techcafeteria

Today is the fifth anniversary of this blog, which was started on May 20, 2005.  Back then, it was on another website and not very well-defined. I’d say my purpose in starting it was pretty much “because I should be blogging”. After a year or two, though, I started to find my voice by discussing what I do: nonprofit technology. And then I registered Techcafeteria, the personal arm what I call my “extra curricular activities” beyond family and the day job.

Things didn’t really take off until the fall of 2008, when I stated blogging elsewhere. Many of the posts here are republished from the Idealware Blog, which I now run. Accordingly, the Techcafeteria-only posts tend to be housekeeping ones (like this one); way off of NPO technology topics (such as my more political and personal entries) and overflow, because, while I write regularly for Idealware, I find myself with more things to write about than would be appropriate to flood that blog with, at times. I’ve definitely hit my stride, and expect this to continue to be a steady source of content for some time to come. But, if all you really want is the technology stuff, and could care less about whether we homeschool or how I feel about civil rights, you might be happier subscribing to Idealware, which has the benefits of a stricter focus and nine additional excellent bloggers contributing.

Over the years, a handful of my posts have either gained notoriety or stood out in terms of synthesizing some of my key messages, so I thought I’d re-recommend them. Here’s my best of the first five years list:

• Message to The Krazy.com Spammer – I occasionally write missives to people who will never read them. I’m particularly fond of this one, based entirely on a true story.


• Schlock and Oh! Facebook’s Social Dysfunction – This is timely: My initial reaction to Facebook, after reluctantly signing up.  I’ve been bashing them since 2007.  (Take note, Jon Looper!)


• The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine – I took a stab at explaining the geeky concept of virtualization in relatively plain english, and I think I nailed it.


• Why We Tweet – In case you were wondering.


• The ROI On Flexibility – I consider this to be the best thing I’ve written, a synthesis of my philosophy on technology management and my standard rant against IT control freakishness.


• Why Sharepoint Scares Me – I think I hit the corporate zeitgeist with a post that doesn’t slam Microsoft’s collaborative platform, but catalogs the things about it that might be difficult for nonprofits to deal with.


• Why We Homeschool – Homeschooling gets a really bad rap, and, as parents who have determined, for good reasons, that it’s the right path for our kid, we deal with a lot of flack and misconceptions.


• The Offensive Bardwell Defense – Keith Bardwell was a Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to marry interracial couples on the grounds that it was unfair “to the children”.  As is gay marriage.  As is any hatred-based viewpoint that a bigot desperately wants to justify and defend.  On a side note, I’m pretty sure that this is the article that spawned a ton of traffic from Sean Hannity’s website.  I hope it was educational for those visitors!


• Why Geeks (Like Me) Promote Transparency – In order to obtain funding and improve effectiveness, NPOs are going to have to start managing and sharing their outcome data. This is a big theme of mine, and this post said it well.

It’s been a productive five years.  Here’s to the next five at Techcafeteria!

This blog doesn’t get a ton of comments – the most active posts tend to be the ones leading up to this weeks Nonprofit Technology Conference.  But I’ve been getting a bunch lately that I’ve decided not to post, as comments, at least.  So this is to clarify the comment policy, and respond to some borderline conversational/offensive comments left in the last day or so.

Comments are moderated here, mainly in order to weed out the obvious spam that slips through my Akismet filter on occasion.  I don’t publish spam or link spam, so if you’re one of the people leaving innocuous comments about my writing style, note that I don’t believe that you’re sincere, and I won’t publish your link to your viagra site.

But the comments I received this week aren’t spam.  Instead, they appear to be the work of someone looking to provoke me.  They’re in reply to my post “The Offensive Bardwell Defense“, in which I spoke about segregation, my marriage, and the legal battle to allow same sex marriage underway.  The first message was easy to ignore, because it was pure vitriol, equating my interracial marriage with numerous controversial sex acts.  The writer, one “DMTS” of gmail, followed that up with a more measured comment that, while continuing to make personal comments about my marital status, argued that, while it’s fine for me to “hook up” with people of non-white ancestry, I have no right to blog about it.  ”Don’t ask, don’t tell”, as it were.  The full comment went:

“Peter Campbells marriage (if still intact) is just an exception to the way things really work in mixed marriages. I don’t want to deny him any success or happiness with his nice wife and child pictured (great pic btw), but he does not have any rights defending something that is clearly wrong for the majority, when he is in the minority of working mixed marriages(for now). If I hook up with a different race partner, I will just do it, and not advertise it as normal, or make a big deal and use someones legit comment as a scapegoat. WHO CARES ANYWAY PETER? no one is making laws that specify you can’t hook up with dreadlocks, beehives, or skinheads, so what are you worried about? when has anyone persecuted mixed racials? sounds to me you are looking to MAKE TROUBLE by drawing sympathy to yourself that is totally unjustified. Blog about something else that is important, like what your son is planning to do with his future, to help make this a better world without blog script shills making trouble for all races. Shalom”

I’d point out two things to Mr. (I presume) DMTS. The first is that, while he can suggest that my marriage is some kind of exception to the rule, I’m not aware of any evidence that it is.  Divorce is rampant in this country, but I’ve never seen a statistic that suggests that it’s higher among interracial couples than same race. Mr. Bardwell didn’t cite any statistics for his assumptions, either.

The second thing I’d point out is that DMTS completely missed my point.  I used my interracial marriage, and interracial marriage in general, to point out that the same sex marriage debate underway in this country is a parallel, and, as with interracial marriage in the 60’s, the bigots, of whom I assume DMTS counts himself among, are going to lose the battle.  He seems to have skimmed my message and misread my conclusion that this type of bigotry—be it about race or sexual orientation—will be overcome.  It’s a slow process. It clearly still exists, as DMTS chooses to illustrate.  But, today, his attitudes and comments are sad.  In 30 years time, they’ll be outrageous.  Racism and hatred/bigotry based on assumptions about race (or race relations) is on the wane.  Interracial marriage is now accepted in the U. S.. It’s a slower course for a lot of the institutionalized racism in our schools and justice system. But most of the vitriol comes from old, white men, and two trends are clear: whites as a percentage of our population are shrinking, and old people will die sooner than the more enlightened young ones.

As to publishing comments like this: I’m interested in dialogue, and if DMTS responds to this with something that doesn’t use language that I wouldn’t want my Mom (who reads this blog) to see, I’ll certainly approve it.  If he provides some backing for his unverified claims that interracial (“mixed” is an offensive term) marriages are at higher risk of failure than same race marriages, a claim that I find very suspect and unlikely, I might even reply. But if DMTS actually isn’t invested in his arguments, and is just trying to get a rise out of me, it only takes a second to mark a comment as spam.  And rude, unconstructive conversation, like DMTS’s first message, which I will not publish,  is spam here; that’s the policy.

Yesterday I received a letter from the State of California alerting me that my Census form is due next week and that I should be sure to fill it out and return it, as is decidedly my intention. That form will include the page that drives many Americans crazy—the one that offers you a bunch of ethnic backgrounds that you can identify yourself on. As my spouse of African-Cherokee-Jamaican-German and who knows what else decent says, this is not a multiple choice question for many of us. Personally, I always check the “white” box, which is not lying, although I always have a nagging doubt that the Semitic parts of my genetic makeup aren’t fairly represented by that choice.

Today, skimming through my news feed, I starred this article by Michelle Malkin, passed on by Google Reader’s “Cool” feed, and I just found time to read it. The gist of the article is that Census filler-outers should refrain from allowing the government to peg us by ethnicity, instead choosing “Other” and filling in the comment squares with “American”. Take that, Gubmint statisticians!

Now, this is interesting, because while Ms. Malkin proudly describes herself as a Fox News Commentator, I don’t think this question lands on a liberal/conservative scale. Discomfort with being pegged by race straddles all ideological outposts, as it should. But data is data, and the ethnic makeup of our country by geographic area is a powerful set of data. If we don’t know that a neighborhood is primarily Asian, White, Black or Hispanic, we don’t know if the schools are largely segregated. We don’t know if the auto insurance rates are being assessed with a racial bias. We don’t know if elected officials are representative of the districts they serve. And these are all very important things to know.

It might seem that, by eschewing all data about race, we can consider ourselves above racism. But we can board our windows and doors and dream that the world outside is made of candy, too. It won’t make the world any sweeter. If we don’t have any facts about the ethnic makeup and the conditions of people in this country, then we can’t discuss racial justice and equality in any meaningful fashion. We might hate to take something as personal as the genetic, geographic path that brought us to this country and made us the unique individuals that we are and dissect it, analyze it, generalize about it and draw broad conclusions. It is uncomfortable and, in a way, demeaning. But it’s not as uncomfortable and demeaning as being broadly discriminated against. And without evidence of abuse, and of progress, we can’t end discrimination. We can only board up the windows that display it.

So, I’m not going to take Ms. Malkin’s advice on this one, and I’m going to urge my multi-racial wife and kid to be as honest as they can with the choices provided to them. Because we want the government to make decisions based on facts and data, not idealizations, even if it means being a little blaze about who we really are.

Details have come in for two exciting events in February:

On Thursday, February 4th, at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern, don’t miss The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting. This panel discussion with represenatives from Charity Navigator and Guidestar will cover all of the questions I’ve been blogging about here. Join me with moderator Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar, Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D, Christine Egger of Social Actions, David Geilhufe of NetSuite, and host Holly Ross of NTEN. Free registration is here.

And on Wednesday, February 10th, from 10:00 to 2:00 Pacific (1:00 to 5:00 Eastern), NTEN and the Green IT Consortium are putting on the first Greening Your IT Virtual Conference. With a plenary by Joseph Khunaysir of Jolera Inc. and six tactical sessions explaining how your org can benefit yourselves and the earth, including the one I’m co-presenting with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC on Server Virtualization.  Registration is $120, and it looks well worth it.

It’s time for another quick note on upcoming events and happenings in my nonprofit-focused life. These are spare on details, but I’ll be making noise as they finalize.

First, you’re looking at the newest Idealware board member. There’s still some paperwork to fill out, but this is a done enough deal that it’s worth mentioning here. I join at an exciting time, with our first book on the way; a new website about to be unleashed,  and the successful rollout of the Idealware Research Fund (which met it’s initial goal!).

Coming up in February is the Green IT Consortium/NTEN virtual conference on Greening your Technology. Matt Eshleman of CITIDC and I will be reprising the Server Virtualization session that we did at NTC last year. Mark down the date of February 10th, and look for details very soon, including after-conference get-togethers in SF and DC..

Also in February, but as yet not fully scheduled, I’ll be participating on an NTEN-sponsored panel with representatives of Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and the NPTech/Philanthropy community to discuss the upcoming changes in how these organizations assess nonprofits. I’ve been blogging about this potentially dramatic change in the way NPOs are assessed, along with the associated concerns, here and here.

April brings the big event: NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, 4/8 to 10, in Atlanta, Georgia this year.  I have a lot going on—I’m assembling a group of NTEN’s more technical presenters to lead the technology track, five sessions that will focus on the less trendy, but eternally critical tasks that nonprofit techs face daily: keeping the servers running (and virtualizing them); installing wireless; supporting computer use and planning and purchasing with little budget.  Our hope is that this track will not only impart a lot of useful information, but also serve as the introduction of a peer community for the front line NP techs. And I’ll be flying down early enough to participate in Day of Service and this year’s experimental unconference, where we’ll, among many other things, discuss how we standardize on shared outcome measurements and what that might look like.

The biggest challenge? Doing all this without breaking the stride on my work at Earthjustice, where I’m busy developing a case management system, installing email archiving software, deploying videoconferencing systems and prepping for Office 2007 and Document Management roll-outs, among other things; blogging weekly for the aforementioned Idealware; and spending as much quality time as I can get with my wonderful wife and kid. If you have any extra hours in the day to donate, send them here!

Warning: This entry is a little off of the usual nptech topic. Feel free to skip if you only come here for the geeky thoughts!

The decision to homeschool our kid wasn’t a slam dunk, but it was the right one. We made it after thoroughly investigating everything—our son’s learning style, both through the school system and via our local Children’s Hospital; every public, private, and non-public school within about a six town radius; and conversations with educators, administrators, parents and other experts. Given what we now know about how our son learns and what options are out there, we aren’t guessing that this is the best route.  We’ve verified it.

But we are constantly questioned about the decision.

We are conscientious, aware parents who value our son’s education and happiness highly (just like you!) and we have identified and followed the path that will work out best for him.

There is no need to be offended if your child’s best environment is a different one, like a public school.

There is no need to be panicked about his psychological well-being:  He has lots of friends, makes new friends easily, and is well-behaved, polite and happy.

There is no need to worry about our qualifications:  We know what we can teach him and we know where to find museums, extra-curricular programs and classes, qualified tutors and other external resources in order to get him what he needs.

Do we have opinions about public schools, and what they’re like under the testing-obsessed No Child Left Behind act, in a system where the key educational decisions are made by the middle-management bureaucrats and local politicians?  Sure.  But our opinion isn’t that children can’t succeed in those schools.  It’s that children who are conducive to that learning environment do well, and we have it on good, credentialed authority that our kid won’t.

Do we think our curriculum, which mixes standard K-12 materials with lots of trips, history and science classes, arts, gymnastics (circus school!) and hands-on activities is, in many ways, superior to the brick and mortar experience?  Of course! We can do a lot of  training that is targeted to our son’s learning style, as opposed to mostly desk-bound training generalized for a 20 to 40 child audience.  We appeal to his creativity, and let his interests guide an appropriate percentage of the curriculum. Schools can’t afford to provide this level of individualized attention and responsiveness to their students.

Are we sheltering and insulating our child from a heathenous, corrupting culture that would steer him away from the path of God and righteousness? No, we own a TV and he watches it.  And we rest pretty heavy on the heathenous side of the scale in the first place.  We are protecting him from a lot of character-building bullying, peer pressure and anxiety, but we are extremely reassured that he has plenty of character all the same.  My friend Jane has a joke about this:  “Yeah, in order to give my  homeshcooled kid the school social experience, once a week I take her  into the bathroom, beat her up and steal her lunch money.”

I think that last one is the big one—I think a lot of the well meaning questions about socialization (a word that every homeschooler has ample reason to simply loathe) boil down to a concern that our child won’t be able to cope as an adult because he missed out on the sheer brutality of spending five days a week with a slew of other children, experiencing all of the social confusion and frustration that they experience and inflict on their peers.  Our kid experiences self doubt and frustration.  He knows what it feels like to be criticized, and he can be critical of others.  He might not get kicked and ridiculed with the intensity that we were when we went to public schools; he might remain a quirky, individual who doesn’t take fashion cues from The WB; but homeschooling him has not resulted in some sort of avoidance of human doubt and discomfort.  In that, he’s a lot like every other kid. And he’ll deal with it, learn from it, and become an adult that shows no external signs of having been homeschooled.

It’s just getting to be a bit much, being constantly questioned about something that we did the work to identify as the right thing for our child.  It is not an affront on society.  It’s what’s best for someone who we not only care incredibly about, but are actually responsible for.  So, please, if you know us, have a little faith—we show pretty good judgment and intelligence in the other things we do, why would we be any different about something as important as this?

Notes from here and there:

• If you hate visiting this web site, and believe that RSS is dead (I don’t!), then you’re welcome to ditch both and follow Techcaferia and nptech.info on Twitter.

• The Techcafeteria Twitter feed will post links to blog entries like this one, and topically-related articles from around the web, much like you see here under the “Stuff” tab.  Note that this is simply my Google Reader Shared items; if you use Reader you can just share with me there, as well.

• The nptechinfo Twitter feed will post links to items tagged with “nptech” from around the web.  Note that ntech.info also aggregates a bunch of nptech blogs, general tech info, and nptech tagged tweets, which are excluded from the Twitter feed because they create redundant links. The nptech.info blogs are well worth following, and you can subscribe to the feed there, but I have no care to compete with Joe Solomon’s awesome nptechblogs feed, which he is better about maintaining, anyway.

• With well over 100 posts on this blog, I took some advice and I’m going to make some improvements here to better locate particular content.  I’m surprised to see how quickly I’ve built up a body of work. This is the 119th post here.  And I’m happy to see that it meets goals for the blog that I articulated back in April of 2007 fairly well.

• On a different topic, NTEN’s Online Technology Conference starts Wednesday. You can still register, and, if you tell them that you heard it here, they’ll give you a 25% discount. Who’s says it doesn’t pay off to read my blog?

Congress can take a vote and change the time that the sun goes down.  So why can’t they give me the 10 additional hours in each day that I keep lobbying for?

In addition to my fulfilling work at Earthjustice and the quality time at home with my lovely wife and Lego-obsessed 10 year old, here are some of the things that are keeping me busy that might interest you as well:

• Blogging weekly at Idealware, as usual. This is one of those rare entries that shows up here at Techcafeteria, but not there.  And I’m joined at Idealware by a great group of fellow bloggers, so, if you only read me here, you might get more out of reading me there.
• I recently joined the GreenIT Consortium, a group of nonprofit professionals committed to spreading environmental technology practices throughout our sector.  I blog about this topic at Earthjustice.  Planned (but no dates set) is a webinar on Server Virtualization; technology that can reduce electrical use dramatically while making networks more manageable.  This will be similar to the session I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in April, and I’ll be joined again by Matt Eshleman of CITIDC. I’m also helping Ann Yoders, a consultant at Informatics Studio, with an article on green technology for Idealware.
• On September 9th, I’ll be recording another episode of Blackbaud’s Baudcast with other friends, including Holly Ross of NTEN. The topic this time is technology management, a subject I don’t ever shut up about.
• Saving the big ones for last, NTEN’s first Online Conference is themed around the book, Managing Technology To Meet Your Mission. This one takes place September 16th and 17th, and I’ll be leading the discussion on my chapter: How to Decide: Planning and Prioritizing.
• In early 2010, Aspiration will bring my pitch to life when we hold a two day conference that is truly on nonprofit technology, geared towards those of us who manage and support it. I’ve been known to rant about the fact that the big nptech shindigs—NTEN’s NTC and Techsoup’s Netsquared—focus heavily on social media and web technologies, with few sessions geared toward the day to day work that most nptechs are immersed in.  The goal of the event is to not only share knowledge, but also to build the community.  With so many nptech staff bred in the “accidental” vein, we think that fostering mentoring and community for this crowd is a no-brainer.
• Further out, at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, I’ll be putting together a similar tech-focused sub-track.  Since the Aspiration event will be local (in the SF Bay), this will be a chance to take what we learn and make it global.

My nptech friends will forgive me for declaring my extra-curricular dance card otherwise closed—this is enough work to drop on top of my full-time commitments!

Interesting things pop up on the web all of the time; here are a few things I think are worth sharing:

Twitter Results in Google

Even if you will never tweet, it’s obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren’t indexed by Google yet.

One Stop Web 2.0 Sign-up

Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn’t signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname… snap!

Make Friend Lists on Facebook

This is a tip, not a tool – if you’ve been stymied by Facebook’s recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the “Create New List” button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called “no tweets”, which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.

Exhibit Your Info

Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.

Google Voice is on the Horizon

Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They’re about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.

When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.

Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!

Photo by Andrew J. Cohen of Forum1

Here it is Saturday, and I’m still reeling from the awesome event that was the Nonprofit Technology Conference, put on by org of awesomeness NTEN. First things first, if you attended, live or virtually, and, like me, you not only appreciate, but are pretty much astounded by the way Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett and crew get this amazing event together and remain 100% approachable and sociable while they’re keeping the thing running, then you should show your support here.

We had 1400 people at the sold-out event, and if that hadn’t been a capacity crowd, I’m pretty sure we had at least 200 more people that were turned away. What does that say about this conference in a year when almost all of us have slashed this type of budget in response to a dire economic situation? I think it says that NTEN is an organization that gets, totally, and phenomenally, what the web means to cash-strapped, mission-focused organizations, and, while we have all cut spending, sometimes with the painful sacrifice of treasured people and programs, we know that mastering the web is a sound strategic investment.

Accordingly, social media permeated the event, from the Clay Shirky plenary, to the giant screen of tweets on the wall, and the 80% penetration of social media as topic in the sessions. As usual, I lit a candle for the vast majority of nonprofit techies who are not on Twitter, don’t have an organizational Facebook page, and, instead, spend their days troubleshooting Windows glitches and installing routers. My Monday morning session, presented with guru Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, was on Server Virtualization. If you missed it, @jackaponte did such a complete, accurate transcription, and you can feel like you were there just by reading her notes (scroll down to 10:12) and following along with the slides.

My dream—which I will do my best to make reality—is that next year will include a Geek Track that focuses much harder on the traditional technology support that so many NPTechs need. I stand on record that I’m willing to put this track together and make it great!

I was also quite pleased to do a session on How to Decide, Planning and Prioritizing, based on my chapter of NTEN’s book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.  It was really great to start the session with a question that I’ve always dreamed I’d be able to ask: “Have you read my book?”.  I’m in debt to NTEN for that opportunity!

The biggest omission at this event (um, besides reliable wifi, but what can you do?) was the addition of a twitter name space on our ID badges. Twitter provided a number of things to the—by my estimation—half of the attendees who hang out there.

• Event anticipation buildup, resource sharing, session coordination and  planning, ride and room sharing and other activities were all rife on Twitter as the conference approached.


• Session tweeting allowed people both in other sessions and at home to participate and share in some of the great knowledge shared.


• For me, as a Twitter user who has been on the network for two years and is primarily connected to NTEN members, Twitter did something phenomenal. Catching up with many of my “tweeps”, we just skipped the formalities and dived into the conversations. So much ice is broken when you know who works where, what they focus on in their job, if they have partners and/or kids, what music tastes you share, that catching up in person means diving in deeper. The end result is clear—#09ntc is still an active tag on Twitter, and the conference continues there, and will continue until it quietly evolves into #10ntc.

One thing, however, worries me. This was the tenth NTC, my fifth, but it was the first NTC that the online world noticed. Tuesday, on Twitter, we were the second most popular trend (the competing pandemic outranked us). NTEN’s mission is to help nonprofits use technologies to further their missions. But, as said above, this conference was, in many ways, a social media event. I’m hoping that Holly and crew will review their registration process next year to insure that early spots in what is sure to be an even more popular event aren’t filled up by people who really aren’t as committed to changing the world as they are to keeping up with this trend.

But, concerns aside, we need to send that team to a week-long spa retreat, and be proud of them, and proud of ourselves for not only being a community that cares, but being one that shares. I urge even the most skeptical of you to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, we’re not on there discussing what we had for breakfast. We’re taking the annual event and making it a perpetual one, with the same expertise sharing,  querying, peer support and genuine camaraderie that makes the nptech community so unique – and great. Come join us!