Here’s some social media resources from Mashable site that you may find helpful. It includes tech and business resources.

Would you like to know more about how to encourage positive, strength-focused change in your organisation or your community?

Then don’t miss this exciting opportunity!

Dr Jaqueline (Jackie) Stavros is visiting Australia for the first time to conduct four one-day workshops:   “S.O.A.R. to Greatness”.

• Sydney – 20 July 2010
• Melbourne – 22 July 2010
• Canberra – 26 July 2010
• Brisbane – 28 July 2010

Jackie Stavros is the co-creator of S.O.A.R., a strengths-focused approach to building strategic capacity.

She is an internationally known and lauded Appreciative Inquiry practitioner, who has many years of experience assisting organisations to use positive means to co-create an improved future. She is also co-author of several publications including  The Thin Book of SOAR, The Appreciative Inquiry Handbook, and Dynamic Relationships.

Jackie has had extensive experience both teaching (Program Chair and Associate Professor, College of Management, Lawrence Technological University) and working with individuals, teams, divisions and organisations in the development of strategy, strategic planning, organisational development and change, marketing, teamwork and leadership.

Workshop Details & Registration
Download flyer
Register Online

Jackie’s Australian visit is c0-sponsored by:

• John Loty & Associates
• CENGAGE Learning
• Hargraves Institute
• Leaderskill Group Pty. Ltd
• The Australian Institute of Management
• Innovative Resources

The Better Boards Conference is a bi-annual conference held in Sydney.

Solely for nonprofit organisations, this is a wonderful development and networking opportunity for Australian and New Zealand Boards, CEOs and Managers of nonprofits.

The 2010 Better Boards Conference is happening from 23-25 July, including a special CEOs day on 23 July.

If you work with or for a nonprofit Board, don’t miss this event!

For more information and updates visit the Better Boards Conference website via the above link.

Or you can also download the flyers here:

Better Boards Conference Flyer
CEO Day Flyer

Another issue of Starlink, full of useful and fun resources.

For non-subscribers, if you’d like to check it out, go to Starlink Newsletter area of our site – and you’ll find each new issue on the Archives page as soon as it’s published. :)

CrossLoop is another wonderful resource we’ve discovered …

Have you ever tried getting or giving computer help over the phone?

If you or those you are helping are not particularly “tech-savvy”, this can be problematical. It can involve confusion, mis-communication – and often a great deal of time!

Perhaps this conversation sounds familiar?

“How do you copy cells in Excel?”
“Have you got Excel open now?”
“Yes”
“Ok … go to the first cell you want to copy and click on it.”
“Ok, now what?”
“Drag your mouse to highlight all the cells you want to copy, then right-click your mouse.”
“Tried that … only the last cell is showing highlighted now”
“Did you right-click your mouse?”
“Oh …. right mouse button?”
“Yes”
“Hang on a sec ….. ok done.”
“Select ‘copy’ from the list”
“What list?”
” ….. hmmm … can you tell me exactly what you’re seeing on your screen right now?”
“The Excel page.”
“Yes, but did you right click those cells you wanted to copy? If so you should see a list of options”
“Hang on again …..Yep, got it …”

And so on ….

So many times in one of these conversations a helper has to ask “What can you see on your screen right now?” or “Can you see … ” or “What happened when you did that?” etc. And it all takes time!

You may eventually get to the solution … but the journey can at times be pretty frustrating for both of you. :)

We can highly recommend CrossLoop as a great tool that we’ve found extremely useful – and you may do too.  (We gain nothing from recommending this by the way … it’s just a program we’ve used very successfully ourselves.)

CrossLoop allows you to “see the screen and control the mouse and keyboard on a remote computer. It is as if you are working side by side at the same PC.”

Every connection session has its unique connection number code – this is generated per session, and is not saved anywhere. Just one of the features that makes CrossLoop a secure option to use. And if the helper simply needs to see the other person’s screen, and does not need to control the mouse or keyboard actions, you can select a ‘view only’ connection option – increasing security even further.

Security is an important part of any desktop sharing program, and CrossLoop does address this:

CrossLoop encrypts all files and messages exchanged on our network to ensure user privacy. Only you and your invited friends or family can view or share control of your computer. A CrossLoop session can only begin on your computer by explicitly inviting someone to begin a session. All data sent over the CrossLoop network is encrypted at the endpoints using a 128-bit Blowfish encryption.

There are paid versions available (CrossLoop Home and CrossLoop Pro) for folk who regularly provide computer help across their organisations.

However the free version is probably all that most “informal” computer helpers will need – and is all we have used ourselves so far.

It provides an individual 1:1 connection between the helper and the ‘helpee’s’ computer.

If you need computer help yourself, but don’t have a techie friend or colleague who can help, you can also tap into the wider CrossLoop community. From our reading of the site, some (possibly most) of this help is fee-based. You’ll need to explore the information yourself on their website, as this is not a service we’ve used.

For much more information on all the above, visit the CrossLoop website.

Meeting Wizard is a very handy free program for organising face-to-face or online meetings with several people.

We recently used this program to set up a meeting with four other people and it saved us a lot of time and effort.

Have a go and let us know what you think about it.

Oh, we haven’t got shares in this program or get a commission for recommending it. We like it because it’s free, easy to use and it does save time.

The first issue of Starlink for 2010 is just off the press this evening!

The emails will be going to our newsletter subscribers first thing tomorrow morning.

It’s another jam-packed collection of useful resources, inspirational stories – and, we hope, fun.

For non-subscribers, if you’d like to check it out, go to Starlink Newsletter area of our site – and you’ll find each new issue on the Archives page as soon as it’s published. :)

Drawing on Glasser’s Choice Theory and on Reality Therapy, the Cars R Us Kit is another wonderful strength-focused resource from St Luke’s Innovative Resources.

Recently I was asked to facilitate a three-hour  ‘teambuilding workshop’ for a client.

Rather than opting for more traditional or often-used approaches, I chose to make the Cars R Us kit the framework for the whole session.

The “Fleet Cards” from the kit were a terrific start – team members selected one image each to represent themselves as individuals and team members at this point in time. Sharing the reasons why they’d chosen their cards proved a great way for them to connect and understand where others were coming from.

We then focused on the “Know Your Vehicle” cards for the remainder of the session – again this proved a wonderful analogy for everyone to understand and discuss various aspects of their team, their roles within it, and the differences or similarities in their working styles.

Indeed, the discussion proved so fruitful that in three hours we covered only 6 of the 16 ‘parts of the car’ or aspects of the team! They have asked me to come back and facilitate another session to support them in their discussion and learning together.

If you’re wanting to enhance your team, you might also like to give Cars R Us a workout.

Of course it’s possible the car theme won’t be right for you. You’ll need to know your team – and you may need to have other approaches up your sleeve, just in case.

But if the vehicle analogy resonates for your team – and in our experience it almost always does – it’s a wonderful way to encourage deep conversation and transformation! :)

We first shared this with our Starlink readers in February 2006. We think it’s worth revisiting, because it still makes us smile. :)

Astronauts quickly discovered ballpoint pens would not work in zero gravity.

To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, under water, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300C.

… The Russians used a pencil.

We’ve discovered a great plugin for WordPress called Table of Contents Creator (TOCC).

A sitemap is an important addition to any website these days, offering visitors another method to find their way around.

After trying several sitemap creators and becoming disillusioned with most of them, TOCC was a real find.

Very easy to install and configure, this plugin had our new sitemap ready to go in minutes!

We like the look of it and love the way site visitors can configure how they’d like to view the map – expanding or collapsing child elements from the menu as they wish, and also being able to sort the viewing order in several ways.

All kudos to Mark Beljaars for such a simple and elegant solution. :)

If you decide to check out our sitemap, we’d love to hear from you about what you think of it.