I’m sitting here on Tuesday morning, reflecting on the New Year and all that has gone on as 5772 has ended. I find myself with something I’m not familiar with…a few minutes of free time. I’m off today, no one is home and I’ve got nothing I absolutely have to do at the moment besides pack for Dreamforce, finish a pair of socks and rest up. I’m taking a ridiculously early flight to Dreamforce tomorrow morning. Car is picking me up at 2 am to catch a 5 am flight that will get me to San Francisco in time for Marc Benioff’s opening keyonte. Sad to have missed the first day. Hopefully it will never be a problem again.

I cut my hair very short (for me). Cathartic to leave more on the floor than my head. And here I am, blogging again and experimenting with new themes. Why all the change? As most folks in my life know, my position at Blackbaud was eliminated when the company decided to “sunset” Common Ground, the product I was working on.

My last official day of employment is next Friday, September 28. I’ll need some distance both emotionally and legally before I can talk about it here. I’m so blessed to have an amazing network of friends personally and professionally who have reached out. I’ve signed some consulting contracts that will hold me for a while while I work on settling in to the next opportunity. I’ve signed contracts so far with KELL Partners and with Lisa & Martin Kornstein. These are projects where I’ll be using my knowledge and love of Force.com to help organizations make the world a better place. These are projects where I know the people behind them are are as passionate about serving communities as I am, and they’re not in this to return a profit to disinterested investors.

This week, it’s all about Dreamforce! No time to be sad and mournful when there’s 3 days of crazy with 85,000 friends to look forward to!

I’m speaking at 2 Community-led sessions this year and last I checked, neither was completely full so not too late to add to your agenda.

Apps, Apps & More Apps: This session is being led by Rhonda Ross of Appirio. Joining us will be Mario Duff and Sarah Cooper from Rhonda’s user group. We’re going to be showing off some of our favorite apps. For my four selections, I focused on “unsung heroes.” I wanted to pick apps that I am absolutely in love with, are approachable for both nonprofits and commercial organizations and don’t necessarily have the same front-page PR that other apps have. So come join me tomorrow (Wednesday) at 1:30 pm in Moscone Center West 3009/3011 to hear me gush about Rollup Helper, Apsona (and Multi-Step Reports), Loop Document Services and CalendarAnything.

Bring Good Karma with Your Admin Skills: This is my baby. I pitched the session and got a fantastic panel joining me. Tal Frankfurt of Cloud For Good (a nonprofit-specialist consulting organization), Matt Bertuzzi of Bridge Group (who has experience volunteering his mad Force.com skills to nonprofit projects) and Carol Guttery of the Salesforce Foundation (whose job it is to help build philanthropy programs). Every year, Marc Benioff honors the nonprofits in his keynote by asking them to stand up. He then urges everyone else in the room to reach out to the nonprofits and help them. But so many don’t know how. Or they think they do and they really don’t, which is worse because you never want to push away a volunteer. How are nonprofits using Salesforce that’s different than other organizations? How do nonprofits get started (so a volunteer can help them get going)? What’s the state of nonprofit apps that might be useful to a volunteer for-profit admin? Where should they go to find out more about volunteering their tech skills? Where’s the nonprofit community? The Foundation urges folks to volunteer at Dreamforce every year doing tasks like stuffing bags, and that’s absolutely fantastic. But do these folks know where they can go to help an organization build a better process for managing their programs within their Salesforce instance? Come to our session on Thursday, September 20th at noon in Moscone Center West, 3022 and find out.

See you in San Francisco!