budget | Social Signal

Part 4 of a series. Originally appeared on AlexandraSamuel.com.

The rule of 90-9-1 means that small organizations with focused audiences are unlikely to create highly participatory, self-reinforcing online communities. But they can still benefit from using social media tools to engage their audiences in online conversation. And one of the most exciting options is very useful to large organizations and businesses, too.

Part 2 of a series. Originally appeared on AlexandraSamuel.com.

"How can our organization create a social media presence?"

The latest person to ask me that question was a dear friend who is on the board of a 2,000-member non-profit. Their next board meeting was coming up, and social media was on the agenda. What kind of approach would I recommend?

Go directly to the latest Open SoSi release, How to create budget estimates for proposals and project management. >>

I'm hosting a conversation today at SXSW, Breaking it Open: Open Source Consulting Models. So this seemed like the right moment to return to the job of open sourcing our consulting materials.

As it turns out, the biggest challenge of open sourcing is actually organizing our materials in a form that is useful to share. Any programmer can tell you that documentation is often the most onerous part of sharing code, and we've found the same thing is true in our own open sourcing process. We could just dump a pile of documents onto the Internet, but we want to release them in a form other people can make sense of and apply to their own work. That takes time.