Words of Wisdom from the NetSquared Conference

"I think the power of Web 2.0 is the fact that people can choose which tools work best for their aims, their organizations, or them personally. You never know — you get behind a technology and it goes away, but Web 2.0 is always new innovation"
- Rick Cohen, Membership and Communications Associate, National Council of Nonprofit Associations

"Any tool you can use to self-publish [content] is incredibly, incredibly useful at getting the word out about everything."
- Tara Hunt, Online Marketing Director, Riya

"Tagging has the most potential for adding meaning to data, which is really what a lot of the Web 2.0 technologies are driven at, helping us not only see what stuff is there, but understand why or how it's important to us."
- Xavier Leonard, Executive Director, Heads On Fire

"I think mashups offer a really cool opportunity to let NGOs and nonprofits get data and resources that they might not otherwise be able to afford. You can reuse other peoples' technologies that are already out there and create new things that can help your cause."
- Taylor McKnight, Co-Founder, Podbop

"Distributed content tools — whether that's a wiki or a blog — are fantastic tools for organizations to keep their Web sites up to date and begin to engage a broader community to help them move past the older ways of projecting content out to their constituents and begin to include their constituents in content creation."
- Zac Mutrux, Freelance Technology Manager

"I think it's more of the concept that has the most effect. I think it's the idea that people have opportunity now to represent themselves, and that's an umbrella concept that covers most of the technologies that are going to be discussed during the conference."
- Bryan Nunez, Technology Manager, Witness

"Generally what you find is that it actually [requires] less time and effort to use these publicly available tools than to come up with a private thing that's directly suited to your work because then you have to develop it all yourself. There's an infrastructure around the public space that amplifies the impact you have. There's a lot of stuff there that people are already using, so you can just ride on that."
- Kevin Marks, Principal Engineer, Technorati

"If you want to actually be able to harvest the wealth of talent that's out there, you have to put yourself out there. I think that what's going to happen over time is that kids coming out of school and international pools of talent are going to become more digitally savvy and if you lack accessibility or accountability to a wider audience, other organizations will attract that talent."
- Chris Messina, Independent Technology Consultant

"There's enough proof that these things work. A picture or a Web site is a lot more effective than just telling somebody about it. Just show somebody Wikipedia. Just show somebody Global Voices."
- Deepti Rohatgi, Fellow, Reuters Digital Vision Program

"Just the other day I was having a conversation with my friend who is a developer and I was implementing my very first AJAX call on a page of my own and I said 'Oh look, I dynamically, asynchronously populated the page with an error message from PostgreSQL database.' If that's not a nerdy thing to be excited about I can't possibly think what is."
- Daniel Heath, Co-Founder, Giant Rabbit

"I just downloaded a mind-mapping program, so I spent four hours last Friday night loading my entire life into it and then trying to make it into a PDF that I could show all my friends."
- Ben Wyskida, Communications Director, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights