Great reads from around the web on April 23rd

I come across so many great conversations, ideas, and resources all over the web every day. Here are some of the most interesting things I’ve found recently (as of April 23rd). You can join the conversations in the comments, or click through to the original posts to find what others are saying.

To follow more of the things I find online, you can follow @amysampleward on Twitter (which is just a blog and resource feed), or find me on Delicious (for all kinds of bookmarks).

  • Report Release: The 2010 Nonprofit IT Staffing and Spending … – "Nearly 1,200 nonprofit professionals filled out the latest annual survey, sponsored by NTEN and The NonProfit Times, providing us with another year of benchmarks and data concerning: salaries, outsourcing, recruiting, organizational structure, and other aspects of Information Technology practices in the nonprofit sector. One of the findings that stood out to us: Only 40% of respondents reported that their organization has some type of formal technology plan. And much less than that (22%) reported that their organization had ever evaluated Return on Investment (ROI) of technology projects or programs."
  • World Bank’s Mapping for Results launched – Check out this deployment of the Ushahidi platform for digital storytelling and reporting: "This weekend at the World Bank annual meetings the World Bank launched their new Mapping for Results platform. The initiative visualizes the location of World Bank projects to better monitor project and impact on people; to enhance transparency and social accountability; and to enable citizens and other stakeholders to provide direct feedback. All 79 IDA countries, the lowest income nations, are included with the geographic locations of projects, financing, and sector identification such as water, transportation, governance, etc. There are also indicator data including maternal health, infant mortality, malnutrition, poverty, and population. The tool is meant to openly share and visualize the operations of World Bank financed activities down to as local a level as possible and compare these with actual need and monitor the effects over time."
  • Conversation is the New Attention – "This article is adapted from their SXSW 2011 talk, Toss the Projector: Redefining the Speaker/Audience Dynamic. In the talk, Tim and Chris unveiled Donahue, a new experimental tool designed and built by Arc90 and Behavior Design which tears down the wall between audience and presenter, allowing the audience to interact directly with the presenter’s ideas to begin a conversation."
  • 2011: The Year the Check-in Died – "Early last year, "checking in" was the cool new craze. No visit to your favorite tech news site could be had without getting buried in a tsunami of articles about Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, BriteKite or a myriad other startups. The big guys quickly followed suit: Yelp introduced "Check-Ins" while Facebook launched "Places" and most recently, Google Latitude updated to incorporate check-ins and check-outs. But here's the thing: the trends aren't actually that good."
  • Hey, Let’s Fix The Internet – What do you think – can we change? Change the internet? Change the way we associated with others on and offline? This post has me thinking about many different perspectives on community organizing and community engagement and I'd love to hear what it triggers for you!

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