Elijah van der Giessen

I help nonprofits build community.

Month: April 2010

CONFIRMED: Vancouver Change Camp to be held Saturday June 12 at the W2 Storyeum — April 21, 2010

CONFIRMED: Vancouver Change Camp to be held Saturday June 12 at the W2 Storyeum

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It’s good to have a hobby. Even if your hobby is something weird, like organizing conferences.
So I’m proud to present the second of this summer’s keep-Eli-out-of-trouble projects:

Vancouver Change Camp 2010

Date: Saturday, June 12
Location: W2 Storyeum
Early-bird tickets are available now for just $15 (until May 15)!
How you can get involved:

WHAT IS VANCHANGECAMP: A participatory, web-enabled event to imagine and build new ways to collaborate for social change in the digital age. ?

WHY: Change Camp is a collaborative, participatory and web-enabled event that is meant to explore the following questions:
  1. How can we help our governments be more open and responsive?
  2. How do we as citizens organize to get better outcomes ourselves?
NetSquared Camp Vancouver: not an announcement — April 18, 2010

NetSquared Camp Vancouver: not an announcement

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Hi everybody!

My name’s Eli and you may know me from Net Tuesday Vancouver.

Today I don’t have an announcement. Announcements have details, and I don’t have details yet.

But I do have a statement of intent. And an invitation.

This summer I will be hosting a NetSquared Camp in Vancouver. And I want you to be part of it.

I’ve had the great pleasure of organizing the local Net Tuesday group in Vancouver for the last year. By throwing together people from charities and community organizations, techies (consultants, programmers, designers etc.), government folks, marketers and assorted other allies I hope I’ve been able create opportunities for people to learn from each other. At the very least I’ve sure learned a lot! :-)

So, why is a NetSquared Camp needed?

Net Tuesday meetups are over too quickly! I have to cut off fascinating conversations all the time. And what about those times when a presenter shows you something incredible, but you want to have the chance to try it out yourself with a bit of instruction? Sorry, there’s no time!

That’s why NetSquared Camp will be an all-day unconference-style event with a focus on hands-on learning from Vancouver’s generous and ridiculously talented nonprofit sector and its allies.

How do I get involved?

  • Join the organizing committee. Email Eli to join the team.
  • Prepare a skill to share at the Camp
  • Bring your trickiest nonprofit problem and challenge our experts to solve it!
  • Suggest a sponsor or venue

Can’t you tell me ANYTHING? Surely you have some details…

  • The event will be held summer 2010
  • Saturday is my preferred day of the week to hold the event
  • There will be ~100 participants
  • It will be pretty cheap to attend. Probably $20 for the day

P.S.

Why “NetSquared” rather than “Net Tuesday”?

Net Tuesday Vancouver has always been an offshoot of NetSquared.org, which supports a global network of meetups. And calling an event held on Saturday “Net Tuesday” would be confusing.

P.P.S.

Feeling so keen that you’re willing to buy a ticket for the event even without a date or location? Bless ya! http://NetSquaredVancouver.eventbrite.com/

Net Tuesday May 4: Event-based fundraising — April 12, 2010

Net Tuesday May 4: Event-based fundraising

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May’s Net Tuesday has been scheduled, with a focus on event-based and friend-asking-friend fundraising.

RSVP now

The event will be anchored by Sarah Hall, Online Giving Specialist at the Canadian Cancer Society. She’ll share some case studies and best practices.

But wait, there’s more:

  • a quick survey of entry-level online tools for friend-asking-friend fundraising
  • http://fundrazr.com/ – a Facebook application that helps you manage events
  • Mobio, maker of an iPhone application that uses bar codes for payment (download the application ahead of time to play along)
  • and maybe even a Twestival postmortem.

Haven’t whet your appetite enough yet?

Then check out an earlier version of Sarah Hall’s slide deck and RSVP for the event.

How to add captions to your Youtube videos in English and French — April 11, 2010

How to add captions to your Youtube videos in English and French

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My parents have a hell of a time explaining to their friends just what it is I do at work. And who can blame them, since it’s a bit jack-of-all-trades-y.

And so, for their edification, I present a summary of a recent project.

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Subtitling videos used to be VERY time consuming. It would take a volunteer all day to transcribe the video, time the in and out points for each line of dialog, and then enter it all into Final Cut Pro. Ick!

Naturally, we avoided translating most of the video clips we produce. Which makes the David Suzuki Foundation’s Quebec office very sad. <le boo hoo. le sigh>

But now, through the magic of Google’s translation service and Youtube’s automatic transcription and timing features, we can subtitle a video with 30 minutes of effort.  That means we can easily make all our videos bilingual.

Check it out!


(to turn on the captioning click the triangle button in the bottom right of the Youtube player and then hover over your language)

Here’s step-by-step instructions on how to add French subtitles to a Youtube video:

  1. Upload your video to Youtube.com
  2. Get Youtube to transcribe your video by going to the “Captions and Subtitles” tab Youtube Captions and Subtitle tab
  3. Instruct Youtube to transcribe your video, then wait about an hour.
  4. Download the “English:Machine Transcription” file
  5. Clean up the Transcription file in a text editor, because Youtube’s translation is wonky! (“police team is wasted energy”??)
  6. Upload your corrected text file (but keep the “.sbv” extension” to Youtube

Congratulations! You now have a clean caption file in Youtube that can be automatically translated into dozens of languages.
Translation magic from Youtube

But what if “good-enough” isn’t good enough for you? What if you need a perfect translation?

  1. Cut and paste your timed caption text into Google Translate and let it work its magic
  2. Get a native-speaker to review and correct the translation
  3. Upload the corrected text to Youtube (remember to change your text file’s extension to “.sbv ” and if you’re dealing with a language with accents save the file in UTF-8 format.)

And you’re done!

Helpful links: