Wigley and Associates

Scenes from the National Civic Summit party at Mill City Museum

Griff Wigley — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 12:05:52 +0000

Target Corp. hosted quite a bash last night at the Mill City Museum in downtown Mpls for the National Civic Summit’s opening night party and Tweet-Up. The FREE conference continues today and tomorrow at the Mpls. Hilton.

National Civic Summit to focus on social media

Griff Wigley — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:09:38 +0000

The National Civic Summit is being held in downtown Minneapolis next week, July 15-17. The two-day conference is free and open to the public, though there is a charge for the pre-conference party and National Tweetup at the Mill City Museum on Wed. night. I’ll be attending all three days. The key questions for the conference:

“How can we increase civic imagination and capacity to solve today’s challenges in ways that serve the public interest?”
“How do we use technology to move from isolation and overload to effective collaboration and solutions?”

The folks at the Citizens League, one of the event’s co-sponsors, will be unveiling CitiZing!, their new online civic collaboration utility, at the Summit.

Tutorials and a YouTube Channel for the Trials Training Center

Griff Wigley — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:58:52 +0000

I’ve been building a series of “How to Ride Motorcycle Trials” tutorial pages for the Trials Training Center (TTC) in Sequatchie, TN.

Many of the pages have video clips and I’ve created a TTC YouTube Channel to house them all.

Each video has a description, several tags, and a link back to the specific how-to page to help drive traffic from the TTC YouTube Channel to the TTC’s site.

Blogging and Twittering the JuneBug Festival of Music

Griff Wigley — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:47:00 +0000

Several months ago, I created a blog site for the 2nd Annual JuneBug Festival of Music in Northfield, Minnesota.

During the recently completed 4-day festival, I posted Northfield JuneBug Twitter updates 30 minutes prior to each performance on the upcoming act’s venue and scheduled starting time.

I also blogged photos of each musical act’s performance.

HideAway Coffeehouse and Wine Bar gets a blogger

Griff Wigley — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:47:50 +0000

I helped Jim and Joan Spaulding get set up with a coffeehouse blogsite back in July, 2004. They opened a second location in May, 2006 and sold their original location in January, 2008 to focus on the newly-named HideAway Coffeehouse and Wine Bar in downtown Northfield. While Jim is focusing on his new Just Trikes business, Joan, among her myriad other tasks, is learning to post to the HideAway blog.

War Kids Relief: Gunnar Swanson and Dina Fesler

Griff Wigley — Wed, 20 May 2009 20:24:00 +0000

I first met Gunnar Swanson and Dina Fesler of War Kids Relief back in January when they made a presentation in Northfield. (We later hosted them on our Locally Grown podcast/radio show.)

They hired me to help them get set up with a WordPress-based website and to think about how social media could be used for the variety of initiatives they were planning. Their marketing and communications firm, Neuger Communications Group, then took on the design of the website.

Updated blogsite for Laura Baker Services Association

Griff Wigley — Wed, 06 May 2009 20:03:00 +0000

Back in January, I posted about the internal staff blog for the Laura Baker Services Association (LBSA). Lately, I’ve been working with them on an update to their main website. Most of this has been behind-the-scenes coaching with Jane Fenton, Director of Community Relations, and her staff, particularly Ashley Dinzey.

Leadership blogging tour wraps up in Grand Rapids, MN

Griff Wigley — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 19:21:24 +0000

I finished my leadership blogging tour for Northern Community Internet on Friday with a presentation to a full-house of 30-40 people at the Grand Rapids Area Library, a very cool-looking library with a giant red chair outside. (Click any of the photo thumbnails to enlarge and the scroll through the images.)

Afterwards, I had lunch next door with the staff at KAXE, Northern Community Radio, and lucked out to be there for volunteer chef Charlie Lano’s catered home-made lunch. (That’s Charlie standing to the right of Maggie Montgomery, KAXE General Manager.)

A tip-of-the-blogger hat to Ross Williams, one of the planners/project managers for Northern Community Internet, who handled all the arrangements for my visit. (Photo is from the MN Voices UnConference, courtesy of Marc Osten, original here.)

Heading up north: presentations on leadership blogging

Griff Wigley — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 02:08:38 +0000

I’ll be in the northern Minnesota cities of Bemidji, Brainerd, and Grand Rapids later this week, doing presentations on leadership blogging for the Northern Community Internet, “a network of northern Minnesota communities using the internet to connect to our neighbors and with one another.” It’s a project of KAXE Northern Community Radio and funded by the Blandin Foundation. My invitation came from Ross Williams who I first met two years ago during an all-day visit to Blandin when the project was just being conceived.

My presentation is based on my 2005 U.K. Civic Leadership Blogging Guide (25-page PDF). Last fall, I collaborated with Gallomanor, colleagues in the U.K.. to produce an updated version of that, a 32-page booklet (PDF) called CivicSurf. It’s primarily oriented towards elected councilors but applicable for anyone in a leadership position.

If you’re looking for something that’ll give you a taste of what I’ll be covering in the presentation, the CivicSurf booklet would be your best bet.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a generic leadership blogging presentation, so I’m in the middle of updating it to include new examples from a variety of bloggers, many based here in Minnesota and a few from afar.

Minnesota Voices Online Unconference

Griff Wigley — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 12:40:43 +0000

I was an invited ‘practioner’ at the Minnesota Voices Online Unconference (“Connecting rural Minnesotans with new media so every place can share its voice in the Internet age”) in Duluth this weekend, co-hosted by the Blandin Foundation and e-Democracy.org. Above: Bernadine Joselyn, Director of Public Policy and Engagement at the Blandin Foundation; Steve Clift, Co-Founder and Chair of e-Democracy.org; Marc Osten of the Summit Collaborative who moderated the event (run as an unconference).

Some of my photos (click any thumbnail and then scroll through all 8 photos):