his former Chrysanthemum Project teammates suddenly looks like the one stable link in the chain. So why is Vasily so pleased to see Akinyele get his hands on the third piece of the cipher key? Is it because he finally noticed Mayor Subramaniam’s uncanny resemblance to Candace’s half-clone son… or because he hasn’t yet?

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Previously on Noise to Signal: The source of that thumping inside the casket becomes clear – and it ain’t Mayor Subramaniam’s pet chinchilla, which commandeers the International Space Station on a heroic but doomed effort to thwart the Oncoming. At the last minute, the Anvil betrays Ivana for what he believes is the last remaining dose of the Blue Epsilon antiviral agent… but is in fact Vasily’s spirit consciousness downloaded to nanobot form. Candace, seeing clearly at last, makes a desperate move for dispensation from the Crossroads Directorate to activate her H.A.V.O.C. protocol. The Directorate agrees, but at a price that could be fatal to the one she loves the most – and to Indira’s shock, it isn’t her.

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Apple takes its role as walled gardener pretty seriously. They want you to see your iDevices as safe places that would never do you harm (well, other than taking you to the In-App Purchase Cleaners with children’s games… but that’s a rant for another time).

But they’re a cop without a judicial or legislative system. There are some guidelines — but they’re often vague and inconsistently applied. There’s a sort of court of appeal — but not the kind that holds public hearings or issues helpful explanations of their rulings. And some rules seem to be aimed more at protecting themselves from controversy (or perhaps market reprisals from miffed government officials) than protecting users from malware.

I feel for the iOS developers out there who want to try something genuinely innovative in an area that hasn’t been mined to death already. There’s that very real risk that they’ll invest time and imagination into a ground-breaking app, only to have a reviewer at Apple come up with a reason to block it… or at least take long enough to approve it that the project falters.

Not that it happens all the time, or even most of the time. But enough that I worry it chills innovation, and tempts adventurous developers to play it a little safer, and stick to the stuff Apple’s known to approve.

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