I just spent about three hours at the NTEN Conference, “Science Fair” — their version of the vendor exhibit. Here are a few vendors of interest to AAUW:

• Blackbaud – their booth didn’t arrive and I didn’t really have any substantive questions about Raiser’s Edge. But they are reaching into smaller customers — “higher ed” (which isn’t small from my point of view — and growing their web-based functionality.
• PaperThin, vendor for CommonSpot, the CMS on which the new web site will be based. I can see where AAUW needed to go with a prioprietary (rather than open source) CMS. Just hoping to see the first test sites sometime soon.
• GoLightly – this is *very* exciting. Their software powers the NTEN affinity groups and mailing lists. It allows for user created affinity groups, some simple document management, and more. It’s offered at a price point that would put it in AAUW’s reach as an option for the kind of ad-hoc groups that I think will be a good complement to what we now know as branches.
• Free toolkits for nonprofits: www.grassroots.org, www.insideigloo.org
• Puget Sound Center for Teaching, Learning and Technology — these are the National Girls Collaborative Project folks. I had a good chat about some NGCP issues. We may yet get a representative at our North Carolina convention.

If anyone from the AAUW staff was here, I didn’t bump into them.