NetSquared’s local organizers hold over 450 nonprofit technology events annually. The best way to participate is to attend in person but our organizers also create event reports so that they can share the lessons learned with a global audience. You can find many of those event summaries here on the NetSquared blog, but some organizers just don’t like blogging! I’m one of them. For those more visually-oriented organizers the NetSquared community and I have been experimenting with some non-blog ways to document NetSquared local events.

Here are a few tools and techniques that will help you easily create event reports:

Storify

NetSquared events create a huge amount of digital ephemera: tweets, slides, videos, links mentioned, photos… Storify.com offers an online tool that helps you collect your event’s online clutter and shape it into a coherent story using a drag and drop interface. Here’s an example from Vancouver’s January event with Cambridge organizer Mel Findlater.

Google+ Hangouts

Several NetSquared groups have been streaming their events using Google+ Hangouts and then automatically uploading the event to youtube. Amanda in Burlington has been doing this regularly as has Judy Hallman in North Carolina. For an example of a more complex, multi-city event streamed via Google+ Hangouts check out the four city NetSquared Downunder camp organized by our team in Australia and New Zealand.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHZn4A1GMPI?rel=0]

Live screencast recordings

The newest and laziest form of event reporting I’ve recently discovered is to create a screencast from your event. This is a perfect solution for demos and other presentations that feature slides or a lot of on-screen activity. You use screencasting software (here’s 12 options from free to expensive – I used Screenflow) to record a video of all on-screen activity and record audio using the computer’s built-in microphone. Now you have a file with presentation audio and video that you can upload to youtube or video. It’s SUPER easy as long as you set-up your presenter’s computer ahead of time! Check out this example from Vancouver’s data visualization event.

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/59114867 w=500&h=313]

Visualizing data using maps and other tools – NetTuesday Vancouver from Mack Hardy on Vimeo.

How do you document your events? Please share your favorite tricks and tools in the comments.