Weekly Accomplishments – Two Month Edition

This idea of doing weekly records of things done & achieved turned out to be much harder than I expected. This hiatus came about because I had been on a 2-week trip to Israel only to come back to a huge event planning mission followed by a festival. So, without further ado the crazy things:

• I finally got accepted to go on a Birthright Israel trip with a barely 3-week notice, which resulted in the end of April being spent rearranging my project schedule and getting ready. The “vacation” was May 6-17 but I spent another couple of weeks after it catching up on my business & news reading. I have been working on a separate post about the experience so stay tuned.
• Upon return, my DC crowd informed me that our plan to have public viewing of FIFA World Cup games on June 12 was coming along so I joined what was known as Soccer in the Circle where I took care of my usual duties: drafting messages, monitoring social networks, and making random connections resulting in huge benefits. The end result was not really surprising after our snowball fight: we estimate the highest number of viewers present at once to be close to 3,000 people and total attendance to be at 5,000 people. England-USA game was probably the first time I felt proud of being a US citizen (I had been happy & excited about that before) because the feeling of unity was simply incredible.
• Digital Capital Week, the first technology culture festival in DC, took place June 11-19. I managed to attend almost every party & happy hour, half a dozen panels, and volunteer as event staff & a social media consultant for a local farmers' market. The main takeaways were the usual a stack of business cards & face time with people who are hard to find otherwise. The festival as a whole had its hits and misses, but it was the first time an event of such purpose took place in DC and many things were experimental, so I’m hoping for an even better next year.
• I spent the majority the last week mobilizing people to nominate me for MTV’s search for its first Twitter Jockey. I am not going to comment on the process until the final contestants are announced, but I learned that it is much harder to get friends to do simple things than it seems. The results will be known by July 6.
• And as a follow-up from earlier days, my N85 had been to service twice with no success to fix the notorious “SIM card registration failed”/“Insert SIM card” issue. Nokia’s quality assurance department finally replaced the device last week and the new one has been working fine for the last two days.