Good — but different — Open Everything in Singapore yesterday. We had about half local NGOs, half local social entrepreneurs and a very small smattering of the usual software / open content / open edu crowd.

The speedgeeks seemed like the big highlight for most people. Personally, I really enjoyed listening in on Gary Kwong as he answered questions about how the Mozilla community works and what’s going on with Chrome. Andrew Lowenthal’s wide ranging ‘open source for NGOs‘ talk and Giorgos Cheliotis overview of Creative Commons licensing were also great. These presentations dropped people fast and deep into basic open source thinking, which was what they wanted.

There was also a nice open philanthropy thread of sorts. Rich Fuchs talked about social hacking the internal knowledge management systems at IDRC. With his work on ‘rolling PCR’s‘, Rich helped IDRC move from a traditional ‘fill in this form’ internal learning processes to an approach that is much more oriented to conversation and interaction (with podcasts and cool unconferency events rolled in for good measure). I also peppered in a few of the simple things we tried at telecentre.org and Shuttleworth, including replacing most internal reporting with public blogging.

All in all, an interesting event. Very useful in terms of a bridge from ‘open everything’ thinking into the mainstream NGO and social entreprenuership world. We need more of that. Thanks to Caroline, Sharifah and everyone the Lien Centre for making it all happen. And three cheers to Heidi at Ford Foundation who may just starting blogging about her grantmaking. May the force be with you.