Archive of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technmology
This is the archive of my old blog, zenofnptech.org, which hasn't been up in years. It's in reverse chronological order. Much of it is outdated, and not particularly useful, but I figured it would be good to have it up. -MP
On 02 May, 2013 By mpm
There are a number of ways that organizations in the nonprofit
technology field fund writing projects. Some are internal to an
organization, others are funded by grants from foundations, and some are
funded by vendor sponsorships.
Each of these methods have their upsides and downsides. They provide a
great way to get good, solid content in the hands of as many nonprofit
stakeholders as possible, and that\'s a good thing. Having been involved
in a number of writing projects of those sorts over the years, I know
how much valuable content is possible when organizations, funders and/or
vendors support writing.
The primary downside is that none of them are independent. The
organization will have it\'s particular focus and branding - depending
on what their perspective and mission are. Funders have their own
missions and motives for funding content. And, vendor sponsorships
generally provide some level of limitations on the freedom of the writer
to speak critically of any individual vendor or group of vendors
collectively, if a sponsor is among that group. For instance, you\'re
not going to find deep, critical questioning about the relatively recent
consolidation of nonprofit CRM/Fundraising software options in anything
sponsored by a particular vendor that shall remain nameless here, but
will be named in my book.
Crowdfunding this book frees me to ask big questions without
fear.
Of course, I have my own biases - I am not objective. No one is. But
there is no one looking over my shoulder, or directing what I write (or
don\'t write.) And I hope that means that I\'ll be able to provide an
independent view, and provide a helpful resource, unencumbered by who
funds the writing.
But, I have to have your help, the help of the crowd, to get this
done. Please consider supporting
me.
On 25 Apr, 2013 By mpm
I promised a few excerpts during the indiegogo
campaign, and here is another
one - a part of the Introduction.**
The idea for this book came one day, as I was pondering the fact that I
had stopped the blog that gave this book it's name. I stopped blogging
because I felt that I'd said all that I wanted to say, and saying more
was just useless repetition. And, of course, in a blog form, it is. I
then realized that probably the best way for me to talk about my wide
range of issues, questions and ideas around nonprofit technology, was to
do what I have been doing in the fiction realm for some years... write a
book about it.
So here is that book. If you are looking for a place to read about why
you might want to pick Drupal over WordPress, or get advice about
Salesforce vs. Raiser's Edge, this is not really the place. Of course, I
have my opinions, and you'll hear a bit of that here, but there are many
wonderful websites, organizations and people to help you with questions
at this level of detail. There are lots of links and resources in end of
the book.
This book is about bigger things. For individuals and organizations
there are best practices, planning resources and detailed info on
technology decision-making from a mission-based perspective. For the
sector, there are some moderate doses of philosophy, ethics and
politics. I'll start out with a short history of modern technology and
its influence on nonprofits, and the evolution of the field of nonprofit
technology, and where the field is now. And because there are other
voices that should be heard, I'll be bringing in some of them to speak
about their perspectives and experiences.
I'll talk about philosophies of technology use in nonprofits, from
increasing mission efficacy, improving efficiency, and increasing
fundraising. There will be information about the technology factors
outside of the sector, such as hardware, software, bandwidth and
services. I'll discuss vendors and the sometimes sticky relationships
between vendors and nonprofits, diving into questions of not only what
makes a good vendor (and what makes a bad one) but also the ethics of
the work we do. Finally, I'll dive into talking about open source
software and software development more broadly, open data and open
standards, and I'll wind up with issues of privacy and security. And
there will be moments of Zen, when I ask questions like "why are we
doing this, anyway?" and "what is the sound of one hand tweeting?"
This book is for anyone with an interest, whether it be passing or
deeply rooted, in nonprofit organizations. You might be the brand new
board member of a nonprofit organization, and you've been put on the
technology committee. You might be an intern working in the
communications department of a big nonprofit, hoping to turn that
experience into a career in communications. You might be a long-time
member of the nonprofit technology community, and remember what a
"circuit rider" was. You might be a developer who has done work on
occasion for nonprofit organizations. You might work in, or own, a
company whose major market is the nonprofit sector. You could be a
student of nonprofit management. You might work in a foundation, and do
technology grantmaking. This book is for all of you, and anyone else who
finds this topic of interest.
And then, you might ask, who am I to write such a book? I have been
working in the nonprofit sector for most of my adult life, in some
capacity or another. I was on my first nonprofit board in 1985, and have
been in one major role or another in a nonprofit and/or activist
organization almost every year since then. I have been involved in
starting two nonprofit organizations, and have now been on a governing
body of a total of eight, including two churches. I currently serve on
two boards: a small Oakland-based food justice organization, and the
organization Aspiration, a nonprofit organization focused on nonprofit
technology. I am a past board member of NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology
Network. I have also spent the years from 1994 through the present,
working in a variety of capacities with nonprofit organizations
specifically around technology. I have been the in-house (volunteer)
techie as well as a consultant and developer for many organizations over
those years. Although I wasn't (literally) in the room at the very
beginning, I've watched the field of nonprofit technology grow from a
hundred or so loosely organized people and a small handful of start-up
organizations and companies, to the field that it is today, with
thousands of people who consider themselves part of the field, and
hundreds of companies and organizations devoted to serving the sector. I
have also been other things: a scientist and academic, a seminarian and
theologian, and a science fiction writer. And it is likely these other
things that gives me a bit of a unique view into the field of nonprofit
technology.
This book will inform you, and give you information that will be useful
to you in your work in and with nonprofit organizations. It will give
you concrete guidance to help you make good technology decisions,
whatever they may be. It might also sometimes make you uncomfortable,
because there are uncomfortable truths about some of what happens in
this field, and about technology in general. I hope that promise won't
make you put the book down, but encourage you to read it, and face those
things that might be uncomfortable, and start (or in many cases,
continue) discussions and dialog about those issues.
This book is much more heavy on anecdotes based on experience and
philosophy rather than evidence based on research, but having been a
scientist, I'm quite clear when I need evidence to back up an assertion,
and I should be taken to task if I don't pay attention to that. That
said, every writer is biased, no matter whether they tell you their bias
or not up front. I will point it out mine, plainly. I am someone who
deeply questions the way our society is structured, and thinks that the
benefits of the great innovations of our time should be much more evenly
spread. Most people in our society (I'm talking specifically about the
United States) work too much and are paid too little. And, to boot,
we're endangering our own long-term survival on a planetary scale.
And this perspective has shown itself in how I think about not only
technology, but how technology is, and should be, used within nonprofit
organizations. I am also a realist and pragmatist. People who have
worked with me in the open source/free software movement know this about
me. If there is a tiny, scrappy nonprofit, with a leader who finds it
easier to get their mission accomplished with a proprietary tool, then
I'm not one to say that leader should struggle with an open source tool
that isn't up to the task. But I am one to take the entire field to task
for not providing better options for that tiny, scrappy nonprofit. I was
born and have lived my entire life inside of the United States of
America. I've been to many other countries to visit, and I have worked
some with international organizations, but I can't in any way say that I
have any international expertise. Although this book will certainly have
relevance for people who work in NGOs outside of the US, the focus of
this book is very definitely the US. I will talk in some detail in the
book about some specific international issues dealing with technology,
but this book is very much grounded in my experience within the US, and
I won't make any claims about the generalizability of these issues
outside of the US. I think most of this is relevant to Canadians, and to
some extend Europeans, but even in those places, the landscape of
nonprofit/NGO technology is quite different, as I've learned.
I've written this book with three basic resources: my own brain and
experience, the brains and experience of a few others in the field, and
the resources available on the web and in some books (all of which are
footnoted in this book.)
The nonprofit technology field is at an interesting moment. The Internet
(herein, named 'the Net') has matured to such an extent that it is
ubiquitous, and in our very hands at almost any moment. There are
organizations from a single-person advocacy or activist organization to
multi-billion dollar nonprofits. And serving those organizations in
various capacities are legions of individual "accidental techies" to
Fortune 100 publicly-traded companies. Observing the field and
technology more broadly at this particular moment, and then looking
forward seems especially satisfying to me. I hope it will be to you as
well.
Continue
Reading
On 18 Apr, 2013 By mpm
I\'ll be posting a series of short excerpts of what I\'ve already
written of Zen and the Art of Nonprofit
Technology. I hope
this will whet your appetite for more. Please consider supporting
me to get this book written.
This is a part of the chapter \"Strategic Planning for Software and
Internet Projects\". The section is entitled \"CRM and the Myth of
Uniqueness.\"
One of the hardest problems for nonprofits to solve is finding a good
CRM (Constituent Relationship Management) that really works for them,
and fits their needs. There are a ton of options, and many of them are
sub-optimal. Many are exorbitantly expensive. If I were to add in
another item to my list of things that keep the both nonprofits, and
the sector as a whole from really solving the CRM/Fundraising/Advocacy
conundrum would be what I call the \"myth of uniqueness.\"
[Of course, each nonprofit is unique---unique in it\'s
relationship to its mission, the personalities of the staff and
leadership, where it\'s located, its quirks and dysfunctions... But
the uniqueness should really not be reflected in the software it
uses.]{style="line-height: 1.5;"}
For most organizations, their perception of uniquness around their
data ecosystem comes because way back in 1995, someone (perhaps the
ED, perhaps the CFO) got really tired of dealing with paper, and
having to generate painstaking reports manually. It would take them
days and days. They were fed up. They hired a database guru (I used to
be one of these back then,) or they drafted an accidental techie, or
they found out that their Board Chair\'s high school kid knew their
way around Microsoft Access, Visual Fox Pro, or Filemaker.
And they built their first database. And it wasn\'t pretty or perfect,
but at least the ED and CFO could get five reports quickly and easily.
They weren\'t really the reports they really optimally needed,
but that was what the system generated, and it worked. And the staff
stopped grumbling about the fact that the tool would lose data in the
middle of data entry, and had only a certain size for fields, but they
suggested that their workflow and system be modified to make it
easier to avoid those problems and the limitations of the database.
And the whole organization, over time, wrapped it\'s workflow around
this imperfect tool.
Five, seven, eight, or perhaps even 10 years later, they realize that
they are totally outgrowing this tool, and they need a new one.
And so they write up the requirements of the tool. For instance, and
it has to generate the same five reports that everyone forgot were
imperfect. The tool has to fit into their workflow... the workflow
they forgot they built around the unique, imperfect tool that they
built first.
We all are unique human beings, but our organs, like our hearts and
stomachs look and work pretty much the same. (And no, in this
metaphor, the data ecosystem of an org is not it\'s brain - it\'s
brain is the people.) Good tools work like organs. I have personal
experience with one tool that can work very well for a very small,
scrappy organization, as well as a multi-million dollar and huge,
huge donor/volunteer organization. I would say there are good odds
that this tool will work for a lot of organizations in the middle. I
can say from personal consultant experience that a different tool can
work for a Fortune 100 financial services corporation with
thousands of users, gazillions of deals, catrillions of dollars in
size, as well as it does for a small educational nonprofit with one
user and tens of donors and hundreds of students to track. Good tools
can do that.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through deep details of how
to choose a CRM, or a system to manage your data ecosystem. But I will
give you some basic ideas on how to start planning for a change in
that data system, and what basic factors to look for in making those
choices, and what kinds of effects this change may have on your
organization.
First, let's ask my favorite question: "Why are you changing your
CRM?"
There are a number of reasons why organizations choose to change the
tools they use for their data ecosystem:
- The tool is not accomplishing the tasks the organization needs it
to accomplish
- The tool is deprecated by the software developer
- The tool is not cost-effective
- You need to integrate with other organizational tools, and your
current CRM does not support that integration.
- There is a new development director or exective director.
[I\'ll look at each of these. First off the bat---that last reason is
the planet's worst reason to change a CRM, even though it happens all
the time. It's totally understandable when a new person who is
responsible for a huge part of the organization's success, is used to
a specific tool, and wants to use the tool they know, and feel
comfortable with (and perhaps even feel as if it is the bee's knees.)
And, of course, going with my idea that organizations are not all that
unique, it shouldn't be a big deal, right?]{style="line-height: 1.5;"}
[The problem is three fold. First, the tool the new person is
comfortable with may not really be the best tool for the organization.
It may be, but it will take time, analysis and planning to figure that
out. Second, it takes time and especially money to do a big data
ecosystem change---time and money that may well be better spent on
something else. Third, it forces change on end-users that have gotten
used to whatever system is in place.]{style="line-height: 1.5;"}
This is, of course, not to say that often, a new CFO, or ED, or
Development Director comes in, and realizes that the data system is a
mess, and needs to change. That happens as well. But it's important to
separate the needs of the organization's data ecosystem with the needs
of a new executive.
If the tool is not accomplishing the task that the organization needs,
what's important is to look very specifically at the points of pain,
and get some advice about how to deal with them. Sometimes, it may not
require a wholesale change in the CRM or donation management tool, but
may require a new plug-in or module, or to spin off a particular part
of the functionality to a new tool, without having to change the whole
thing.
[If a software manufacturer has decided to deprecate the tool that has
become mission critical, your choices are more limited. With the
increasing consolidation of the enterprise-level CRM and donation
managment tools, this has become a big issue of
late.]{style="line-height: 1.5;"}[..]{style="line-height: 1.5;"}
There is more in that section, and chapter, and of course, the whole
book (when I finish writing it)!
Continue Reading
On 28 Mar, 2013 By mpm
There hasn\'t been much fanfare about this, but NTEN released a report
recently, called \"Nonprofit Technology Assistance Providers Sector
Reach.\" You can read it
here.
It is definitely an interesting study. The problem is, glaringly missing
are the open source focused and vendor-neutral NTAPs, such as
Aspiration, the Progressive Technology Project, and others. The only
vendor-neutral NTAP included was Idealware.
Research like this is important to our sector. but to so blatantly leave
out such important NTAP players in the sector leaves the impression that
this was by design. These are active, vibrant organizations that have a
great influence on the progress of technology in nonprofits, and to
leave them out of a study like this means that the study isn\'t
authoritative, and doesn\'t actually measure the true reach of NTAPs in
the sector.
FYI, the study was funded by Microsoft. Things that make you go
hmmm.....
Continue Reading
On 08 Apr, 2012 By mpm
With 5 Comments
As I said a while back, I\'m writing a book about nonprofit technology.
It will be titled (this is no surprise) \"Zen and the Art of Nonprofit
Technology\". Having been at the #12NTC (Nonprofit Technology
Conference) really got me excited about the book.
I met people who I would like to talk to about the book, and I got some
good ideas about what I might want to delve into. I\'m 10,000 words into
the book already, although I have a lot of research to do. I\'ll be
filling you all in on more details as it develops, but below is a
tentative outline (lots of things haven\'t been fleshed out yet.)
Comments and questions are welcome!
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Background and Philosophy of Nonprofit Technology
- Definitions
- Brief History of Nptech and current status of the field
- Should Nonprofits be like businesses?
- What is technology for, anyway?
- The Raw Materials
- Hardware
- Software
- Bandwidth
- Services
- Technology for change?
- Harware, Software, and Cloud in the nonprofit sector
- From servers to phones
- From word processors to cloud CRM
- Social Networks
- Strategic Planning
- Planning for infrastructure
- Planning for software/internet projects
- Planning for communications and social networks
- \"Best Practices\"
- How to define them, and where to find them
- Sector-wide and organizational best practices
- Vendor/Nonprofit Relationships
- Technology needs of nonprofit organizations
- Types of support systems
- Internal
- Individual Consultants
- Cooperatives
- For Profit Companies
- Publicly Traded for-profit companies
- Corporate Philanthropy in Nonprofit technology
- Philosophy and Ethics of vendor/nonprofit relationships
- The Ethics of Client/Consultant relationships
- The tyranny of the hourly rate
- Nonprofits that support other Nonprofits
- The NTAP
- Other kinds of nonprofit technology focused nonprofits
- The role of foundations
- Open Source Software in the nonprofit sector
- Status of the field: Winners and Losers
- Making decisions around open source software
- Looking forward
- OpenAPIs/Open Data/Open Social
- Are nonprofit data standards an oxymoron?
- Software Development and the Nonprofit sector
- Privacy and Security in the networked age
- Why privacy matters for nonprofits
- The Identity conversation
- Security and the nonprofit organization
- Why net neutrality matters
- Conclusion
Continue Reading
On 07 Apr, 2012 By mpm
Here are some example projects of my work over the years. (Roles when
in a team: PM=Project Management, SA=Systems Administration,
IA=Information Architecture, DD=Drupal Development, DB=Database
Management, Dev=Code development)
2013 (Mostly with DevCollaborative):
2012 (Mostly with DevCollaborative):
2011:
2009-2010:
Recently (in the last 4 years):
- Implemented new site for Zen Hospice Center
(everything except design/theming)
- Migrated West Suburban Teen
Clinic to Drupal
(everything except design/theming)
- Strategic planning for Revenue Watch Institute
- Strategic planning for Center for Reproductive Rights
- Strategic planning for other Reproductive Rights organizations
- Researched original Idealware report on open
source CMS
- Wrote and updated NOSI primer on open source
software
Other stuff:
Continue Reading
On 07 Apr, 2012 By mpm
I\'ve had my sleeves rolled up since the mid 90\'s building websites and
web-based databases. It\'s in my blood. I\'ve used most back-end web
technologies invented at least once, and I\'ve dived deeply into a
number of them over the years. Right now, my focus is on Drupal and
websites, and setting up and administering the LAMP/R stack.
I work with the DevCollaborative, and
also work on my own. I also do small scale projects for Buddhist
organizations on Dana basis.
I have a list of example projects and
the like.
Continue
Reading
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On 07 Apr, 2012 By mpm
\
I\'m not at all an Instagram user. Since I am much more language-driven
than image-driven, it\'s just not something I\'ve used. But I came
across this
article
about the really weird response of iPhone Instagram users to the reality
that they released an Android version.
As an Android user, I\'ve often thought of the Android/iPhone divide as
one that was more about open vs. closed, and choice. Android is a
sort-of open source mobile operating system, there are many fewer
restrictions as to the ways app developers can develop on the platform,
and there is a vibrant hacker community
that Google doesn\'t bother to police (in fact, the cyanogenmod codebase
is hosted on google code!) Apple has been trying to say that
jailbreaking your phone is illegal (but the court begs to differ.)
And, of course, there are tens of phones with a wide variety of features
to choose from that run Android, and only one iPhone.
It appears, based on the vocal outcry on twitter (well, I don\'t know
how scientific a sample that is) that iPhone users think of the
Android/iPhone divide as a class divide (and, in some cases, a race
divide.) I wonder how widespread this perception is. It\'s also, frankly
ludicrous, since the majority of newly-released Android phones cost as
much as iPhones - out of the reach of a lot of people in this country
(let alone the world,) and you can get both older iPhone models, and
low-end Android models for free from some carriers.
Continue
Reading
On 07 Mar, 2012 By mpm
As I said, I am done. Blogging, that is. But I'm a writer, and the
writer in me decided that "Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology" is
going to be a book. I'll leave you just with that little tidbit. In
April (after my lenten social media fast), and after I relaunch my
personal site (I'm moving all of the tech stuff there, and this URL will
have stuff for the book,) I'll fill everyone in with a lot more details.
I'm actually really excited about this project, and have begun to line
up folks for interviews, and do research, and all sorts of stuff.
Continue Reading
On 25 Jul, 2011 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'ve been thinking about the purpose of this blog in my life for the
last few months. I started blogging specifically on technology just over
6 years ago, took about a year hiatus in 2005-2006, and have been
writing consistently here ever since. But the time has come for me to
stop. Mostly, it\'s because I\'ve run out of things to say. On one hand,
the technology issues I cover are well covered elsewhere. There are some
amazingly good blogs out there focused on the use of Drupal and other
open source tools. You don\'t need to hear from me about the newest web
tools - you have ReadWriteWeb and
Mashable for that, among others. On strictly
NPTech topics, I can only say \"nonprofits should use open source
software for better
sustainability,\"
\"there\'s more to talk about than social
media,\" and
\"all nonprofit software should have open
APIs,\" and
\"technology won\'t save the
world,\"
and \"the nptech world should develop open
standards,\"
and \"nonprofits should collaboratively develop
software,\" so
many times. I know that this isn\'t falling totally on deaf ears, but
some days it does feel that way. And I\'m kinda tired and bored of
sounding like a broken record, so I will stop rotating now. And besides,
the landscape has changed somewhat - in some ways better, in some ways
worse. I\'ll still be building
websites (and
their successors) for the foreseeable future with Drupal, and perhaps
with whichever cool, new open source development framework comes next
after Drupal becomes irrelevant (it will, eventually). And I\'ll be
Google+ing
(rather than Tweeting, which is mostly for my
writing, or Facebooking, which is friends/family)
interesting Tech and NPTech topics as they come along and are discussed.
And when Google+ stops being relevant, I\'ll find the next thing that
comes along to share links and ideas and discuss. But for now, and until
I change my mind (I like to keep my options open), this blog will be
inactive. Was this blog a success? I don\'t know how to answer. Perhaps
you can tell me in comments. For a good while, I had a lot of fun doing
it. I hope I was at least a little helpful. Those are enough for me. For
the curious (well, OK, it was mostly me who was curious): There are 409
posts and 922 comments. Since since September 2007 when I started to use
analytics, there have been 151,000 ish unique page views, and 106,000ish
unique visitors. The most popular pages are (these are fascinating!):
- The home page
- LibreOffice vs.
OpenOffice.org
- CRM and CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser\'s Edge and
NetCommunity
- WordPress vs. Drupal...
Fight!
- What is Cloud
Computing?
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On 16 Jul, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 09 Jul, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 18 Jun, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 11 Jun, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 04 Jun, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 02 Jun, 2011 By mpm
With 9
Comments
I\'ve been a user of a ton of operating systems over time. In the past
ten years, I have been an everyday user of the big three, Windows, Mac
OS, and Linux, for long stretches of time. I switched from Apple to
Windows/Linux last
year, and
I\'ve largely been OK with it, but I\'ve complained enough about all
three that I realized that they all suck. Of course, they suck for
completely different reasons, which is part of the frustration. And each
have places where they shine. Why can\'t there be a nice combination of
all three? That would be perfect. Why Mac OS X sucks:
- Apple is becoming a controlling, closed system, and with the advent
of the Apple App store, developers have to go through an approval
process to get their apps on the store, there are specific things
you can\'t include in an app in the store, and there will come a
time when most people get their software through the store, so there
will be less and less incentive to maintain non-app store versions
of software apps
- These days, you can find most kinds of software for the Mac, but
there still is a relative paucity of apps in comparison to Windows.
Why Windows sucks:
- Viruses, Trojans and Worms, Oh My!
- Although I have only seen the Blue Screen of Death once in my year
of Windows 7 use, there are still inexplicable slow-downs, crashes,
and weird problems. And it takes FOREVER to boot, even with
Soluto.
- Internet Explorer
Why Linux (in my case Ubuntu) sucks:
- I have to go through arcane (and luckily for me, fairly painless)
procedures to get simple things to work (like plugging a headset
with a mic into my
jack!)
- Hardware manufacturers ignore Linux for the most part
- Most software developers don\'t make Linux versions
The only good news I can see is that the operating system is getting
less and less relevant. And, on balance, for me, Linux is winning. Now
that dropbox and scrivener work on Linux, and I\'m moving from Quicken
to some online cloudish thing (suggestions?), I can pretty much leave
Windows behind. (Oh, there is still Netflix. Sigh.)
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On 28 May, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
are here.
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On 24 May, 2011 By mpm
With 3 Comments
So I do have social media
ennui, but I am
also somewhat of a data geek, and cool ways of moving social media data
into one\'s nonprofit data workflow is pretty important in my most
humble opinion. This post on Social CRM is not going to contain one buzz
phrase. It\'s going to talk about one particular, interesting example of
how to move social media data into a real live CRM -the one you might
even be using now - Salesforce. This example uses an app from the
Salesforce AppExchange, called \"Salesforce for Facebook and
Twitter.\"
To make things just a tad confusing, this is also called \"Salesforce
for Social Media\" and \"Salesforce for Twitter.\" There are likely many
more options, but this is one I\'ve seen that is pretty cool, although
it has its weak spots. It definitely is geared more toward the \"Service
Cloud\" than the \"Sales Cloud.\" You can set up multiple twitter and
facebook accounts, and each facebook account can have access to multiple
pages. It\'s all done via OAuth, which is cool. Once you set up the
accounts, you can then grab conversations:
{.size-medium
.wp-image-996 .alignnone width="300" height="158"} You can filter and
sort, just like records in any other SF object. You can choose whether
or not to send Twitter or Facebook identities to Leads, Contacts, or
Person Accounts. You can choose to create cases from tweets or FB posts
as well. You can tweet or post to facebook directly from Salesforce:
{.alignnone
.size-medium .wp-image-999 width="300"
height="165"} And
it works:
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height="173"} You can
schedule tweets and facebook posts as well. There is a lot more you can
do - it\'s a pretty cool tool. The one thing I can\'t seem to find - and
I don\'t know whether this is in development, or they won\'t ever do it
- is import your social graph into salesforce - your facebook fans or
your twitter followers. I\'m not sure why this is, exactly. It seems a
big gap to me. But then, it is the folks who engage with you who you
definitely want to make sure to keep track of. Anyway, if you are a user
of either Salesforce, the Nonprofit Starter Pack, or Convio Common
Ground, this is definitely a tool to know about.
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On 21 May, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
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On 17 May, 2011 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I have a confession to make. I have social media ennui. I\'m tired of
reading and hearing about about social media and nonprofits, and I\'m
annoyed that social media is taking up so much of the air space in the
#nptech world. As you know, I\'m a bit of a technology curmudgeon, but
I\'m far from a luddite - I\'m an early adopter, for the most part. I\'m
a fairly active user of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and some other
social networking sites, and have been for years now. I certainly have
followed and friended lots of organizations on these networks
(particularly on Twitter, but also some more personally relevant to me
on Facebook.) The apps I use most on my phone include the Facebook app
for Android and Tweetdeck. I spend some amount of my Drupal and
WordPress development time, both for my clients and for myself, in
setting up one or two-way integrations between websites and social media
sites. I understand how the varied APIs work, and have to keep on top of
whether I should be using a \"like\" or a \"share\" button for Facebook.
I\'ve been using social media to actively promote my new science fiction
books. In other words, I don\'t avoid social media, I use it a lot, and
I actively facilitate my clients use of social media integration with
their web presence. (And I use hashtags in blog entries!) But I\'m
still bored silly. Case in point: A new report out from IBM on Social
CRM.
It\'s geared toward a for-profit audience, but it certainly has some
reasonably useful lessons for nonprofits, and it has been a topic of
conversation in the #nptech world today. But there isn\'t anything in
this report I haven\'t read a dozen times already. It doesn\'t help
organizations bridge the huge data and workflow gap present between
their traditional CRM/Donation management systems and their social media
interactions. And if I hear the buzz phrase \"game changer\" one more
time, I\'m going to puke. It\'s hype designed to sell things. And hype
designed to sell things isn\'t necessarily going to help make the world
a better place. No one should take this post personally. I\'m very glad
that most of my #socialmedia #nptech colleagues talk a lot about ROI
of social media, and really try and figure out what works, and what
doesn\'t. But we\'ve had, what 3 or 4 years solid of nonprofits using
this stuff. Can it be demoted now? So what do I want us to talk more
about? How about lowering the costs of software by using open source and
collaboratively developing software? How about data standards to help us
share information more easily? How about finishing the work we did on
getting the expensive CRM vendors to really open up their APIs so that
organizations can better integrate their systems? Maybe talking how to
deal with neglected nonprofit verticals like client management? Helping
accidental techies get the training they need so that they can do more
work in-house? Nonprofits who need tech help partnering with local
organizations who provide training to the unemployed and ex-offender?
The list goes on and on.
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On 11 May, 2011 By mpm
I\'m mostly doing this last post on my tools to pimp
Scrivener. I was a loyal Scrivener
user on my Mac for years, and then when I moved to Windows last year, I
mourned my loss terribly. But then! Then someone started to work on
Scrivener for Windows and
Linux. Almost
enough to make a grown woman cry. I do just about all of my novel
writing on Scrivener. It\'s great for outlining, for research, for
writing scenes, etc. And it has a great compile function, to spit it all
out into a manuscript when it\'s ready to edit. I have probably only
used 30% of it\'s features, but I love it, and look forward to using it.
(Am I really looking forward to using it, or just looking forward to
writing...?) I use LibreOffice for most other writing and editing
tasks, although sometimes I must sadly use MS Word for some stuff (like
some ebook converters have a harder time with LO files, even formatted
as .doc.) I\'ve been experimenting using
Scribus for page layout. I use
GIMP for any graphics manipulation I need for cover art and such. And,
of course, I do a lot of writing on WordPress and Drupal.
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On 07 May, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
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On 06 May, 2011 By mpm
I\'ve had a web presence of some sort since way back when most personal
URLs looked something like: http://somecollege.edu/~username. In 2002
or so, I ditched HTML for a series of CMS systems for my personal stuff.
I started out using the CMS I wrote in Perl, called XINA. (Those were
the days.) Anyway, that was then, and this is now. Here\'s what I use.
Software:
- WordPress - you already know it and love it.
I use it for this blog, only. I used to have two blogs on WP - this
blog and my personal blog, but I moved my personal (and author blog)
to Drupal, to integrate it with other stuff I had online.
- Drupal - I use Drupal for my personal blog and
also other purposes, like the website for my intentional community.
My main personal site will be migrated to Drupal 7 soonish. My main
sci-fi author site is already on Drupal.
- Dokuwiki - my woefully neglected
and out of date technology wiki is on Dokuwiki. Dokuwiki is a very
cool tool. It\'s a wiki, but everything is stored in files instead
of a database. It makes it quicker, and also much more easily
migratable. The annoying part is that it is one more wiki markup to
learn (I wish SOMEONE would finally agree to make a wiki markup
standard!!)
- In the relatively rare case where I need to use HTML/CSS for web
pages (there are a few legacy sites I maintain for friends) I use
Bluefish (on Ubuntu.)
What I like most about WordPress is that I don\'t really have to do any
work to use it, or tweak it. I love how easy it is to use. I love Drupal
for its flexibility - and for my personal stuff, it\'s really great to
be able to mix and match stuff (like I actually have two different blogs
on that site, but it\'s really only one blog... Drupal is ace at that
sort of thing.) I keep debating about whether or not to migrate this
blog to Drupal. Stay tuned. Hosting: All of my personal stuff is on
Dreamhost. I say this with some hesitation. I
have hosted with Dreamhost since 2007. They are worker-owned, pretty
green, and their newsletters are quite humorous. They give free accounts
to nonprofits. Their service has improved over the years, but they
ultimately aren\'t all that reliable. They have downtimes (a really bad
one recently,) Drupal often barfs on Dreamhost during admin tasks, and
you can\'t run Rails apps reliably at all. I\'m going to spend the
spring and summer migrating all of my domains (there are plenty!) to a
VPS on Linode (this will be my chance to play with
IPv6, too. I already use Linode as a development server.)
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On 30 Apr, 2011 By mpm
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On 25 Apr, 2011 By mpm
Since I am a web developer, the core of my development workflow is, for
sure, a browser. But not just one browser, or any browser. Several.
Chrome has become my everyday browser, although Firefox is making its
way back into my heart, now that Firefox 4 is so lean and zippy. But I
am very often in both. I use Opera on occasion, and, of course, I use IE
only when I absolutely have to (and it generally means rebooting into
Windows, which I do less and less these days.) My other core tool is a
console window. In Linux, I use the generic version. For Windows, I use
SecureCRT, which
is well worth the \$ since
putty is not up to
the task (I know, it\'s open source, which is great. But it just
doesn\'t cut it if you need to use it pretty much all day every day with
multiple servers.) My text editor of choice is Emacs. Yes. Emacs.
{.alignnone
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love Notepad++, a sweet open source
text editor. I like Eclipse as an
IDE,
its awesome. I think it\'s better than the proprietary
Komodo, but that\'s just me,
I\'m sure people beg to differ. Other core tools are git for version
control and github for code sharing. I haven\'t
found a GUI git client I like, so I just use the command line. IRC
and Pastebin rock my world for getting help
in troubleshooting problems, and IRC is great just for chilling with
other developers.
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On 25 Apr, 2011 By mpm
With 1
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By Web Server Software, I mean the software used to serve
websites/pages. This includes databases, operating systems and other
software that is involved in that process. On the proprietary side,
there are two options. Proprietary Unix, and Microsoft Windows, and
associated Microsoft Software. The current version of MS Server in use
is Server
2008.
Microsoft has web server software called IIS, and
it\'s database server product is MS SQL
server, which
people use for far more than just serving web site data. The primary web
development framework used in this environment is
.NET. Proprietary UNIX has dwindled
greatly in popularity with the increasing popularity of Linux. On top of
proprietary UNIX, people will generally run associated open source
server software for web, database and development frameworks. On the
open source side, Linux is by far
the most popular, with BSD in second
place. Both Linux and BSD come in several flavors (or distributions.)
Apache is by far the
most popular web server software. MySQL and PostgreSQL are the open
source database systems most in use for web servers, with PostgreSQL
being a pretty distant second to MySQL. Other database systems (such as
NoSQL variants) are increasing in popularity, but are pretty far down
from MySQL as well. Also, it is possible to run Apache, most varieties
of open source databases and web frameworks on Windows, and that is not
uncommon. It\'s hard to know what the market share of server operating
systems are, because there are different ways to measure it. You can
measure how many units are sold. By that measure, Windows is first at
about 49-67%, Linux is second at 16-23%, and proprietary UNIX is third
at 7-22%. That underestimates things like self-installed OS systems
(standard with Linux), as well as
VPS systems. If
you measure by surveying publicly accessible websites, you get Linux
first at 41%-74%, Windows second at 20-42% and proprietary UNIX third at
2-5%. This underestimates servers inside enterprises. (source:
wikipedia)
From my perspective, the underestimation of self-installed and VPS
systems by the first measure far outweighs the underestimation of
enterprise servers, because plenty of organizations and enterprises also
install Linux behind the firewall. It would make sense to me that the
true number is much closer to the estimation by publicly accessible
websites, rather than the unit sales estimation. So on the OS side,
Linux does look like it wins. Apache is far and away the most popular
web server software. It is way ahead of IIS. The most recent data from
Netcraft
shows that Apache has 63% of web servers, compared to 19% for IIS. Also,
Apache is showing a clear upward trend, and IIS a clear downward trend.
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On 12 Apr, 2011 By mpm
I was perusing Social Source Commons
(something I don\'t do nearly often enough,) and catching up on the SSC
blog, and I thought it might be
worth sharing with this audience what tools I use for basic consulting
workflow. I\'ll do another few posts for other areas, like development,
system maintenance, personal web presence, and writing. (If you want to
look at my Social Source Commons toolbox, it\'s
here. It\'s
not so up to date, and it\'s a list more of tools I have used, and some
I still use.) The center of my workflow, like for most consultants, is
email. I\'ve used a variety of email clients of one sort or another over
time, and I have recently just decided to ditch them, and use gmail
exclusively. I have definitely noticed that I\'ve been migrating a lot
of functionality of things that I do to web-based apps of one type or
another, and this is one example of that. I use Canned
Responses
to provide HTML signatures when needed, and also forward all of my mail
to gmail, then send out mail as other identities. (I\'ve learned how to
circumvent that annoying thing of \"Sent on behalf of\" in gmail - use
the SMTP of the email alias you\'re using.) What\'s also very close to
the center is my project management tool, Redmine. (I\'m actually now
using a very recent fork of Redmine, called
Chiliproject.) I\'ve waxed
on
about this tool ever since I\'ve found it, and I would love to
challenge a loyal Basecamp user to a point-by-point comparison of the
two tools. I think it knocks Basecamp right out of the water. It\'s core
is a very powerful and flexible ticket tracker, but it includes all of
the important project management features you want and need, milestones,
time tracking, wikis, file repository, even discussion boards, and it
connects with version control repositories. It works for multiple
projects. And, it\'s open source, and isn\'t even that hard to get set
up and running. Another important tool, which I use in my personal life
as well as consulting life, is Evernote.
Evernote rocks my world. The web interface is great, as is the desktop
application (which I use cross-platform - the Windows version works
great with WINE). I also access Evernote on my
Android phone. It\'s a great tool. I use it for to do lists, stuff like
blogging calendars, and also the Chrome Evernote extension allows for
clipping of whole web pages, which I love (there is a Firefox extension
as well.) A tool I\'ve recently come to adore is
Passpack. It is an awesome web-based
password management tool for teams. I love the collaboration features.
For sharing files, as well as providing solid file backup, I use
Dropbox (it even works on Linux!) And, like all
consultants, workflow involves documents and spreadsheets, and for that
I mostly use LibreOffice, although sometimes
using Google Docs makes sense for collaboration. I use Google Reader for
RSS feeds, and TweetDeck, or, more
recently, HootSuite for Twitter (I really like
the tabbed interface of HootSuite. It makes looking at the variety of
lists I have a lot easier.)
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On 11 Apr, 2011 By mpm
I do a fair bit of SEO work for clients. I\'m not one of those very
serious SEO folks, but I do know my way around the not-so-black-magic
that SEO is. This blog is the one of my many personal sites that I pay
the most attention to SEO (although I think that will change soon,) I
tend to focus a lot on Google, since according to my analytics (and yes,
they are Google analytics. I\'m wondering whether I should check out my
server logs...) 99% of the traffic to this blog that comes from search
engines comes from Google. But according to this article in
Mashable,
Bing gets 30% of the overall search engine traffic. Now, I already
know my audience
is different, but that seems, well remarkably different. In the last
month, 3,743 visits came from Google, and 43 came from Bing. And I
thought \"aha! So I haven\'t been paying attention to Bing in my SEO
efforts - that must be the problem!\" So I did some benchmarking. No,
that wasn\'t the problem. In fact, in general for the set of phrases I
used for benchmarking, Bing more often had me higher up in the results
than Google! Things that make you go hmmmmm....
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On 09 Apr, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
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On 07 Apr, 2011 By mpm
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There are some very interesting comparisons to make in this realm, and,
I\'d say first off, that the proprietary tools are in the lead, for
sure. I\'ll start with basic graphics - graphic manipulation tools. Of
course, on the proprietary side is the ever present and predominant
Adobe
Photoshop
and
Illustrator.
And, honestly, they are very good tools, and considered industry
standards. On the open source side, the projects that stand out are
GIMP (a Photoshop replacement) and
Inkscape (a vector graphics program - like
Illustrator). I\'ve used GIMP for many years, and I don\'t generally do
a whole lot with graphics, but it always serves my needs. There has
been a lot of back and forth about the GIMP user interface. It is very
unlike that of Photoshop. So much so, in fact that someone came up with
another project called Gimpshop,
which re-does the UI to better match Photoshop. Both GIMP and Inkscape
are completely cross-platform, and available for Mac, Windows and Linux.
I\'ll leave it to the graphics professionals to say for sure, but they
are both worth a look if you don\'t want to plunk down hundreds of \$
for Photoshop and Illustrator, and/or you like to work with open source
tools. The other realm of stuff that I know some about is video. In term
of viewing, on the proprietary side are the players that come with the
proprietary operating systems. Itunes/Quicktime comes native with MacOS,
and Windows Media Player for Windows. One doesn\'t have to pay for
these, so it\'s a bit hard for open source (or other products, even) to
compete. Which is perhaps why the other major proprietary video player,
Real Player, has had such a hard time catching
on for all of these years. I notice now they seem to have added a ton of
features (like video conversion from one format to another). On the open
source side, one program you must know about is
VLC by VideoLAN. Totally cross-platform
(so cross-platform, they have a version for BeOS!) It plays
everything. I mean,
everything.This means you
don\'t have to have several video players around to play different
formats. I use it constantly - it\'s my go-to video player. It has a
bunch of other features as well. In terms of video editing, again, the
proprietary programs have somewhat of a leg up on the open source,
although a recent entry into the field may well change that (see below).
On the \"low-end\" (for people like me who make videos like
this,) there is, like in
the video playing arena, iMovie and Windows Movie Maker, made by Apple
and Microsoft respectively, for their own platforms. (An aside, a lot
has been
said
about the crapware iMovie has become - it used to be a really good video
editor.) There are other proprietary products as well. I\'ve used
TrakAxPC, which has a free version
and a paid version. There are a variety of other low-end video editing
options. There are low-end versions of Adobe\'s Premier (called
Elements) and Apple\'s Final Cut (called Final Cut Express.) On the high
end (where I\'d love to work more), there is Apple\'s Final
Cut (only available
on Apple hardware) and Adobe
Premier
(cross-platform). There are also quite a number of high-end, Hollywood
products, like Avid (a
side note, I used Avid a little bit, way back when it was the first and
only non-linear video editing platform). On the open source end, there
are some notable entries. Blender is a very
popular cross-platform open source 3-D modeling, animation and editing
tool. It\'s actually pretty amazing what it can
do. (There is
a study that compares a bunch of 3D tools for
professionals,
you can see how Blender stacks up.) Another notable entry is
Cinelerra, which only runs on Linux. (You can
see videos edited with
Cinelerra on Vimeo.) A
recent entry into the fray, and the one that might make a huge
difference, is Lightworks. This is one
of the video editors that Hollywood uses that used to be proprietary. It
will go open source later in the year, but you can grab it for free
right now. Yes, a Hollywood-quality video editor for free, and soon to
be open source. It\'s Windows only for now, though. In summary,
proprietary software has the popularity edge, mostly. From this
non-graphic professional\'s perspective, it seems that one would not be
left wanting if you went the open source route, however.
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On 06 Apr, 2011 By mpm
If I got a dollar for every time I heard something like: \"we\'re trying
to choose between Ruby on Rails and Drupal for our new website\" or
\"our developer convinced us to do our new website in Ruby on Rails and
we can\'t update it,\" I wouldn\'t be rich, but I\'d have some money for
a very nice meal at an expensive restaurant. I know a lot of pretty
serious geeks read this blog, but I also know some folks who aren\'t do
too, and I figured it was time to do a quick outline of web application
frameworks, and how they differ from things like a CMS. A web server, in
the physical sense of the phrase, is a box sitting in a data center (or
under someone\'s desk) with a unique IP address, that answers queries
from the internet and serves up data, depending on the request. In the
software sense of the phrase, it is the actual piece of software (most
often Apache, but sometimes something
different.) That software runs in the background, and and listens to
requests, then serves up the data. That data is in some form of HTML,
CSS and Javascript, because that is what browsers understand. However,
how that HTML, CSS and JS is generated varies depending on the system
underneath. In the old days (when I was starting with web programming,
back in the early-mid-90s) it was all HTML flat files (and not even much
in the way of CSS or JS at the time.) And dynamic elements were less
common (you remember those days.) Now, a minority of web servers
actually serve HTML files - they serve HTML, CSS and Javascript
dynamically generated by software, like, in the case of this page you
are reading now, WordPress. WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are CMS
systems that are written in PHP. PHP is one of many programming
languages. Plone, for instance is written in Python. This isn\'t really
the place to describe what programming languages are, or how they work,
but Wikipedia (as always) as a nice
entry, worth a read.
CMS systems are full-featured - they require no programming to install
or configure or get going, or to create a usable interface. They may
require some to customize in particular kinds of ways, but I\'d say most
nonprofit websites don\'t need to do that. Most Drupal developers, for
instance, don\'t spend a whole lot of their time in code unless they
work on contributed modules (or contribute patches and such to core.) A
web application framework is one that does require programming to
provide the basics of a user interface. The cool thing about frameworks
for developers is that it provides a great leg up, and a way to use the
model-view-controller
design pattern really easily - it\'s a powerful way to do
development. The advantage of a framework is that it allows you to do
great custom apps a lot easier and quicker than before (many web 2.0
apps are written using these frameworks). The disadvantage to a
framework is that it does take significant programming to get user
interfaces (especially on the admin side) working well. So to use them
to build a CMS (or a CRM, for that matter) is probably not a great idea,
given the plethora of already-cooked options in the world. People who
are working with frameworks are spending much of their time dealing with
code. Popular web application frameworks include Ruby on
Rails (using the Ruby programming
language,) CakePHP (using PHP),
and django (using Python.) Ruby on Rails is
arguably the most popular MVC web framework at the moment, but there are
a lot of folks using the others. The PHP frameworks (which include Cake,
as well as Symfony and Zend) are pretty popular because of the plethora
of PHP programmers out there. All of these frameworks get more
sophisticated every year, and they are interesting to watch.
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On 04 Apr, 2011 By mpm
With 5 Comments
Content Management Systems are an essential part of the communications
function of nonprofit organizations. There are a myriad of options, open
source options are among the most popular, possibly the most popular.
I\'m going to focus here on the nonprofit sector, and options that are
most common among nonprofits. On the proprietary side, there are a
number of options, and they fall into three categories:
- Single-source proprietary custom CMS (from one web shop, or web
host)
- Proprietary CMS as part of a large package (such as from Convio or
Blackbaud)
- Proprietary stand-alone CMS (such as Sharepoint.)
You already know what I think about option
1, so I won\'t
belabor it here. Many people have found that option 2, using a large
package, which includes donation pages, event management, etc. can be a
really good option, and I certainly don\'t want to say that this is not
a good idea - I think it can be - but it also can be quite costly - and
for many organizations, it\'s overkill. And there are open source
options that can do much of the same work for much less money. There are
not a lot of stand-alone proprietary CMS systems in nonprofits these
days. Microsoft
Sharepoint
might be the most common I\'ve heard of.
Ektron is another one that I\'ve heard folks
talk about, as well as ExpressionEngine.
The advantage of using Sharepoint for Microsoft-centric shops is that
there is full integration with lots of internal network resources. The
open source options are many, but the big four:
WordPress, Drupal,
Joomla, and Plone, stand out
from the pack. As you know, I am pretty loyal to Drupal (and
secondarily, WordPress) but I have to say that Joomla and Plone are
solid, wonderful projects, with great communities, and active
development, and will serve you well. Check out Idealware\'s newish
comparison of the four - it
can help you figure out what\'s best based on your needs. Other open
source options that I think are worth looking at include:
Alfresco, which is heavy on the
document management functionality
and DotNetNuke, which is based on .NET,
and somewhat popular among Windows users. Two up and comers I am very
interested in following include Radiant
and Refinery, both based on Ruby on Rails.
There is also Django-CMS, written on
top of the django framework (a python
framework.) If you\'re really interested in open source CMS options, and
looking not for data on features, but for data on popularity, marketing,
community and such (a good idea if you are, for instance, a shop
deciding what CMS systems to develop with and support) check out this
report
from Water and Stone (a digital marketing agency.) I think on the whole,
though, the number and richness of options on the open source side is
quite a bit better than that on the proprietary side, and until I get an
answer to this
question, I
can only guess that open source options have won over proprietary ones
in the nonprofit sector.
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On 02 Apr, 2011 By mpm
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links
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On 31 Mar, 2011 By mpm
I didn\'t make it to Drupalcon Chicago, but, thanks to the organizers of
the conference, it doesn\'t mean I need to miss the sessions. I\'ve been
looking through videos both the regular
sessions, as well as the
ignite sessions (thanks,
\@gregoryheller), and here are my
highlight presentations (this does reflect what I\'m interested in more
than it reflects what\'s the best of DrupalCon):
Continue Reading
On 23 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 9 Comments
A bit over a year ago, I wrote a post about the status of
Drupal/Salesforce
Integration.
I figured it was time to do an update. At the moment, if you want to
integrate Drupal and Salesforce, you have three options:
- Use the contributed modules
(or have a developer install and configure them for you).
- Use Jackson River\'s
Springboard.
- Roll your own (or have a developer roll your own for you.)
I\'m going to talk in much detail about #1 in a bit. I\'ve not had any
experience with Springboard, but it\'s important to understand that it
is not open source, and is only maintained by one shop. That is going to
be an inherent weakness - no matter what. I don\'t know enough about it
to match it to the contributed modules, but it\'s hard to imagine that
it\'s possible for it to keep up, given the nature of open source
development. All of that said, it\'s supposed to be an interesting
all-in-one sort of option, so it\'s probably worth a look. Rolling your
own is always a precarious proposition. I frankly can\'t imagine much of
a situation where it would be preferable to modifying what\'s available
and contributing the mods back. So what is the status of the Drupal
modules? Right now, there is an alpha release for Drupal 6, which is
alpha in that very humble open source sense - it\'s being used in quite
a number of production sites. It includes some great stuff. You can see
an overview
here,
in the slide deck for a talk given at NTC last week, which compares the
integration of Salesforce with 3 of the big open source CMS platforms,
Plone, Drupal, and Joomla. There are four major projects:
- Salesforce Suite, which
includes:
- The API - the core module that does the communicating with the
Salesforce API
- Contrib - a module that provides support for import/export from
contributed modules
- Export Queue (experimental) for queuing exports
- Import - importing data from SF
- Match - for matching objects before creating new ones
- Node - for linking Drupal nodes to SF objects
- Notifications (experimental, sort of - it\'s worked quite well
for me) - allowing Drupal to handle SF outbound messages
- User - matching users to SF objects
- Salesforce/Ubercart -
provides integration for Ubercart. Uses the Salesforce Suite API
- Salesforce Feeds -
allows for feeding SF records into Drupal via
Feeds. Also uses the Salesforce
Suite API
- Salesforce Webform - Allows
for passing data from a Drupal Webform to Salesforce. Currently does
not use the Salesforce Suite API, and cannot be used on the same
site as the Salesforce Suite, but hopefully that will change
soon.
All of these modules are actively maintained, there is an active base of
folks using and contributing (including me) and there are plans afoot
for Drupal 7, with big improvements. Of course, there are still some
snaggy spots, and it helps if you know some about Salesforce to have
this work really well, but I\'ve gotten good results doing two-way sync
of user and node data with the Salesforce Suite, as well as used the
Salesforce Feeds module some. If you use Salesforce, want integration,
and are pondering a CMS choice, definitely check out the overview
slides.
If you are using Drupal, want integration, and considering a CRM,
definitely consider Salesforce. And if you are
already using both, and looking to find ways to integrate them, drop me
a line, I can either directly help you, or
point you in the direction of folks who can.
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On 16 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 5
Comments
CRM systems (which I am defining rather loosely, rather than tightly,
for the purpose of this post - as the tool or set of tools used to track
constituents, donations, perhaps even events and volunteers) are
arguably the most important technology tools that nonprofits use.
Organizations use this tool to track donors, send out newsletters, track
the success of campaigns, track who is engaged with the organization in
what ways, etc. And, in my experience over the past 15 years, it\'s
where organizations are willing to spend the most money on technology -
often more than on their website or other technology tools - for good
reason. Because of this, the deck has always been stacked against open
source tools in this arena. The sheer number of vendors providing this
toolset for nonprofits is huge (although rapidly shrinking.) Two of them
(Convio and Blackbaud) are even publicly traded companies, which says a
lot about the profit potential of this vertical. On the proprietary
side, there is a wide range of available tools, from the relatively
inexpensive, like Salesforce (web-based,
including Convio Common
Ground and the
Nonprofit Starter
Pack,) eTapestry
(web-based, now owned by Blackbaud), Democracy in
Action, and
GiftWorks (desktop) to the
egregiously expensive (you know which ones I mean.) Both
NTEN and Idealware are the
best sources for information about the range of options for this toolset
- that\'s out of scope for this post. As you can tell, I\'ve lumped SaaS
tools like Salesforce, DIA and eTapestry in with proprietary in this
post - that\'s because that\'s what they are - proprietary. However,
Salesforce in particular has a leg up that most other proprietary tools
don\'t have, because of their open APIs and their incredibly robust
development platform. That
combination is impossible to beat if you need integration, ease of data
movement, and a lot of customization. From my perspective, open data
(via open APIs) can sometimes be more important to consider than whether
or not a tool is open source - since integration with other tools, as
well as using external tools of various sorts is critical. Closed data
systems, difficult to integrate systems, or systems that require payment
to get access to your data should be avoided at all cost. On the
open source side, there are a number options: you can choose an open
source CRM package (designed for business), like
SugarCRM, and use it or customize it for use in a
nonprofit, use CiviCRM, or choose the
desktop-based nonprofit CRM called
MPX (built by a company called
Orange Leap.) I\'m excited about a new Drupal project called \"Red Hen
CRM\" but it\'s very fledgeling.
CiviCRM is a web-based open source nonprofit-focused CRM/Donation
management tool. It\'s been around for a while now, and is used by many
organizations, some quite large (like the Wikimedia
Foundation.) It is quite
broad in its feature set - it has donation pages, event management,
e-newsletter functionality, even a case-management system. I\'ve
installed, configured and administered CiviCRM many times, still work
with it, and I have, like most developers, a love/hate relationship with
it:
- I love that it\'s open source/free software
- It\'s got a great community of developers and users
- I love that it\'s feature rich - you cannot find the whole set of
things it does in any proprietary tool that I\'ve seen.
- It is a tool that has unmatched cost-effectiveness for small
organizations
- It\'s great that it integrates with both Drupal and Joomla (although
the Drupal integration is by far the most solid - and it is a very
nice integration - hard to get with proprietary tools.)
- It is relatively easy to set up for most functionality
But ...
- Data migration into CiviCRM is often nightmarish (this is really
where the hate lies)
- Reporting tools are improving, but don\'t match the proprietary
versions
- It can sometimes be pretty tough to handle complex issues
- It can be tough to troubleshoot issues
MPX is a desktop tool, and although it is open source (GPLv3,) unlike
CiviCRM, or SugarCRM, it is built on top of a proprietary stack (.Net/MS
SQL Server.) It has primarily been used in faith-based organizations
(that is Orange Leap\'s primary client base.) But it\'s a very full
featured product, and quite mature. So if you are a small organization
that perhaps is still working with spreadsheets, CiviCRM is a great idea
to check out. But in general, there are a lot choices and, sadly, few of
them are open source.
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On 14 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 5 Comments
For those of us that depend on MySQL everyday, the buyout of Sun (which
had bought MySQL) by Oracle did not bode well. A decidedly biased
survey
by the folks behind PostgreSQL suggests that many people worry about the
health of MySQL in Oracle\'s hands. I\'ve mentioned this before, and I
do think the conventional wisdom is that open source software (which
includes OpenOffice.org, MySQL and Java) will not flourish at Oracle. It
makes sense - Oracle has never had a culture of fostering open source
software, and it seems unlikely to obtain one. So what does someone do
who builds their houses right on top of the LAMP stack (M standing for
MySQL)? For most folks, especially if they build on shared hosting
infrastructures, this just isn\'t an issue. They depend upon their
hosting providers, for whom it may or may not be an issue - but they
won\'t have to think about it. For those folks in a position to choose
which database software to use, (for example, you use VPS systems like
Amazon, Slicehost, Linode, etc.,) then I think there are two pretty good
options:
- Go with MariaDB, which is
basically a drop-in replacement for MySQL (and conveniently starts
with an \"M\".)
- Switch to PostgreSQL.
MariaDB is a branch of MySQL that came about because of the uncertainty
relating to Oracle\'s ownership of MySQL. From the
website:
In most respects MariaDB will work exactly as
MySQL:
all commands, interfaces, libraries and APIs that exist in MySQL also
exist in MariaDB. There is no need to convert databases to switch to
MariaDB. MariaDB is a true drop in replacement of MySQL! Additionally,
MariaDB has a lot of nice new
featuresthat
you can take advantage of.
The problem is that the major Linux distributions (Ubuntu, Debian,
RedHat) don\'t yet have MariaDB in their repositories, so it will be a
while before MariaDB is an easy apt-get or yum away from installation
(there are some independent repositories and builds.)
PostgreSQL is a different beast entirely.
It\'s been an also-ran in the open source database race, and I was, for
many years, quite faithful to it. It\'s a very solid database, and it
was ACID compliant before MySQL
was. It\'s major weakness (and why the LAMP stack is called that and not
the LAPP stack) was that it was a fair bit slower than MySQL. But
that weakness has long been taken care of, but the damage was already
done. Many open source web database systems can use PostgreSQL instead
of MySQL at this point. But PostgreSQL doesn\'t have the same large user
base, and doesn\'t have many of the same web-based and desktop tools
that MySQL does. There are differences in the SQL commands and such, and
the command-line interface looks different. There is also a big
difference in how Auto-numbered fields get handled, but that\'s not
really an issue that folks who don\'t dive into deep database and code
need to deal with. So which to go with? It probably makes sense to wait
a bit, first for MariaDB to make it into mainstream repositories, etc.,
and also to see what the fate of MySQL is. And checking out PostgreSQL
is always a good option, it\'s a very good database system, and the
likely flight from MySQL might do the project some good.
Continue Reading
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On 14 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 2
Comments
The browser wars between proprietary and open source browsers have
changed in some ways from the days that it was simply Internet Explorer
vs. Netscape. There are more players on both sides of the field, with
some interesting complexities. On the proprietary side, still, sits
Internet Explorer, now about ready to pop with version 9. It definitely
depends on who is gathering the data, but IE has about 44% of the
market. This is down significantly from its high point, back in the dark
ages of 2005, when it garnered over 90%. It has been dropping steadily
since. This drop has been primarily, but not exclusively due to the open
source browser, Firefox. More recently, however, two other proprietary
browsers, Opera and Safari, have been increasing their own market
shares. Now, Opera gets about 2% of the market (up from microscopic some
years ago.) Safari, used mainly by Apple Mac users (although there is a
Windows version) now gets about 5% of the market. On the open source
side, Firefox is certainly the leader, with a bit less than 30% of the
market. Chrome, which is sort of an open source browser, is now getting
around 14% of the market. So what do I mean when I say Chrome is \"sort
of an open source browser\"? Chromium,
is the open source project which results in the browser Chrome - but
there are a bunch of additions Google makes to Chrome which are
proprietary, and not in the Chromium codebase. So, anyway, basically,
between Firefox and Chrome, the open source side is a smidge in the lead
over the proprietary side, but it\'s pretty close to even. And still,
the primary reason for the difference is that IE still ships with
Windows (and Safari with Mac OS X), and if people don\'t take the step
to download and install another browser if they are a windows user, they
will still just be using IE. In the mobile space, things are very
interesting. Opera mobile is in the lead, with about 21%, followed by
iPhone, Nokia, and Blackberry. These are all proprietary. Bringing up
the rear is Android, at 16%. But I\'m sure that is going to change as
Android begins to gobble up the moble smartphone market
share.
Continue
Reading
On 13 Mar, 2011 By mpm
{.alignright
width="200"
height="234"} The
Ada Initiative is a nonprofit organization that works to support women
in open culture (open source software, open standards, open content,
etc.) Really great stuff. They have a new census that they are
encouraging people to take. So please take
it, and spread the word.
Continue Reading
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On 07 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 6
Comments
I recently wrote a blog
entry
about LibreOffice (LO), the fork of
OpenOffice.org (OOo) that came after the
acquisition of Sun (the old holder/maintainer of OOo) by Oracle. For the
purposes of this blog entry, at this moment in time (early 2011,)
LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are the same. (funnily enough, for both
packages, the executable is still called \'soffice\' - for \'Star
Office.\') I\'ve been using this tool since it actually was StarOffice,
more than 10 years ago, when it was first open sourced by Sun in 2000.
For most of that time, except when I was doing heavy collaborative
editing with colleagues who are using MS Office, it is my Office Suite
of choice. There have been many times, over the course of the years,
where there are things I\'ve thrown at OpenOffice.org that it couln\'t
handle, but those things have diminished year by year, and over the past
couple of years, I\'ve had absolutely nothing to complain about (nor
have I submitted any bugs, which I did a fair bit of in the early
2000\'s.) I would take a bet that 90% of people who use MS Office don\'t
need to pay for it, but can do fine with OOo/LO. 70% of people could
pick up OOo/LO and use it with no training or help, even if they are
used to MS Office. It is the only fully cross-platform office suite with
pretty much the same functionality and interface independent of
platform. It reads and writes all MS Office formats (except for Access
files.) It does have a drawing program, an XML editor, as well as a math
equation editor, in addition to the standard word processor,
spreadsheet, presentation tool and database. Oh, and did I mention it\'s
free as in beer, too, instead of adding a couple of hundred bucks or
more to the price of a new PC? So what are it\'s weaknesses?
- The spreadsheet doesn\'t yet have all of the functionality of Excel.
It\'s pretty darned close, but even I have to admit that Excel is
darned hard to beat.
- ~~It doesn\'t have The Ribbon~~ I think most people would say this
is a strength. :-)
- The presentation package isn\'t quite as polished as PowerPoint,
although you can do most of what you can do with PP.
- ~~It doesn\'t have Publisher~~
- The database has not come anywhere near the functionality of Access.
The days when many a nonprofit were run by Access databases is coming to
a close as things move more and more to the cloud. Google docs will take
a good long time to make it to the point where the functionality begins
to match either MS Office or OOo/LO, so OOo/LO is a very good
alternative to MS Office if you don\'t need MS Access, and have folks
able and willing to make a small adjustment to use this tool. I know
that the fact that nonprofits can get MS Office for \$30 or
so
makes a change unlikely, and I\'ve carped about that one for
years.
But at least, for now, it seems that MS is still willing to be generous.
Continue
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On 06 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I was looking at my Google Analytics report for this blog, and came
across an interesting thing. The browser share of those visiting my
site, and the North America browser share from
Statcounter.
Here are my stats:
{.alignnone
.size-medium .wp-image-881 width="300" height="86"} Here are the stats
from Statcounter:
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height="193"}
It\'s a bit hard to see, but my stats have IE as third, where as the
Statcounter stats have IE as out front, by a fair bit. Also, my stats
have Chrome in 2nd place, and they have Chrome in 3rd, even with Safari,
and a fair bit below Firefox. This falls into the category of \"things
that make you go hmmmmm...\" Although in some ways, it makes sense,
given that my audience is much more tech-savvy than the audiences of
most websites. (For instance, my personal site, that gets much less
traffic, and is likely a less techy crowd, has stats much more similar
to Statcounter than this blog.) So, anyway, way to go readers, making
Firefox first! And for those 37 of you who visited this year using IE6,
shame on you. Be nice to web developers and
ditch IE 6, please?
Continue Reading
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On 03 Mar, 2011 By mpm
With 2
Comments
In my time working on web development for nonprofit organizations, I\'ve
seen more RFPs than I can even begin to count. I\'ve even written a few.
And, especially since I\'ve primarily been someone in the role of having
to respond to an RFP, I\'ve gotten pretty good at spotting RFPs that I
feel don\'t serve either the organization, or the developers well. Here
is, in my estimation, the good, bad, and ugly in the realm of RFPs.
I\'ll start with the bad. A mistake I see very often in RFPs is an
imbalance in what is articulated in the RFP, and the kind of work that
is required to pull off what\'s needed. Let me give an example: An RFP
for a new website has 2 pages describing in detail needs provided by any
modern CMS (web based WYSIWYG editing, drop down menus, new pages easily
added, contact forms, etc.) and then a phrase dropped in like
\"integration with our CRM,\" or \"event management system,\" without
any detail as to what these things really mean (like, what is the CRM
and what kind of integration is needed, etc.) This invites a world of
hurt, as you can imagine. Kind of like the sound made when the Man from
Mars starts eating guitars in the Blondie song. Then there is the ugly.
The mistake that organizations most often make is that they have a five-
or six-figure imagination, and a four-figure budget. So what\'s the
good? What makes a good RFP?
- Do your homework: know what kinds of software options available to
build the kind of system you want, and know what their capabilities
are, and how much it generally costs to implement those basic
capabilities. Learn about how hard customization of those platforms
are (some are much easier than others.)
- Understand that integration of most any two different systems is
going to be four times as hard as you think, cost at least three
times as much, and will do 1/2 of what you expect or want.
- Hire a strategic consultant who really understands technology and
the technological details of what you are looking for to help you
figure out whether or not you can afford what you really want, and
how best to articulate those needs in an RFP. Even an hour or two of
their time will save you money and headaches. Someone who is a
developer or who has been one in the past is a good bet.
- Read this slide
deck
by Gunner of Aspiration!!
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On 28 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 1
Comments
Since I wrote my post on \"Open Source vs. Proprietary\" last week, and
especially after Thomas Taylor\'s very apt
comment
that the battle is not over in many corners, I decided that, well, what
the heck, it was a good time to write a series about open source
software options, and their comparisons to proprietary, in 2011, more
than 12 years after this whole thing started. And I\'ll highlight where
the comparisons are interesting and compelling, especially for nonprofit
organizations. I\'ll write a series of posts, and cover the following
topics:
- Desktop software (OS, Office Suites, browsers, utility software, and
other good stuff.)
- Comparisons of open source vs. proprietary development environments
(i.e. PHP vs. .NET and that sort of thing.)
- CMS
- Non-profit CRM (including \"SaaS\" in the proprietary camp)
- CRM/ERP more generally
- Document Management
- Other web applications
- Open Source Communities, and how they have changed (and not)
I don\'t know what order I\'ll write about these things - I guess just
as the mood strikes me.
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On 27 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 1 Comments
\"Nothing endures but change\" - Heraclitus Sometimes, change happens
when we\'re not looking for it, or we don\'t really want it. Sometimes
changes that we don\'t want lead us to places that make more sense for
us. This is one of those times. I\'ve been struggling with health issues
(life-altering, but not life-threatening, thankfully) for almost 6
months. They have led me to make a significant change in my work life. I
have decided to step out of co-running
OpenIssue, a business that I helped start more
than 2 years ago, so that I can work part-time, to get (and stay)
healthy. OpenIssue will continue with its strong team focused entirely
on CRM and data (using Salesforce, Convio Common Ground, etc.). I\'ll
still be working with OpenIssue on odds and ends moving forward. I\'ll
be looking for small projects, or being a piece of larger projects.
Please feel free to drop me a line, and
please read my
page
about what I\'m looking for.
Continue Reading
On 23 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 4 Comments
This is an issue I\'ve been struggling with for a long time. I\'m an
unrepentant, unabashed technophile. OK, well, not so unrepentant or
unabashed since I\'m writing this post on the varied factors around
technology and the environment, and have been thinking about this issue
for myself for a long time. And I will start this post off by being
clear - this is as much of an internal, personal conflict for me, and a
way in which I see my own behavior and my values diverge at times. We
are approaching a time when just about everyone should be thinking hard
about use of fossil fuels, consumption and waste. Global climate change
is beginning to affect our lives in a real
way.
I offer this set of data points, if you will, with the hope that it will
spark some thinking and perhaps discussion. Cloud computing There is
some
argument
as to whether or not cloud computing is good or
bad
for the environment. On one hand, you have folks saying that moving
organizational data and functions into the cloud means gaining
efficiencies not possible in server rooms. Most organizational servers
do not run at full capacity, whereas servers in the cloud generally are
using more of their available capacity. One could argue that 100 servers
running at 1/2 capacity is better than 200 servers running at 1/4
capacity. That said, we are doing a lot more than just moving stuff out
to the cloud. We are creating whole new infrastructures that didn\'t
exist before (think Facebook, Google, etc.) But it also means that we
can use lighter clients. Will the move to, for instance, tablet and
phone computing be a net positive or negative benefit in terms of
resource consumption? Green Hosting There are a ton of hosting
companies claiming that they are \"green hosting.\" Just Google
it.
And you might see \"powered by wind power\" or some such. The truth is
more complicated. Green hosting companies are just like any other
hosting company. They have a big data center that\'s attached to the
grid, from which they draw power. And they become \"green\" by
purchasing renewable energy credits, or by purchasing carbon offsets.
There are some
arguments
about whether or not these are really helping the environment. Figuring
this out is far beyond the scope of this article. But I think it\'s fair
to say that the jury is still out on this one. Production and Disposal
of Technology Equipment So this is where it gets ugly. I remember, back
in the heady days of the early Circuit
Rider
movement, when one of the big issues was that nonprofits had old,
outdated equipment, and they never budgeted for its timely replacement.
I remember we talked about planning to replace 1/4 to 1/3 of the
hardware in an organization each year. The logic behind this is very
hard to fault. Computing changes at a breathtaking pace. Software is
written for current high-end hardware, so upgrading software on older
machines is either painful or impossible. The argument goes - nonprofits
need up-to-date tools to do their work effectively. It all makes sense,
but what results is nonprofit technology\'s contribution to
e-waste.
And as our tools get more and more functional, and slimmer and smaller,
and, well, cooler, we\'re more
than happy to toss the old stuff in the trash. We don\'t see or interact
with e-waste. We leave that to China, Ghana, and other countries.
E-waste pollutes the environment and poisons people. And all because
this technology, all of it, is \"designed for the
dump.\" (Follow that link,
please.) (And, parenthetically, although it\'s not really about the
environment, check out this information about
Coltan, a necessary
ingredient in many electronics, including mobile phones.) And then there
are the resources that go into producing our technological gizmos. For
instance, it takes 500 pounds of fossil fuel, 50 pounds of metal, and an
enormous 1.5 tons of water to make the average computer. That is a
staggering amount of resources. And, between phones, tablets, e-readers,
laptops, desktops, servers, routers ... it\'s an incredible amount of
resource consumption and waste. So what to do? I recently read this
article that I found interesting on \"Seven Criteria for the Adoption
of New
Technology.\"
It\'s written by someone who is working at living a simple life, and
finds the same kind of conflicts in this that I do:
As the world rushes toward an overcrowded but new and improved grave
full of "articulated task lamps" with "industrial style charm," wines
with "velvety" appeal, and cordless window shades that are "safe® for
children and pets" (that's just one section of today's paper), I find
my supposedly simple-living self caught on the same slow slide toward
more. The bike I ride now is better than the one I had a year ago.
Before long I'll need a new computer, and it will be better than the
one I have now. The force of inevitability takes over. What is one to
do? How exactly, and realistically, can a person resist, or cope, or
somehow do something other than just get swept along? My impulse is to
rant.
Here are my modified seven criteria: 1) How would the technology affect
dynamics of organizations, friends, family and community? 2) Would it
help us live and/or work in more stable circles, and strengthen our
communities? 3) Is there a way to limit it, or does it push us down the
slippery slope to even more? 4) Would it do "work that is clearly and
demonstrably better" than the thing it replaces? 5) Who would want us to
get it, and who would not? 6) Would it bring joy and satisfaction to
life? 7) Does it represent what we believe in? Thoughts?
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On 22 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 1 Comments
\"Only the present moment is real and available to us. The peace we
desire is not in some distant future, but it is something we can
realize in the present moment.\" --Thich Nhat Hahn
I have been thinking about why I decided to call this blog \"Zen and the
Art of Nonprofit Technology\" recently. I named it that back in 2006
when I
resurrected this
blog (pun not really intended) after my time in seminary. If you\'ve
read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance,
you know that what\'s important is the journey, not the destination. Of
course this is a common theme, and it\'s one that I try to always keep
in mind. For me, the means are the ends, and how we do what we do is
easily as important as what we do. The name of this blog was designed to
make me keep that in mind when I wrote about technology. As you know,
I\'ve given up
hope
that by helping nonprofit organizations with technology that I\'m
changing the world. But I do believe, strongly, that we change the world
when we pay attention to what\'s going on now, to how we accomplish
what we do. I think I just contradicted myself. Or, rather, entered into
somewhat of a paradox. What I\'m saying is that the ends, making
nonprofits super duper amazing users of technology, is not what\'s most
important. It\'s how they get there that is.
Continue Reading
On 21 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I hope that everyone reading this blog has heard of
OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a free and
open source cross-platform office suite, which can read and write MS
Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. It actually has more to it than that,
there is a drawing program, a database, a math equation editor and more.
It has been in development as OpenOffice.org since 1999, when Sun
Microsystems bought the
code from a company called Star Division (remember StarOffice?) (You can
find an aged, but perhaps useful webinar I
did up
on slideshare.) For 85% of what most nonprofits (and individuals) need
out of MS Office, you can get in this package for free. Sorry, clippy
not included. OpenOffice.org has come an incredibly long way since the
old days, and it is, now, quite a credible competitor to MS Office. But
then ... Oracle
bought Sun. And just like the fears that many in the MySQL community
have had about the future of MySQL under Oracle\'s watch (Oracle shut
down the OpenSolaris project, for example), people were worried about
the future of OpenOffice.org. And the cool thing about open source
software is that in situations like this, people can fork
stuff.
And they did. They formed an organization called the Document
Foundation, and forked the code
from version 3.3 of OpenOffice.org, and called it
LibreOffice. All of the major Linux
distributions are going to include LibreOffice, some as the default
office suite. I\'ve already been using LibreOffice, and intend to stick
with it, since IMHO, a good bet is that anything FOSS will flounder and
probably die in Oracle\'s hands. (Which is why I am also keeping a keen
eye on MySQL drop-in replacements, as well. You\'ll read about that one
here.)
Continue
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On 19 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 4
Comments
This epic battle between Open Source software (or Free software) and
proprietary software is coming to a close. Some might argue that FOSS
won the battle. Others would argue that proprietary software won. I\'m
going to argue that both won, and both lost. The Desktop About 10
years ago, the very big FOSS vs. Proprietary battle was between Linux
and Microsoft. The \"year of the Linux desktop\", where Linux becomes a
dominant force in the desktop computing world, was predicted, but never
came. It never will come. Er, well. No, actually it will, but it will be
in the form that no one could have predicted: Android. Android is
based on a modified Linux kernel. If Linux had never existed, Android
probably would never have existed. Smart phones and tablets are going to
be the new desktops, and yes, the Apple iPad is there first, but like
the Macintosh and the iPhone, there will be a wave of successor devices
running Android that will overtake the iPad in a matter of a year or
two, relegating Apple to a niche player once more. And this has moved so
fast, that Microsoft will also be a small niche player. Speaking of
Apple and FOSS, Apple\'s OS X and iOS are based on the BSD operating
system - another open source *NIX that has been around for a while. If
it hadn\'t been for BSD, it\'s likely OS X and iOS wouldn\'t be what
they are today. The Server to the Cloud Also \'round about 10 years
ago, the battle was brewing between Linux and BSD, and proprietary UNIX
like SCO and Sun, as well as between Linux and Windows. For a while,
Linux (and to a lesser extend, BSD) was winning only against the
proprietary UNIX flavors, and Windows servers were heavily favored still
by enterprises that needed stuff like Exchange. That was true until ...
the cloud. The cloud would not exist without FOSS. There is no way
that the kind of inexpensive cloud architecture could have developed if
everyone had to have depended on proprietary, licensed software. The
cost required to either pay software makers, or recreate everything
needed from scratch would have made something like the cloud, or a
Google, so expensive as to be impossible. But what\'s also true is that
\"the cloud\" is, at its core, supremely proprietary. Not only do you
not have access to the code running something like, say, Salesforce.com,
but in some cases (such as the case of Facebook) the cloud service
providers own your data, too! Even if you wanted to, you couldn\'t
download your own copy of Google Apps to run on your desktop. And, at
the same time, the cloud provides you with an ever increasing set of
features and functionalities, with ever increasing ease of use, at ever
decreasing costs. This is both made possible by open source software,
and is completely proprietary. So there you have it. Open source
software has won. It underlies the bulk of the current technologies we
use everyday. And, at the same time, even everybody interacts with FOSS
every day, they don\'t (and won\'t) know it. And proprietary software
has won, because in the final analysis, it\'s the proprietary layers on
top of FOSS that people see and know, even though it depends completely
on FOSS.
Continue
Reading
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On 18 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I saw a call for a ColdFusion
developer on an email list I\'m on, and I couldn\'t help but think about
technology choice and change, particularly in the website world, and how
nonprofits deal with technology change (or, don\'t deal with it.)
ColdFusion has been around for 15 years (more than a century in Internet
time), and although it has improved and developed, technologically, it
has been surpassed by its successors (including PHP, Java, Python,
RubyonRails, and even .NET.) But this article isn\'t about CF, it\'s
about technology change. Technology is a rapidly moving beast. And the
pressure to move forward, fast, is right there, always. It\'s part of
our culture, from the advertisements to the neatest, newest, coolest
phones, to the new TV you should have. And then there are those of us in
the Nonprofit technology community who are constantly on the bleeding
edge of the next thing, whether it be hardware, software, or web
services, are constantly talking about it, and how it\'s going to make
it easier/better/faster to change the world. Although I often get snarky
about this, I am aware that I am guilty of this, too. Most nonprofits
are not run by geeks. Most nonprofit leaders think of technology as
something in between a useful tool to be leveraged, and a necessary
evil. They are resistant to rapid changes in their technology, as well
they should be. And, they depend on geeks to help them get things done.
I have a story about nonprofits with a website they can\'t leverage for
their mission. Although complete fiction, this story will feel quite
familiar. And I know I\'ve been a guilty party in a real story at some
point in my career. A small nonprofit has a small staff who know a lot
about their mission, but nothing about how to create a website. A friend
of one of the board members is a web developer. They hire that web
developer to put a new site together. The developer waxes poetic about
the capabilities of this platform, called AmazingWebCreator. They
imagine the developer knows what they are talking about. The developer
builds the website, then goes away. The organization is happy for a
while, they have a website with pages they can easily edit using a web
form, which is more than they had before. Then in months, or years, they
want to add some new pages, or a new section to their site, and a widget
on the side. But they realize they don\'t know how to do that. They call
the developer, who is busy now using AmazingWebCreator on some huge
project, or has moved on to SuperDuperWebCreator, and doesn\'t have time
for them. They have to bring in another developer, who knows
AmazingWebCreator, which may cost them time and \$. Of course, the
critical factor here is what is \"AmazingWebCreator\"? If it is a
relatively new CMS (like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others) they may
not need to bring in a new developer - they may just be able to get a
book, or buy a video to teach them how to use the web interface to
create new regions and widgets. If \"AmazingWebCreator\" is a platform
like RubyonRails, Django, .NET, Java, or ColdFusion, they are most
likely going to have to hire someone to do that work for them, and
depending on the platform, those developers may be either few and far
between (ColdFusion) or in high demand, and therefore relatively
expensive (RubyonRails, Java.) Worst, of course, is if AmazingWebCreator
is a proprietary, custom CMS that the developer wrote themselves in
2002, and no longer supports. How is an organization supposed to know
how to make an informed choice about a website platform? I have a few
suggestions: 1) Assumptions: First, assume the person/people who develop
your site might not be around in a year or so. And assume there are
things you can\'t conceive of now that you\'ll want to do in a year.
Don\'t assume the platform that your buddy chose for their
organization\'s site is the right one for you. Don\'t assume that the
most popular platform is necessarily the right one, either. 2) Feature
set: Garden variety website, or very specialized functionality? (By
\"garden variety\" I don\'t mean brochureware. I mean average, normal
features of most nonprofit organizations. These include such things as
donation buttons/pages, membership lists, blogs, etc.) 3) Platform
choice: Look at a number of things - if it\'s open source - how many
developers are there? How many people use it? How easy is it to find
developers? Will most new functionality be able to be added via web
interface, or will it require back-end coding? Is it a custom CMS,
written, maintained and supported by a single shop? (NEVER, EVER, EVER
CHOOSE THESE. Here\'s
why. Luckily,
they are an endangered species.) If it is proprietary, or
software-as-a-service, are the extra features really worth the cost? Are
there many consultants and developers who can assist you with this
platform? 4) Lifecycle: Is it early in the life of the platform, at
it\'s peak, or late (or very, very late)? Bleeding edge might hurt, aged
platform might crumble underneath the weight. There are lots of folks (I
do this on occasion on this blog, and Idealware
is a great resource) that can provide you with information about
specific platforms, and comparisons between them. Read, read, read, and
ask many questions before you decide.
Continue
Reading
On 17 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 3 Comments
As you can tell, I\'ve been writing more lately, and I plan, for the
time being at least, to really step up my blogging game. I\'ve got a
list of posts of my own I want to write, but I realized that some
long-time readers of this blog might want me to write about some
specific things that fit under my basic purview. Research you\'ve been
too busy to do, something you want my unique opinion on, something
you\'re curious about. So, I\'m soliciting ideas. No guarantees I\'ll
blog about it, but feel free to put in comments (or email
me, if you\'re feeling a need for
privacy) topics you\'d like me to cover. Here\'s my list of upcoming
topics:
- Has Open Source won or lost, or is the struggle still going on?
- Updates on Open Content and Copyleft of things other than code that
nonprofits might be interested in.
- Ruby on Rails (varied topics).
- Drupal Provisioning
- A beginners guide to NoSQL.
- Reasons why nonprofits, and nonprofit technology in specific should
work to expand the economic models by which they work.
- How to be really anonymous technologically (for activist reasons)
and the Flipside - how to make sure people know you are who you say
you are, and what ways do people spoof.
- Cloud development platforms.
- Why technology both sucks for the environment, and is good for the
environment - how to find the sweet spot.
- Podcasting 101.
That\'s my list so far, and I\'d love to add your ideas to the mix.
Continue Reading
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On 16 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 5
Comments
As most of you know, I\'m a writer. I write a fair bit of science
fiction, and also write other stuff. Lately, I\'ve been thinking a lot
about what I want to do to get my novels out in the world, and have been
greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow in terms of
copyright (or, more accurately,
copyleft). Obviously for me,
publishing eBooks is going to be something I do at some point, perhaps
sooner rather than later. I\'m talking in this post about
self-publishing eBooks. What are the options, and how do you go about
doing it? Since this is a technology blog, and not a marketing blog, I
won\'t talk about the details of getting an ISBN number, or getting nice
looking cover art, or getting the word out, etc. There are also avenues
that will allow you to sell both your print book alongside your eBook.
All of those issues I\'ll leave to other folks. I\'m going to talk here
about mechanics of just eBook publishing. Mechanics If you want to put
your book into formats that the widest variety of people will be able to
read, think about these two important factors:
- Distribution avenues: Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google and
Apple, would be the ones I\'d focus on, as well as whatever other
avenues you want to use to get your electronic files out there.
- Devices: Kindle, iPad/iPhone, Android Tablets/Android Phones,
Nook, Computer (in that vague order of preference)
This will define what steps you need to take to get your manuscript into
eBook format. Amazon has what\'s called \"Kindle Direct
Publishing\" - how you
can self-publish your book on Amazon. There is a lot of information
there on how to get going, including how to get your document into the
right
format.
You can either upload a .doc or .docx file, or a mobipocket format file.
Unlike Amazon, which puts all self-published and publisher-published
books into the same pot, Barnes and Noble has this thing called
\"PubIt!\"
It\'s a bit segregated from the rest of the books in the Nook store. You
need to jump through several hoops to get registered, etc. Once you do,
your book can be uploaded either as a .doc or .docx, or you can make an
ePub version to upload (more on that below.) Apple also has a
system by
which you sign up to sell your books in their iBookstore. They also use
ePub, so you\'ll need to get your book into that format. Google also
makes you join a partner program to publish your book. \"Google
Editions\"
is the process by which you get Google to sell your book. In that case,
you need to upload an ePub version. Nicely, Google allows you to
distribute your eBook without DRM, an option no other vendors seem to
have. (This is sort of an off-topic digression, but it\'s interesting,
so I\'ll insert it anyway. From what I can tell, Barnes and Noble is the
only one of the list of these outlets that really distinguishes between
self-publishers and regular publishers in the experience of customers
viewing/searching for eBooks. In fact, Google and Apple seem to have the
same exact back-end process to get books sold, whether you are a big
regular publisher, or little ol\' me sitting in my living room...)
Formats OK, so now that we\'ve gotten the bureaucratic crap out of the
way, how in the bleep do you get your book into the proper format(s)? I
wrote a blog entry a bit ago on eBook
formats.
The distributors above (plus perhaps your own distribution process)
necessitates moving your manuscript from the word processing format you
wrote it in, to some other format. I\'d say you eventually want it in
three different formats:
- PDF
- ePub
- MobiPocket
PDF is easy. MS Word, OpenOffice.org, and
LibreOffice (a recent fork of
OpenOffice.org - that\'s another blog post) have PDF export facilities,
so that job is easy. Make sure, of course, that your manuscript has the
right types of cover pages, etc. that are standard for eBooks. (Here\'s
a nice, short
guide.) There are
many methods for converting files to ePub and Mobi format. It depends on
your platform, your budget, and your technology skillset:
- epub-tools: an open source,
command line set of tools for conversion to epub format. (free)
- Calibre: a cross-platform suite of
tools for ebook management, conversion, etc. I haven\'t spent much
time with it yet, but it\'s free, and seems like it has a pretty
nice feature set, including conversion to epub and Mobi. (free)
- Adobe InDesign: the
rather expensive desktop publishing program includes, apparently,
conversion to
epub
(but not to mobi.) (\$\$)
- ecub: a cross-platform program to
convert files to epub and mobi. (free)
- Jutoh: another cross-platform program that
does multiple format conversions. (\$)
- odftoepub: an
OpenOffice.org plug-in for conversion to epub format (\$)
After you create your files, you\'ll want to look at them, to see if
they worked well. Obviously, checking them out on as many devices as you
can would be good. You can
sideload any of these files
to different devices to test them out. You can also use the following
tools to independently view your creations:
One small note: Unlike ePub, which
is an open standard,
Mobipocket was a company that
had it\'s own format, and was acquired by Amazon in 2005.
Continue
Reading
On 15 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 25 Comments
As a user and developer of WordPress since 1.x
something, and a developer and user of Drupal since
4.7, I figured that with the release of Drupal 7, this would be a great
time to do a comparison of the two. If you want a really detailed look,
please read the very exhaustive, recently released, updated Idealware
report on OpenSource CMS,
which includes Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and Plone. I did the research
for the original report released a couple of years ago, so it\'s been a
while since I\'ve come back to comparing these two platforms. Also, this
is primarily going to be from the developers point of view, although
I\'ll talk some about user interface and experience. (A caveat: I have
more experience, especially with larger sites, in Drupal than in
WordPress, so there are things that I may be missing. Feel free to make
comments on what I got wrong.)
WordPress started out with a focus on ease of use for bloggers and
content creators, and secondarily providing a platform for developers to
build plug-ins and such. WordPress was born as a blogging tool,
primarily, and has expanded outside of that realm, to encompass
different kinds of content management use cases. Drupal started out
primarily as a web content development platform, with a strength in
community features. A focus on ease of use didn\'t come about until
Drupal 7. At this point, both Drupal 7 and WordPress are pretty easy for
end users to add and edit content, and do pretty simple administrative
tasks (moderate comments, etc.) They both have a very nice array of
canned themes available to use, and they both have some customizable
themes (themes that make it easy to customize without needing to know
much HTML or PHP - like Thesis) available.
Getting a site up and running in both platforms is pretty easy, although
neither are really ready for non-techies to take on. That said, most
good webhosts have one-click installs of both CMS platforms. WordPress
still has only two content types: Blog Posts and Pages. You can\'t have
different kinds of pages, or different kinds of blog posts, or some
other content type (news, events, etc.) that aren\'t one or the other.
That is a deal-breaker for many kinds of sites. There are plug-ins that
allow you to create custom content types - I haven\'t tried these, so I
can\'t comment, but it seems a big deal that this is core for Drupal,
and an add-on for WordPress. And it seems that this, and the absence in
WordPress of a way to easily control the way that lists of content are
presented and viewed are the major platform differentiators. That said,
many, many websites need neither of these features. And if you want to
get more deeply under the hood, both platforms require some
understanding of the respective platforms (how plug-ins work in WP, how
modules work in Drupal), and probably a bit of PHP, HTML, or AJAX to add
bells and whistles to the theme. Given some big changes in the core of
Drupal, such as adding fields to nodes, as well as image handling in
core, some things are much easier dealt with in Drupal 7 than previous
versions, getting close to the ease of use of WordPress in that regard.
Kinds of sites probably best done in WordPress:
- Blogs
- Community Blogs
- Simple brochureware websites
Kinds of sites best done in Drupal:
- Large community sites where you need different kinds of content
generated by users (blogs, wikis, job postings, etc.)
- Complex, document-heavy library sites, or sites that need document
management
- Sites where you want complex control over multiple content types -
how they are created and viewed
- Magazine/Newspaper like sites where you want to control how lists of
content are displayed and ordered
- eCommerce sites
- Sites with deep integrations to CRM platforms and web services
Kinds of sites where it\'s a tossup:
- Medium or large websites with lots of content, but relatively simple
organization
- Community blogs with many authors and identified, authenticated
users
Bottom line: They are both such amazing, solid platforms, with rich,
deep ecosystems of plug-in/module developers, implementors, designers,
etc. that it\'s hard to go wrong picking either platform, as long as you
are clear on the feature set needed. They have rock-solid core
development teams, security updates, and over all good code, which you
could hardly say about either platform 4 years ago. Also, I have to say,
as much as I have respect for other Open Source CMS platforms, IMHO, 98%
of websites can be served by either of these platforms. That\'s what\'s
true right at this moment. 3 or so years down the pike, I\'m going to be
looking at platforms based on Ruby on Rails - as Rails gets more
mainstream, and solid CMS platforms start to mature, that will be the
space to watch for. But that\'s another blog entry, isn\'t it?
Continue Reading
On 13 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 8 Comments
Nonprofits don\'t use e-commerce much, but I\'ve had some experience
(on both sides of the profit fence) doing e-commerce, and for some
reason, shopping carts are intriguing me at the moment, and I figure its
a good time to know what\'s out there, especially in the open source
shopping cart world. What would I use if someone came to me wanting to
set up a store? The last time I looked closely at this (which was a few
years ago) it was a different situation - there wasn\'t much in the way
of open source shopping carts. Today, there are a ton, some better than
others. Here are the options I\'ve found:
- Zen Cart - LAMP stack program, at
version 1.3.9. Has a community forum, and seems to be pretty
popular. Dreamhost at least has this option as a one-click
install.
- Magento - this is also LAMP
stack, and is using the SugarCRM business
model (which I will admit is not nearly my favorite) - they have a
community version with fewer features and no support compared to the
other versions. The other versions seem extraordinarily expensive -
(\$3,000 - \$13,000 per year. I\'m assuming for that we\'re talking
high-end shopping cart system.)
- Ubercart - Ubercart is a module of
Drupal, and the one of the bunch of these that
I have the most experience with. Because it is a Drupal module, all
of the vast array of features available with Drupal are right
there - so the shopping cart system doesn\'t have to have them. This
is a big plus.
- Open Cart - Also LAMP. Like Ubercart and
Zen Cart, this is a truly open source community effort, with an
ecosystem of providers rather than a business model.
- PrestaShop - Also LAMP. More like
Magento in business model. My pet peeve: a form for downloading
software that requires you to put in your email address. Hate that.
Most add-ons for PrestaShop cost money.
- OSCommerce - Seems to have most of
their popularity in Europe. LAMP stack program.
- Spree - Open Source Ruby on Rails
eCommerce program. It\'s younger than most of the list above, but
interesting.
There are others, but they are much less popular, and much less feature
rich - not much reason to choose them at this moment. There are
several WordPress shopping cart
plug-ins that seem
worth looking at, if you are wedded to WordPress. Some open source, some
not. Of course, so much depends on how much you want to sell, how you
want to sell, what you want to sell, how important your store is in
comparison with the rest of your website (for instance, do you set up an
entirely separate store, or use something like Ubercart as part of your
website.) Those questions are going to be key to know the answers to
before you compare features and technologies of these systems to make a
decision.
Continue Reading
On 13 Feb, 2011 By mpm
With 1 Comments
For those of you that don\'t know about
IP addresses, here\'s
a very quick lesson. In order for one computer to talk to another
computer on the internet, it needs an address, the same as you have an
address so that people know where to send you junk mail catalogs. Human
beings suck at remembering numbers, so a system of connecting names to
numbers exists (called the Domain Name
System, or DNS.) But
the core underlying structure is computers talking to each other via
numbers that run from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255. This system is called
IPv4, or Internet Protocol Version
4. If you\'re quick at math, IPv4
has 2^32^ possible addresses. That\'s 4,294,967,296, four billion, plus.
That\'s seems like a lot. But guess what? It\'s not nearly enough.
Certainly not enough for a world with increasingly connected devices -
things we\'d never considered 20 or so years ago, like your TV and your
refrigerator, let alone millions and millions of cell phones. Right now,
most people in the US own at least 2 or 3 devices that need an IP
address - your computer, your laptop, your phone, your tablet, your
cable box, etc. We\'ve known for years (since the 80\'s) that we\'d run
out of IPv4 addresses sooner or later. Well, later has come. IANA
(Internet Assigned Numbers
Authority)
has now given out all of the IPv4 address blocks it has. Unallocated
IPv4 addresses will run out in August of this
year. Yes, this year
(right after my birthday, in fact.) So what\'s next? What do we do in
this situation? In comes IPv6.
It\'s a new and improved internet Protocol, IPv6. IPv6 has a different
numbering scheme. It is in hexadecimal. Addresses range from
0:0:0:0:0:0:0:0 to ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff. This allows
for 3.4 x 10^38^ addresses. Officially, that is 340
undecillion, but that\'s
really gazillions and gazillions. But IPv6 is no longer in the future
the way it used to be. It\'s NOW, and you have no choice but to deal
with it. Luckily, most of you reading this blog shouldn\'t have to worry
too much - although if you have older hardware (computers, cable modems,
routers, etc.) you may be in a bit of trouble when your ISP does the
switchover. For most folks who have reasonably recent hardware, the
issues sits entirely with your ISP. June 8, 2011, is being called
\"World IPv6 Day.\" If you own a
website (VPS or server inside your firewall) you may well have work to
do. Check with your hosting provider or ISP to find out what you need to
do to make sure you\'re ready.
Continue Reading
On 24 Jan, 2011 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I\'ve had a bit of time now to work with Drupal
7. I\'ve been playing with it since
it was still pretty experimental, but I finally put together a whole
site with it recently, and am pretty happy with it. It\'s gotten a big
leg up in terms of usability - this was a major focus for this release.
The basic user interface is much improved over Drupal 6, and
unrecognizable if you\'ve only been using Drupal 5 or earlier. In my
opinion, the advantages some CMS had over Drupal (I\'m thinking
specifically of Joomla and WordPress) in the realm of usability have
been diminished or even eliminated - especially in the case of Joomla.
WordPress still has a usability advantage if you are creating a simple
blog site. But if you\'re using WordPress to make a more generic website
- I\'d look twice or three times at Drupal 7. There are also some pretty
serious under the hood improvements as well. I\'m looking forward to
when all of the modules that I depend on are up to speed. Some of the
most important ones made it into core, and many others were released
with Drupal 7. Some others are close, like
Ubercart, which has a version in
Beta, and Views, which surprisingly
is still in Alpha. If you are running a site in Drupal 5, you need to
migrate your site at least to 6, but possibly to 7, if you can. Drupal
5 is no longer supported - which means
that if there are security issues, they won\'t be addressed. There will
be no more updates to contrib modules in Drupal 5 (in fact, many modules
for Drupal 5 were abandoned a while ago.) Lullabot has a nice article on
upgrading your site from Drupal 5 to Drupal
6,
in case your site isn\'t ready for Drupal 7.
Continue Reading
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On 21 Jan, 2011 By mpm
With 3
Comments
If you\'ve been around the block as long as I have, you remember the
days before an audio codec was settled upon. EBooks are moving into
adolescence, and the question is, which format will win, or does one
format have to win? For a while there, the two big players on the field
were Amazon on one side, with it\'s
Kindle and proprietary
format, which is an offshoot of
MobiPocket format, and a
reader that has a fairly limited range of formats it can read. On the
other side was Barnes and Noble, with the
Nook, and it\'s own format which is
based on ePub. Both Amazon and Barnes and Noble have DRM in their book
formats. And, of course, they aren\'t the only players in the field.
Sony has it\'s own reader
and format, although, like the Nook and the Kindle, can read a variety
of formats. I won\'t go into exhaustive detail here on the wide variety
of readers and formats. There\'s a great Wikipedia
article to
do the work for me. What I want to talk a bit about is what\'s next.
Amazon and Barnes and Noble were all geared up for a big fight, until a
number of things happened to change the equation. First, Apple came out
with the iPhone, and both Amazon and Barnes and Noble released software
that allowed you to read the books you\'d bought on that device. Soon
after came Android phones, and the same thing happened. Now, you didn\'t
need to own one of their devices to read books sold in their store.
Next, Apple released the iPad and Bookstore. It provides some serious
competition to all three of these established players. On one hand,
Apple gave it\'s very popular iTunes Store like treatment to books. On
the other hand, as most people who have read books on a reader like the
Kindle know, a device like the iPad is actually not the most optimal
kind to read books for long stretches of time. The truth, is, though,
the iPad became the second most popular device to read eBooks in a very
rapid amount of
time,
mostly to the detriment of the Kindle. All other readers have tiny
market share in comparison to both of those players. But with the soon
to be plethora
of Android tablet competitors (as well as tablets using E Ink) to the
iPad, and the ability to read Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Sony
books
on Android, it does seem that there isn\'t a huge need to come to any
sort of standard. But then, Google enters the fray, in a bigger way that
just with Android. The Google
eBookstore! Google decided to go with
the ePub format for their bookstore, with Adobe
DRM.
Because they did that, users who buy books at the Google eBookstore can
read those books on just about every device except ... the Kindle,
which does not support ePub. So what happens next? This is my bet,
although it will be interesting in a few years to find out whether I\'m
correct: - Amazon and Barnes and Noble leave the hardware manufacturing
biz when inexpensive, credible, good e-ink Android-based devices come
out - those become the standard devices for eBook reading. (NB: The Nook
by Barnes and Noble is actually based on Android itself, but I still
think B&N will exit the hardware biz.) - Sony\'s eBook reader and store
dies because no one uses it. - Google becomes second only to Amazon in
eBook selling, eventually toppling Apple from #2 spot. - Apple, like
always, remains the stylish, expensive niche player. They don\'t have
the same success with eBooks that they did with music. - ePub and
Amazon\'s format both remain viable for years to come. Other formats
wane in importance. Next up, a blog post about what you should do if you
want to self-publish your book as an eBook.
Continue
Reading
On 27 Dec, 2010 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Reports of the death of email are, of course rampant, for the past, oh,
10 years or so. First, spam was going to kill email. It certainly is
true that most email sent these days is spam, but that hasn\'t managed
to kill it. More recently, facebook and twitter were considered likely
candidates for killing it off. Recent studies
suggest
that there is a demographic shift happening - social media being more
primary communications avenues for Millenials and Gen Y, and email for
everyone older. I was having lunch with a friend this week who runs a
small advocacy organization in Canada, that relies heavily on the use of
email lists. The question arose as to whether or not it was worth
thinking about shifting some of that communications traffic from email
lists to the web in some form. I think that\'s a big question - it
matters a lot what the demographics of the organization are, what the
goals of the email lists are, and the direction things are going. Also,
of course, lots of people are beginning to say - go where the people
are, which is increasingly Facebook. I tend to shy away from that
suggestion - putting all of ones eggs in a basket you have no control
over always seems
dangerous to me,
even if the basket is free. I decided it was time to do a roundup of the
discussion and collaboration alternatives that exist at this point. I\'m
sure I\'ll miss some, so please add more in comments. I\'m focusing on
tools that are free and open source - tools that you would install on
your own server, or your own private cloud. Someone else can round up
the free services. 1) Drupal Organic Groups: Organic
Groups is a module of Drupal, which
allows for discussions, wikis and the like. It\'s a very powerful tool,
and combined with other drupal modules, there is a lot you can do with
it. A distribution which includes OG and other tools is called Drupal
Commons, and is
worth a look - it\'s matured quite well. 2) Elgg:
Elgg is a powerful open source social
network tool. I\'ve blogged about
Elgg before.
It\'s quite a powerful tool, and has everything you\'d want in a private
social media site - friending, profiles, groups, collaboration tools,
etc. It\'s modular, themable, and has a very active development
community. 3) Etherpad: I\'m including Etherpad
because although it\'s more of a collaboration tool than a discussion
tool, you can have live chat at the same time as you are collaborating.
It works best for larger groups, but it\'s a pretty amazing tool. There
are some hosted versions you can try out. (And
from that link, you can see that Google acquired the company behind it,
so some of that technology has made it into Google apps - but you can
still get the EtherPad code.) 4) phpBB: phpBB
(BB stands for bulletin board) has been around forever, and is still
kicking. 5) BuddyPress: BuddyPress is a
plug-in that adds features to a WordPress MU site (multi
site), such as profiles,
groups, friending, etc. 6) Redmine: Redmine
is, as you should know by now, my absolutest favorite project management
software - it blows out of the water every other one I\'ve ever tried
(Basecamp, Central Desktop, MS Project, ActiveCollab, etc., etc.) It\'s
strengths are ticket tracking and such, but it does have forums that
work quite well. 7) Crabgrass:
Crabgrass is a lot like Elgg, except
it is written on Ruby on Rails, and also has a specific orientation to
focus on groups that do grassroots organizing. 8) Diaspora: Diaspora is
a Facebook alternative. You can, apparently run your own Diaspora
server.
I haven\'t gotten my Diaspora account yet, so I don\'t know the feature
set well, but I\'m assuming there will be groups and group discussions
available.
Continue
Reading
On 17 Dec, 2010 By mpm
Programming languages and I have issues. By now, I\'ve learned quite a
number of them (I think 9 by last count), but for some reason, I seem to
choose my work on them just at the top of the curve, or as they are
going down. I have yet to manage to pick one early. I learned C at the
height of its popularity, just as C++ was beginning to rise. I learned
Fortran when it was almost dead, mostly for fun. I learned Pascal toward
the tail end of its reign. In the late 90s, I chose to write a CMS in
Perl instead of PHP. Dumb idea. I\'ve been moderately interested in Ruby
and Rails for years now, although I haven\'t yet spent very much time
getting my hands really into coding Ruby. As pretty much all of you in
the Salesforce.com world know, Salesforce.com agreed to buy
Heroku for a pretty big chunk of
change.
I\'d played with Heroku a little a while back, and I thought it rocked.
What is Heroku? Heroku is cloud Ruby on Rails. Build a Rails app, and
deploy it on Heroku. It\'s pretty sweet. So why would Salseforce.com buy
it? On one level, it makes über sense to me. As someone who has managed
to learn some
Apex,
which is, frankly, somewhat of a monster of a programming language,
it\'s pretty clear that it\'s not super easy to build complex apps using
it. It\'s like Java in heavy chains. A well-joined RoR & Salesforce.com
platform, all in the cloud, would simply rock. (In case you are
wondering, there already is a Ruby
toolkit
for the Salesforce API, although it looks like it only works on Rails
2.3, not 3.) One another level, it\'s fascinating. The culture of the
Ruby and Rails world, the open source, community-driven, gift economy
meritocracy, is very different than the Salesforce.com world -
proprietary, business oriented, certifications-focused world. Of course,
these are stereotypes - there are plenty of business-oriented Rails
folks, and plenty of open-source oriented Salesforce folks, but the
worlds really are culturally very different. I\'ll have a post soon
where I talk in detail about why I think open source has both won and
lost the open source vs. proprietary war, but this particular
intercultural marriage will be interesting to watch. And the great thing
is that our company has had such a marriage for a couple of years now,
and it works. Anyway, I\'m dusting off my Ruby books, and diving in. Fun
times!
Continue
Reading
On 28 Nov, 2010 By mpm
With 2 Comments
In April of this year, I left
twitter.
I had good reason to leave twitter. And, after a few months, I didn\'t
miss
it.
And, frankly I still don\'t miss it. But I had a bit of an epiphany
lately that you social media mavens out there will very much appreciate.
I figured it was worth writing on this blog about. I joined Twitter in
the beginning, because my colleagues were. I didn\'t have a reason, or a
goal, except to find out what everyone one else was, well, all a-twitter
about (sorry, I couldn\'t help it.) I knew that my nonprofit consulting
practice was not going to be geared toward social media (as you all
know, I veer way more to the plumber end of the web technology
spectrum.) And, it was fun, for a while, then it got old. I didn\'t have
a specific set of things I wanted to get out there in the world (save in
the realm of what I can easily do by blogging) and I just joined because
all of my nptech buddies joined. I got overwhelmed by the information
coming my way and it invaded my life. So I left. What\'s changed for me
is that I now have a goal and a focus, and with that goal and focus
comes a realization. Aha! Twitter will be useful. It sort of took me by
surprise, interestingly enough. I began to think about how I would
approach this thing, and what would be the best way to learn more, as
well as share, and put stuff out, and ... voila, Twitter. And the
lesson, I learned, which I\'m sure lots of nonprofits are learning,
seems to be: Twitter is a means to an end, and it\'s important for me to
treat it that way, rather than it being and end unto itself. And I know
the social media folks have been saying this all along, but it took me
this long for it to really sink in. I know that at least some of you are
thinking \"so what\'s the goal and focus?\" Sorry, it\'s not nonprofit
technology, ya\'ll. Now that I\'ll be back on Twitter, I\'ll probably do
a few tweets now and again from our company twitter
account, so feel free to follow. And
please don\'t feel at all slighted if I stop following you on my
personal twitter account (It\'s
likely.) Because besides being a web techie, I\'m a science fiction
writer with some stories and novels to peddle.
Continue
Reading
On 15 Nov, 2010 By mpm
A couple of tidbits on the environment today:
Continue Reading
On 11 Oct, 2010 By mpm
With 5 Comments
I\'ve been through a pretty interesting transformation in the last 2
months. I\'ve gone from being a Mac/iPhone user, to being a
ThinkPad/Android user, and not looking back. I\'m actually quite happy -
I can run both Windows 7 and Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, and I like
Android (and my Droid 2 phone) a lot. Once I sell my iPhone (fairly
soon) I will be free of Apple hardware for the first time in 25 years
(yikes! Er, well, actually, I think there were a couple of years there
where I had only a Power
Computing Mac Clone.) I
made the change for two reasons - first - I really needed Windows for
work. There are some tools that our team uses that I need to use that
have no Macintosh version or alternative - and collaboration with our
team using MS Office tools has become so much smoother. I\'m surprised
at how Mac-like, and trouble-free Windows 7 is (I haven\'t had windows
on a machine I owned since Windows 2000.) It\'s basically unobtrusive as
an OS (well, besides the annoying pop-ups asking for permission for
things during installation, but that seems a worthy trade off to the
virus and worm-laden alternative.) And the funny thing about using
Windows is that I have now noticed how much work I used to have to do to
make sure things were going to work with my Mac. That\'s not a problem
I\'ve been facing anymore. And, of course, using Ubuntu on the desktop
is fun. Great web development environment, of course. Some things (like
adding peripherals especially) are still a little problematic, but it\'s
getting better. The second reason was more philosophical. The release of
the iPad (which I will never buy - waiting until there is a credible
Android tablet) sort of woke me up. I had come to chafe at the
closed-ness of the whole system, but somehow the ease of use in
comparison to the alternatives was addictive for a long time. But the
iPad, as simple a consumptive device, and a closed
one
at that, sort of made me realize that coolness of design wasn\'t worth
the trade off. And now that I\'ve spent some time with the alternatives
... well, yes, Apple products still have a bit more gloss, but the
usability for me is not hugely better than either of the 3 alternatives
I\'ve been working with (which, in the case of both Windows and Linux,
was not always the case.) I actually like my Droid phone better than I
ever liked my iphone, which came somewhat of a surprise to me. I\'ve
always really liked ThinkPads, and have owned a couple over the years to
run Linux on. It does feel a bit weird to use Windows sometimes,
considering my years as an open source advocate. But I don\'t think
Apple is any purer, really, they just have less market share. (Although
they did make the right choice in basing their OS on Unix - wish MS
would have done that - although they might have frakked that up.)
What\'s true is that I\'ve given up one corporate behemoth, to fully
embrace 2 others - Google and Microsoft. A scary amount of my data
(mail, contacts, photos, task lists, calendars, phone etc.) resides in
Google\'s data centers. I use their software every day (Android, Chrome,
Picasa, Google Earth). I\'m not quite sure how I feel about that. What
will I miss? I don\'t miss my iPhone at all (especially now that Angry
Birds is on Android). I\'ll
miss Garage Band. I actually think that\'s it, at least, after using a
PC exclusively for the last month, that\'s all I can think of.
Continue Reading
On 22 Sep, 2010 By mpm
With 4 Comments
Salesforce is a very powerful platform onto which one can build a large
variety of interesting kinds of custom applications. I\'ve already
talked on this blog about Salesforce integration with
Drupal,
Plone,
and
others.
Today I\'m going to delve into Salesforce-based CMS systems - systems
built as applications on top of the Force.com platform. First, what are
the advantages and disadvantages of this approach? The disadvantage is
that primarily, Salesforce was not designed as a CMS - it was designed
as a Salesforce automation and customer service tool. It has become a
powerful platform, and there is a lot you can do with it - but it was
never designed with content or visual design in mind. What are the
advantages? If you\'re running database applications (tracking
donations, events, programs, clients) and want deep integration between
your web content and your data, it is an approach that is hard to beat.
Certainly CMS/CRM integrations can go a long way - but ultimately, using
Salesforce as your CMS platform will provide a kind of power that is not
easily replicable using an integration. But with that power, may come
some sacrifices. What are the options for doing CMS-like things on the
Force.com platform?
- The native capability of something called \"Sites\" - which is a
publicly facing version of what\'s called \"VisualForce\" - a markup
language that includes HTML as well as APEX code (Force.com coding
language). This requires a lot of custom code, and becomes unwieldy
when you get to more than a few pages unless you write a mini-CMS
yourself to handle things as a site gets more complex. But there is
a lot there.
- CMSForce -
This is an \"open source\" (in quotes because although you can get
the source code, do what you\'d like with it, and contribute to the
project, because it\'s
written on a proprietary platform, it\'s not really open source.)
I\'ve spent quite a bit of time with this one, and more to come,
I\'m sure - like any open source project, there is a lot that could
be done to make it more usable. But it certainly is something to
evaluate, and contribute to, if you find it useful. It is written by
Force.com Labs, so it\'s got serious Force.com developers behind it.
- OrchestraCMS -
This is a paid app - with discounts for nonprofit organizations.
I\'ve taken just a test drive, but it\'s pretty impressive - it has
it\'s own UI, and is well developed. There were a few hiccups in
getting going, but I suspect it was because I only spent a little
time with it. A partner we work with has done a lot of work with
this application, and we\'re pretty interested in it.
There are a couple of others, and I\'m sure more in development.
Salesforce has a rich enough data model and development platform to
sustain a solid CMS - the big question is - is this the right fit in
terms of integration? Salesforce-based content management is embryonic
in comparison to CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone (or even WordPress
for that matter) but being able to draw data directly in and out of
salesforce very easily, for some organizations running Salesforce, might
well be worth it. And, it\'s also possible to have one\'s main site in a
solid CMS, and instead of using complex integrations, have a mini-site
with the same look and feel based in Salesforce, for the data needs you
have. Again, it depends on what your use cases are, but that\'s another
way to go.
Continue Reading
On 13 Sep, 2010 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I know for many of you this is old news. But since I\'m not on twitter
anymore, and I don\'t read my RSS feeds as often as I should. In July,
Idealware published the Nonprofit Social Media Decision
Guide.
It\'s great - chock full of good information, and some very, very
interesting research. One of the most interesting tidbits of data to me
was the large gap between people who \"thought\" social media of varied
types either helped them reach new audiences, or helped them raise
money, and those that really \"knew\" this was the case. And further,
the largest change was just an increase in website traffic (20%). A
very close second was substantive feedback and discussions (21%), and a
relatively close third was to attract new members or volunteers (16%).
There are some great worksheets to help you figure out what strategies
to use, and how to move forward in this space. And there is, to my mind,
a lot of fodder for thought and conversation among folks thinking about
how to really measure success in social media, as well as those of us
thinking about SocialCRM: how to best capture that data - whether it be
engagement metrics, or actual constituent information.
Continue Reading
On 31 Aug, 2010 By mpm
I\'ve been involved in this Telesummit now since the beginning. It\'s
really fun, and important.
****
The [Women Who Tech Telesummit](http://www.womenwhotech.com%20) was
formed three years ago to celebrate all the innovative women who provide
incredible value to technology and social media. So it\'s time to [come
get your tech on](http://www.bit.ly/womenwhotech)!
Come join hundreds of women on September 15th at the Women Who Tech
Telesummit from 11AM to 6PM Eastern Time. (It's virtual - all you need
is access to a phone line and the web so you can participate from
anywhere in the world).
Women Who Tech's thought provoking virtual panels offer the latest
resources and tools for launching a successful startup, tools and apps
to build your online community, Social Media ROI, and more.
Among the sessions:
- Launching Your Own Startup
- Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation
- Female Ferocity
- ROI of Social Networking
- Speak Up: Pitching and Public Speaking Mojo
- Building the Ultimate User Experience
- Women and Open Source and Identity
And more...
Panelists include a "who's who" of women on the forefront of social
change and technological progress, among them: Elisa Camahort Page,
Co-Founder of BlogHer,
Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder of SlideShare, Beth Kanter, Blogger and CEO of
Zoetica, Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy, Shireen Mitchell of Digital
Sistas, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Deanna Zandt, technologist and author,
Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Tara Hunt, Author, Lynne Johnson of the
Advertising Research Foundation, and Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch.
They are also [hosting after Parties](http://bit.ly/djFEi2) in DC, NYC
and SF so come on out!
Continue Reading
On 27 Jul, 2010 By mpm
With 13 Comments
Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at OpenIssue
headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses,
the pesky notes field (today\'s bane of our existence.) But sometimes,
data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.
In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less
flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender
is one, marital status is another. CiviCRM, to it\'s credit, allows for
an arbitrary number of genders - you can define them however you like.
My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it\'s one of the few out
there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com
contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it
however you\'d like. There was a very interesting and lively
discussion about the gender field in
Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in
Drupal. For a couple of projects we\'ve been working on, we\'ve been
getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and
fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital
status. Here\'s the first draft. We\'d love feedback on this (besides
\"this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.\"). And
we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are
different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories
and make sense of it.
- Sex: Male, Female, FTM, MTF, Intersex
- Gender: Male, Female, Genderqueer
- Sexuality: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Straight
- Marital Status: Straight Marriage, MA, DC, IA, VT Domestic,
CA-SF 2004, CA 2008, Canada
- Relationship Status: Single, Partnered, Divorced, Dating, Poly
(There probably could be some field dependencies of Marital Status
on Relationship Status)
And if you maybe thought that OpenIssue headquarters was in San
Francisco, I\'m sure this list made you sure. (Yes, we are.)
Continue Reading
On 19 Jul, 2010 By mpm
With 3 Comments
As you know, I left
twitter
3 months ago today. I figured it was a good time to do a reflection of
my experiences over this time - what I miss, and what I don\'t miss.
What I don\'t miss
- Distractions: I find myself more productive, for sure. I never was
very disciplined about turning twitter off, so I was constantly
distracted. The lack of distraction has been a really good thing.
- Information overload: how did I keep all that stuff in my head? My
mind feels a lot quieter.
- Need to share: I\'m happy to leave the somewhat narcissistic
impulse that Twitter feeds behind.
What I miss
- Instant answers to questions! And answering people\'s questions.
- Banter: Twitter is way better for banter than any other medium
besides being in person.
- Opportunities for collaboration: it does seem like a lot of that
happens now on Twitter and Facebook (which for me is a
friends/family only zone) so I\'m probably missing out on some of
that.
In general, I\'m still happy I left, and have no plans to return. I
have, on a couple of occasions, used search.twitter.com when a certain
event was happening, so I could see up to the minute what was going on.
I\'m sure I\'ll still do that sometimes.
Continue
Reading
On 19 Jul, 2010 By mpm
I became sold on version
control fairly far back
in my programming life. Back when CVS (C0ncurrent Version System) was
the standard. I learned it, although there were varied gaps in my use of
it, so it never became second nature. As I learned more about newer
version control systems, I tried them out. For a while, I was using SVN
(Subversion), which is similar enough to CVS, but has some nice
improvements. More and more folks are moving to distributed version
control
systems. I
began to understand the great advantages of those systems, and decided
to pick one to standardize on.
Git stood out from the
others in terms of popularity and resources. And, I figured anything
Linus Torvalds wrote was good enough for me. That was last year. This
year. drupal.org is
moving to Git, making my
life oh so much easier. In my daily life, Git has 2 major advantages:
version control and comparison of versions even when I\'m not connected
to the internet (you have your own actual repository, not just a working
copy), and its speed. It takes less time to clone a whole repository of
code than it does to check out a working copy using CVS or SVN! It\'s
really worth checking out. I imagine Git will become the new CVS - the
new standard, until something better comes along to supplant it.
Continue Reading
On 02 Jul, 2010 By mpm
With 5 Comments
I\'ve been working with nonprofit organizations on technology issues
(strategy, implementation) for about 15 years now. I remember the heady
days, when most nonprofits didn\'t even have networks, and some of them
still didn\'t have internet access. In those days, most nonprofit
techies were progressive, and we were sure that what we were doing was
going to change the world for the better. Now, 15 years later, I\'m
pretty sure I\'m not changing the world. You\'re still more likely to
find a progressive nonprofit techie than a conservative one, but there
are plenty of conservative ones now. Conservative causes of all sorts
have discovered the power of the kinds of technologies I\'ve been
helping nonprofits with, and are au courant. Plenty of conservative
organizations use Drupal, Salesforce, online fundraising, Facebook and
Twitter - using those technologies to push for ends that I am far from
interested in seeing come to reality. You can bet that the 2012 and 2016
presidential elections will not be a repeat of the 2008 election with
such a massive differential in use of technology and social networks. I
remember also, from those heady days, the idea that we could help
nonprofits be more effective by encouraging them to be more proactive
around replacing their hardware. Come to find out not so much later,
that the massive production (and disposal) of computer hardware fuels
deadly conflicts, and
causes
serious
environmental
damage.
And then there is the fundamental - what is all this technology really
for, anyway? I was reminded of this when listening to Marketplace
on radio a while ago. It\'s worth remembering that one of the two motive
forces around all of this technology change is that business (and
nonprofits, too) can squeeze more work out of fewer
people.
That would be fine if we had a great safety net where people who were
unemployed could be supported, and perhaps get free education so they
could create art, music, or new and interesting things, but that\'s not
how the system works, is it? The second motive force is simply to empty
your wallet so you can
get shiny.
I still think I\'m doing good. I still think that working with
nonprofits to help them grapple with communications and data is good
work, helps people, and is right
livelihood.
But I\'m pretty sure I\'m not changing the world by doing it. I\'m
reminded, of course, by the famous Audre Lorde quote: \"The master\'s
tools will never dismantle the master\'s house.\" There may be other
ways I\'m helping to
change the world, though, but
you\'ll have to read my other blog for that.
Continue Reading
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On 30 Jun, 2010 By mpm
With 1
Comments
I\'ve been spending a fair bit of time in the last couple of years
learning to code in a new way. It reminds me of a transition I made in
coding from having written stand-alone applications for varied
computers, to writing code for the web. When I was in college, grad
school and early in my academic career (this dates me - from the early
80s to early 90s), I spent a lot of time writing stand-alone
applications, mostly in Pascal and C. The shift from that kind of code,
to writing for the web was a lesson in protocols, constraints, and
different ways of troubleshooting. The transition from writing free-form
web applications, to writing modules for Drupal, or APEX customizations
for Salesforce, is another set of lessons in protocols and constraints.
First, it\'s not enough to understand the syntax and form of the
language (this is especially true for APEX - and beware the required
test coverage!) One has to understand how the surrounding application
works - what APIs or methods one can use, and how. And unlike long
standing languages, there aren\'t lots of detailed cookbooks and that
sort of thing lying around - a lot of it is learning from other folks,
as well as just learning by trial and error. And, in my small forays
into learning frameworks like CakePHP, Ruby On Rails, and others, it
seems like these days, coding for the web is many lessons in constraints
- which is a good thing, I think. Even though it feels like beating my
head against a wall, it\'s nice to know that I won\'t \"dump core\" and
break Salesforce (although I for sure have broken Drupal on occasion!)
Continue
Reading
On 30 Jun, 2010 By mpm
With 4
Comments
I\'ve been getting to know Amazon S3 lately, and there are some great
things about it. I think it is one of the long list of unpredicted
successes that resulted from the near-ubiquitousness of open source
software on the server side. We\'ve been using it for \"offsite\" backup
for drupal sites for a while now. We have a script going which runs by
cron daily to do the backups. There are a number of ways to do this. We
started using S3fs as a way to mount
an S3 bucket in the filesystem, then just copy the files to S3. One of
the scripts we\'ve use is
here. (We also use
rsync.) However, S3fs isn\'t very actively supported or in development.
So we\'re thinking of moving to use S3cmd,
which works really well, and is still under active development.
Continue
Reading
On 21 Jun, 2010 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Again, a little peak at what I\'ve been up to, reading, and thinking
about. You can also see what I\'ve been reading by looking at my shared
items on my google
profile.
Continue
Reading
On 29 Apr, 2010 By mpm
With 2
Comments
So while I\'ve been off twitter, I\'ve had time to research social CRM
(funny, that.) And what I\'ve found is pretty interesting. CRM stands
for \"Customer Relationship Management\" (not to be confused with
\"Cause Related Marketing\"- it came from the for-profit space. In the
nonprofit world we use this acronym to mean \"Constituent Relationship
Management\", generally. From
Wikipedia:
Customer relationship management is a broadly recognized,
widely-implemented strategy for managing and nurturing a company's
interactions with clients and sales prospects. It involves using
technology to organize, automate, and synchronize business
processes---principally sales activities, but also those
for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall
goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain
those the company already has, entice former clients back into the
fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.
Now we could easily translate that into \"managing and nurturing an
organizations\' interactions with donors and constituents.\" and
\"overall goals are to find, attract and win new donors, nurture and
retain those donors the organization already has, entice former donors
back into the fold, and reduce the costs of fundraising.\" (I\'ve never
been convinced that CRM and Donation management are very different
beasts, even though many argue differently.) Anyway, you all know this
stuff, and know the tools we all
use to
do this - Salesforce, CiviCRM, Raiser\'s Edge, etc. And these tools are
great at doing CRM with the standard communications methods - email,
phone, snail mail, in person contact. But what about social media as
another form of communication? That was the question I cam to this issue
with. There are good arguments for why social media will radically
change standard CRM practices. You should definitely read the
report
I mentioned in my earlier post. But in the Social CRM space, there seems
to be a lot more attention paid to what I would call \"metrics\" -
useful for attracting new donors, and understanding the \"emotional
state of conversations\" rather than relationships that are trackable to
\"nurture and retain those donors the organization already has.\" I
don\'t mean to downplay metrics - metrics are hugely important - but I
think mixing up metrics and CRM might make it harder to really do either
well. Example - in Jeremiah Owyang\'s report, of the 18 use cases for
Social CRM he uses, 7 or 8 of them are really use cases for metrics.
Example \"Social Campaign Tracking\" and \"Social Sales Insights.\" In
this series, I\'m going to talk a fair bit about both, although I\'m
going to lean more heavily on the CRM side of things than the Metrics
side, since that\'s more my bailiwick anyway. And I welcome any
comments.
Continue
Reading
On 19 Apr, 2010 By mpm
With 11 Comments
As you might know, almost a year ago, I made a big
change
in my use of social media - I segregated my social graph - work related
stuff moved to LinkedIn and Twitter, and personal friends only on
Facebook. Now, I have taken the next step, and made somewhat of a
momentous decision. I\'m not alone - Jon
Stahl
did this before me, and I know there are others. There are plenty of
people who never entered these waters at all. I have been fairly
conflicted about this for a while. There are things I really like about
Twitter, Identi.ca, Buzz, etc. I like being connected to the nptech
community, and learning what\'s happening. I really like reaching out
and getting questions answered. But, being on those networks has taken
it\'s toll on me. It\'s time spent I need for other things. It\'s an
influx of information in my brain that I really don\'t need. And I\'m
sure people really don\'t need to hear what I think or what I\'m doing
in 140 characters or less. Most of the reason I named this blog \"Zen
and the Art of Nonprofit Technology\" is that I am very interested in
the ethical and spiritual dimensions of technology in general, and
nonprofit technology in particular. And I\'m very interested in the way
my work affects me and my life. Thomas Merton, one of the people I look
to for wisdom once said:
When I speak of the contemplative life ... I am talking about a
special dimension of inner discipline and experience, a certain
integrity and fullness of personal development, which are not
compatible with a purely external, alienated, busy-busy existence.
(By \"alienated\" he meant alienated from ourselves.) For me (and only
for me -[ I\'m not making any generalizations for others) this being
almost always-on connected to the 140 characters-or-less social networks
lead me to an external, alienated, busy-busy existence - the opposite of
the direction I want to go. ]{style="font-style: normal;"} [So ... I
deleted my Four Square account, and I disconnected varied things from my
twitter account. I won\'t be using the 1/2 dozen or social media
accounts that I have. I won\'t be tweeting really anymore. I haven\'t
deleted my twitter account, so if you DM me, I\'ll still get an SMS
telling me. But I won\'t be watching it for the most
part.]{style="font-style: normal;"} [I\'ll miss the banter, and the
exchange. I\'ll miss the easy answers. I won\'t miss the barrage of info
I don\'t need, or the time spent. And, I\'ll still be blogging. Although
it likely won\'t be on too many up-to-the-minute news items (like the
recent Ning
Thing) because
I\'ll be paying less attention to those goings on, and more attention to
other, deeper things.]{style="font-style: normal;"}
Continue
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On 16 Apr, 2010 By mpm
With 18 Comments
Countless nonprofits flocked to Ning to create social networks. Since
I\'m not a social media guru, I\'ve generally kept my opinions about
this to myself. But now that Ning isn\'t free
anymore,
I\'m going to carp some. I think over the course of lo this last few
years, I have blogged or tweeted about this very phenomenon what feels
like countless times. Nonprofits find services for free. They start
depending on them. The free services disappear, for business reasons.
The nonprofit community gets up in arms. Lather, rinse, repeat. There is
nothing wrong with software or services that don\'t cost anything.
Nothing at all. But if you are going to bet the farm, make sure you
know what the risks are. Using free services is fine, but know
why they are free. Are they free because the company behind them
is an ad revenue machine and uber profitable (Google)? Is it free
because it\'s open source (Drupal, Elgg, Word Press)? Is it free
because it is a profitable company that has a clear and well defined
donation program (Salesforce.com)? Or is it free because it is a start
up in search for a business model (Ning)? There is an effort
afloat
(and a
petition)
to get Ning to make nonprofit and educational accounts free. I\'m not
holding my breath. They eliminated 40% of their staff. They are feeling
pinched, and need to stop their burn rate. I don\'t know how charitable
this will make them feel. And even if they do, there is no guarantee
that Ning will even survive. Anyway, if you\'re looking for a great
social network management system that won\'t get pulled out from under
you, try Elgg. It\'s open source, and out
of the box, it does just about everything Ning does, without the need
for the deep setup required to set up Drupal like Ning. It has an active
developer community, and is growing. Or, if you look for another free
service, make sure you understand the risks, and be prepared for
possible disaster if it\'s a startup in search of a business model.
Continue Reading
On 11 Apr, 2010 By mpm
With 2 Comments
This blog series is all Beth
Kanter\'s fault. We (the two
partners of OpenIssue) shared a cab from the
Atlanta airport to the hotel when we arrived for the 2010 Nonprofit
Technology Conference. We were chatting with her
about what kind of work we do, and she asked \"do you do social
CRM?\" She might not have seen the blank stares on our faces since we
were in a dark cab, but I\'m sure she heard the pregnant, confused
silence. As you know, I don\'t blog much about social media. I use it
all the time, but there are much better sources of good information on
that - I\'ve been sticking to writing what I know best. But I have to
admit, this idea of social CRM piqued my interest. More than that. The
truth is, if \@kanter asks me about
something that is related to social media, it must be important, so I\'d
better figure it out. And, of course, I\'m at least a year behind the
curve on this - there has been a lot going on in this space, although,
frankly, in my research so far, I haven\'t found a lot in the technology
sphere that would immediately be helpful to nonprofits (especially small
to medium-sized ones.) There\'s some, and I\'ll talk about that in the
next posts in this series. Beth pointed us in the direction of Jeremiah
Owyang, who I\'d been reading a little
for a while, but had lost track of, since I don\'t follow the social
media space carefully. He has a great post on the use
cases
for Social CRM. It\'s a really solid post, with an information-packed
report attached, as well as some resources. This is a bit high level for
me - my job in life is generally to make use cases real using
technology. I\'m hoping that someone (hint, hint) will write the blog
post or report taking off on this work, and articulate the major
nonprofit use cases for Social CRM. The report does include some
technologies to look at, and I\'ll be delving into those in future
posts. I\'m going to take a little chunk off of this, though, and ask
some leading questions. And then, I\'ll do my best over the course of
the next few weeks to answer how these would get accomplished via the
technological tools that most nonprofits use or can get access to.
- How do you know which of your Facebook fans/Causes members are also
a donors (separate from donations through Causes)?
- How do you know how many of your twitter followers are also donors?
- How do you know what percentage of your donors or constituents are
on social media at all (twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin?)
- Can you follow the trail from tweet (or facebook status) to a
donation? A tweet to a specific action (like a petition?)
If you\'ve got more questions you\'d like to see me address, or you\'ve
got some examples of how your nonprofit has answered these questions,
please feel free to comment on this post.
Continue Reading
On 05 Apr, 2010 By mpm
Tomorrow morning, I\'ll be leaving on a jet plane, to Atlanta, Georgia,
for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference.
This will be my 7th NTC since 2001 (or, more accurately, my 5th. I went
to two Circuit Rider
Roundups.)
I\'m looking forward to it. I\'m speaking in two sessions:
\"Collaborative Problem Solving for
Consultants\"
organized by Robert Weiner, and \"Earth to
Cloud\"
part of the fabulous Tech Track organized by Peter Campbell. I\'m
looking forward to the Unconference on Open Data organized by
NetSquared, and getting to see lots of old colleagues. I\'ll probably be
using FourSquare to check in to
places (I\'m still experimenting with that one.)
Continue Reading
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On 24 Mar, 2010 By mpm
Lobo\'s comment on my post
yesterday
prompted me to complete this blog entry that I\'ve been ruminating on
for a while. I wrote a blog
entry a
while back on the state of Drupal/Salesforce integration. What I didn\'t
say is that a number of shops that have done Drupal/SF integration for
production sites chose not to use the contributed
modules - they built (or are
building) their own custom Salesforce/Drupal integration modules. A few
months ago, in preparation for a couple of projects, and a big push into
this area for our company, I was faced with a strategic choice - go it
alone, and build our own integration module for client projects, or
plunge into using and working with the contributed salesforce modules.
Truth is, it wasn\'t really a choice for me - I\'ve got using and
contributing back to open source projects in my DNA somehow. Although we
certainly could have chosen, like others, to go our own way, we have
committed ourselves to using, and contributing to the modules on
drupal.org. What we lose:
- Complete control over development process and direction
- Not having to fix other people\'s bugs in order for stuff to work
What we gain:
- Not having to reinvent a number of wheels
- An easier upgrade path
- Build on the work of others
- Collaborate and learn
The work done so far on the modules is really solid - and it\'s getting
better. There is a great new
maintainer, and increasing activity and
contributions. There are also a number of other module integrations
(like Ubercart,
Webform, and
FeedAPI) that are moving
forward. Integrations with Views and Actions are also moving being
considered (it\'s instructive to look at the issues
queue).
This is stuff that would be hard to match, and makes building
integrations for different kinds of sites easier. So beyond just my own
personal preference, I think that there is much benefit, both for our
clients, and for us as a company, in hitching our wagon to theses
contributed modules instead of going it alone.
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On 23 Mar, 2010 By mpm
With 3
Comments
As most of you know, I\'m a very long time veteran of web application
building. I\'ve been involved in web application development basically
since they started - when a cgi-bin folder with some perl scripts to
process simple forms was the norm. Until just a few years ago, there was
very little sophistication about the user experience in web applications
- what mattered most was functionality. and to make sure there weren\'t
too many errors when users did unexpected things. I\'ve considered
myself pretty successful at both helping clients navigate the tough
waters of web development projects, as well as accomplishing web
projects for them. Recently, though, I had two projects that ended up,
for wont of a better term, clusterfracks. And I\'ve spent a lot of time
lately trying to figure out what lessons I need to learn from those
projects - what can I take away from them so I don\'t make the same
mistakes again. They were both custom web applications, both projects
that I was a strategic, rather than engineering, partner on. Both
projects were attempting to accomplish pretty sophisticated database
functionality (such as case management). Functionality I knew how to get
done, because I\'d accomplished it before - so I had a very good feeling
for what kind of code it would take to accomplish the task (and, ergo
cost and time.) But what I hadn\'t taken into consideration is how
slick, AJAXy, easy to navigate, and easy to understand user interfaces
people have gotten used to in the last few years. And, frankly, have
come to expect. And how unwilling people are to sacrifice that for raw
functionality. I did a lot of self-examination: where did I go wrong?
What could I have done differently? Was it the client? The developers?
Me? I realized a fairly simple truth. It was all three. In reality, I
should have looked at the budgets of those projects, and looked at the
clients straight in the eye and said, \"double, or triple the budget at
least, or don\'t do the project.\" And walked away if they insisted. The
vendors should have bid triple what they did, and had more user
interface expertise on board. The clients should not have expected to
get slick 2009 functionality for a mid 5-figure budget. The easier a
user interface is to use, the more money and time it took to create.
It\'s that simple. What most nonprofit decision makers don\'t completely
realize is that the interfaces they work in every day when they shop,
or tweet and facebook, or use other online tools, are the product of
millions and millions of dollars of venture capital, or, in some cases,
hundreds of thousands of person hours of work in open source projects
(or some combination of both.) Ground-up custom applications, even when
written in great frameworks like Ruby on Rails or CakePHP, which save
all sorts of development time, just are not going to have the user
experience people are getting more and more used to without very serious
investment of time and expertise. In addition, most small development
shops don\'t have the user interface expertise on hand to accomplish
that task, even with a hefty budget. So the lessons: 1) If you are
embarking on a custom development project (such as a case management,
for example) exhaust every possible option of using and
customizing/modifying existing tools (Salesforce, CiviCRM, SugarCRM,
other open source tools) before you begin to consider custom development
from scratch. 2) If you have a budget of less than \$100,000, go back,
and stay, at step 1. I know this is high, but I\'m serious.
Obviously, simpler projects won\'t need a budget of this sort. But
simpler projects generally don\'t need custom databases. 3) If you\'ve
got the cash to spend, and have exhausted all other options, when
choosing a vendor, make sure the vendor you choose has UE expertise on
hand. Look at other custom database work they\'ve done. Dig in. Make
sure it has the ease of user experience that you are expecting. 4)
Remember the mantra: the easier it is to use, the more expensive it
is to build.
Continue
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On 16 Mar, 2010 By mpm
I\'ve been doing a bit of playing around with Drupal
7 in my copious spare time (not a whole
lot of that!) I\'ve also been keeping track, a bit of how the
development process is going, and what things will look like. One thing
to say - it feels like as big an improvement as Drupal 6 was to Drupal
5. Of course, mostly, Drupal is only as good as it\'s contributed
modules (that\'s a bit more of a stretch, now, because many of the key
contributed modules, like CCK, are now in core Drupal.) So when folks
like us, who build sites that depend on Drupal 7 can start using it is a
bit up in the air, although there is a movement to get many modules
ready for Drupal 7 at it\'s
release.
But some may well not make
it. We\'re guessing that
we\'ll start building production sites in Drupal 7 starting in late
summer, early fall, depending on requirements. A note: the standard
process for deprecation of old Drupal versions is that when a new
version of core comes out, the one two versions back stops being
officially supported. So Drupal 5 will no longer get security updates
and the like. Already, many module developers have stopped supporting
versions of their modules that work on Drupal 5. (The salesforce module
maintainers recently made that decision, as have others.) So certainly a
site running Drupal 5 won\'t stop working, but it will become vulnerable
without security updates to core or modules, and it will get
increasingly difficult to maintain and add features to. So it might be a
good idea to budget the time and money to upgrade as soon as possible if
you are on Drupal 5. If you are on Drupal 6, you\'ve got a while yet,
but Drupal 7 certainly has some great advantages, particularly in user
experience, to look at.
Continue Reading
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On 07 Mar, 2010 By mpm
The reason I post these is because 1) I think they might be helpful
resources, and 2) you can get a feeling for what I\'m working on, or
thinking about (or wishing for.) For instance, the reason there are so
many links about Amazon is that we are now beginning a project that uses
amazon in earnest, with some others possibly on the way.
Continue
Reading
On 17 Feb, 2010 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Although it\'s not often used in nonprofit settings, the Drupal module
(or, more correctly, a large suite of modules) called
\"Ubercart\" is a pretty amazing tool if you
need to create a shopping cart system. We\'ve implemented it for
organizations that want to sell fees for events, sell items, and take
donations. It doesn\'t have many of the strengths of CiviCRM, but it has
a lot of useful features if you want to sell things, or combine selling
things with taking donations, memberships and selling event tickets. A
while back, I\'d heard of the Ubercore initiative - a group of
developers working to bring Ubercart to Drupal 7 (there was quite a
delay between the release of Drupal 6 and the availability of Ubercart
for Drupal 6.) That initiative is now called \"Drupal
Commerce. (other site
here.)\" It is basically meant to be a
rewrite of Ubercart for Drupal 7. It looks to be something to watch.
Gregory Heller of CivicActions wrote an interesting conceptual
piece
on the integration of Drupal Commerce and CiviCRM that\'s worth a read.
(By the way, there is a module done by DharmaTech that integrates
CiviCRM and the current
Ubercart.)
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On 10 Jan, 2010 By mpm
With 1 Comments
You don\'t hear me talking much about social media. One of the reasons
is that there are a number of really good bloggers out there who know
the field far better than I\'ll ever be able to. I would argue that
Beth Kanter is the best social
media blogger there is in the nonprofit space. Her careful writing about
the strengths and weaknesses of social media, the in-depth knowledge of
strategy and approach, her on-the-cutting-edge understanding of trends
and issues and how they relate to the work that nonprofits are doing has
been an incredibly important resource to the sector. If someone asks me
about social media, I just say \"ask Beth!\" And, it\'s her birthday! A
big bunch of us are blogging today to talk about what she\'s
contributed, and also to let people know about the charity she\'s been
working with for a while, now, the Sharing
Foundation. She\'d like folks to
donate
in honor of her birthday. Beth, thanks for the expertise and
intelligence you\'ve lent to the nonprofit sector for quite some time
now! And thanks in advance for all the great upcoming posts in 2010 and
beyond that will help me sound intelligent when I talk about social
media. :-)
Continue Reading
On 31 Dec, 2009 By mpm
With 10 Comments
It\'s taken me a while to write this blog post, mostly because I have
been working hard at various things (like building a business and
building new websites.) This is the last installment in my CRM/CMS
integration
series,
that started almost a year ago (wow!) And I\'m skipping
Joomla/Salesforce Integration because there isn\'t any publicly
available documentation or code about the integration that PICnet did
with Joomla and
Salesforce,
called J!Salesforce. [update: see Ryan\'s comment below.]** So what
is the state of Drupal/Salesforce Integration? It\'s not as mature as
the Plone/Salesforce integration, for sure, but it is coming along
nicely. There are several contributed modules:
- salesforce - main module,
with API, node, and user integration possibilities. This module
provides the basic salesforce API connection (via SOAP), and
includes field mapping, and basic import/export
- sf_webform - Makes
integration with webforms in Drupal fairly easy. Web-to-lead is
quite nice and flexible with this module.
- uc_salesforce - Provides
integration with ubercart orders
- parser-salesforce - Integration
with FeedAPI - pulling data from salesforce into drupal nodes via
FeedAPI (I hope to start maintaining this module)
- sf_import - Import Salesforce
objects into Drupal nodes (will be folded into the main salesforce
module)
All of these modules are in alpha or beta, although I know for a fact
that some of them (or versions of them) are working in production sites.
There are a fair number of bugs that need to be
fixed
before there is a stable release. There are a bunch of outstanding
issues that need a lot of work (like caching, for instance). There are
two other modules that are related, but don\'t use the main salesforce
api module - one for ubercart,
and one for web-to-lead
(called salesforcewebform). That module has a stable release, but only
provides the ability to integrate between Webforms and leads, not other
objects. Right now, the salesforce module allows for integration of
contact, lead and campaign objects only. so that\'s another big area
that could use some work. There is a good
screencast
done by one of the folks (Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed) who has
worked a lot on this project. I\'d say that in a year, we\'ll have a
good solid module release, providing lots of features for integration
between Drupal and Salesforce.com.
Continue Reading
On 07 Dec, 2009 By mpm
One of the great things about the nonprofit technology field is the
collection of nonprofit organizations that provide what is often called
\"Intermediary\" services to other nonprofits: information and resources
that help nonprofit organizations do the work they do in the world, by
helping them make good technology decisions. I\'ve been involved in one
way or another with a number of these intermediary organizations. One of
them, Idealware, is an organization whose goal
is to provide the sector with unbiased, analytically developed reviews
and information about software that nonprofits use in their everyday
work. This is incredibly important stuff, and it\'s darned hard work - I
know, I\'ve been involved in doing a bit of research for Idealware. If
we don\'t have this sort of research in our sector, nonprofits won\'t
have the kind of analytical approach to software available - it is much
needed. As you might imagine, funding this sort of work doesn\'t come
easy - they need our
help to be able to
continue to provide great research.
Continue Reading
On 10 Nov, 2009 By mpm
With 1
Comments
{.alignright
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On 09 Nov, 2009 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I\'m warning you - this is snarky. I was only vaguely following the
brou-ha-ha
over Causes leaving Myspace. Only vaguely because I don\'t really keep
close track of the goings on in the Social Networking space: it\'s not
my passion. I use them a lot, both for work as well as for personal use.
I know they are becoming an increasingly important tool for nonprofits
in communicating with their constituents, and so I do keep them in my
peripheral vision, for sure. Anyway, in reading the varied reactions to
this news, I had to just sigh, and then get annoyed. Sigh because of
what feels to me to be the wasted energy that the nonprofit sector has
spent over many years, using, hawking, and supporting proprietary tools
and companies. Annoyed because it seems the nptech community hasn\'t
figured this out, even being hit over the head with this over, and over,
and over again. Make no mistake about it - Causes is a for profit
company, and they are making what is, I\'d bet, a decision based
entirely on economics. If you\'ve read any of the gloomy
news
from Silicon Valley, this is just the beginning. Social ventures will
not be immune to the blowing winds of economic distress. If we keep
building our nonprofit toolsets on proprietary software and for-profit
web services, even if they are free (for now) we are going to be bit by
this over and over again. The only way we\'re going to get out of this
cycle is to channel this energy and resources into open software
(including \"open\" source apps for proprietary web services), open
standards, and open networks - things no one can take away. I love to
write blog entries about successful open source efforts - like CiviCRM,
or the amazing stuff people are doing in the mobile space. Writing blog
entries about for-profit web vendors that make economic decisions that
hurt nonprofits because we depend on them too much is just not fun.
Continue Reading
On 25 Oct, 2009 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Yesterday, I spent the day in Manhattan, at the UNICEF building, with a
bunch of folks passionate about the technology in mobile phones, and the
ways to use that technology for good. I\'ve been a very long time cell
phone user (had one since 1998), but I haven\'t been involved in
implementing a mobile system for an organization, so I had a lot to
learn. The place to find reports on what happend is on the
wiki.
Also, check out the twitter
stream for the #omc09
hashtag. I was especially interested in the issue of mobile data
collection. (I was so interested, I facilitated a
session.)
And, even more specifically, I\'m interested in how to leverage CiviCRM
and mobile devices for a range of interesting applications. There are a
number of ways to get data from mobile phones into a CRM - and all have
advantages and disadvantages, depending on a lot of things.
- Globally, what you can basically depend on is SMS. Smartphones
haven\'t made it into most of the developing world, nor have 3G
networks. So how do you get SMS data into a database system like
CiviCRM? You need an SMS gateway, and systems such as
RapidSMS to gather data
- Use J2ME to write applications for mobile phones, and send the data
via SMS to a central database.
- A tool such as
EpiCollect, which
is an Android app.
- A slimmed-down, simplified webform to be used on mobile browsers.
One thing that would facilitate this would be a more robust API system
in CiviCRM - access to the data via REST or JSON, which would allow
CiviCRM to talk with some of the tools out there like
Mesh4X. I learned a ton. Thanks to
MobileActive.org and the Open Mobile
Consortium for a fabulous event.
Continue Reading
On 14 Oct, 2009 By mpm
These are the last 10 sites I bookmarked on delicious.com:
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On 08 Oct, 2009 By mpm
With 2
Comments
[caption id=\"attachment_569\" align=\"alignright\" width=\"300\"
caption=\"Security Camera - Photo by Sirius Rust\"]
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Beth threw down the
gauntlet,
and I had to pick it up. I\'m sort of surprised I hadn\'t written about
this before. I think a lot about both of these, not so much for myself,
but for organizations that I work with whose work is fairly sensitive.
First off, some definitions - I think that these two terms do get mixed
up quite often, and understanding what\'s really being meant by them in
a technical context is important. Security, in this context, is the
concept that your personal computing resources and data are safe from
both prying eyes, as well as hijack by crackers and spammers who will
use those resources and data for their nefarious ends. In the case of
your computing resources and personal data inside that box you call your
laptop, or protecting the whole of your home or office network, security
is a matter of using specific tools that prevent unprivileged outsiders
from getting in. Wifi passwords, firewalls, password protected
fileshares, virus protection software, etc. are the tools of the trade
here. Security of your private data that is \"in the cloud\" is largely
at the mercy of the software developers who hold your data. Luckily,
most of them take security quite seriously. (That said, your data \"in
the cloud\" can be compromised by lack of security on your network or
laptop - someone installs a key logger, for instance, and grabs all of
your passwords.) Privacy, in this context, is that you can control,
in a granular sense, what information about you is exposed to whom.
Privacy is, as Beth says, primarily a matter of human behavior, but
there are very interesting intersections with technology and security.
In some instances, services have default privacy settings that are a lot
less private than someone might like - and it takes some know-how to
figure out how to correct those settings. Privacy is, also, a set of
decisions that get made - sometimes in haste, or without much
consideration. Your drunken decision to post that picture of you (or a
co-worker) dancing in your underwear on a table at a party, the cat is
out of the bag, and may never be able to be put back. Security and
privacy in the context of online communities, as Beth points out, are
different beasts. The software that drives online communities (such as
Drupal, phpBB, and others) have options to allow for varied levels of
security. You might need to have a password to see anything. Or you
might just need a password to make comments. You might not be able to
just register for an account - you might need to go through an admin.
These days, most software driving communities have roles you can assign
people to, with specific privileges granted per role. But privacy is
made up of policy (the policy of the organization running the community)
as well as the behavior of the members - their collective agreement that
\"what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.\"
Continue
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On 30 Sep, 2009 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Not so long ago, nonprofit organizations had software tools, that dealt
with specific parts of their organizational process. They had
fundraising tools, client management tools, volunteer management tools,
HR tools, accounting tools, etc. And the data in these varied tools were
siloed - there was no way for one tool to talk to another without:
- painstaking manual entry
- painstaking export/import processes
- tools written by the same vendor designed to talk to each other
(which meant that they were generally exceedingly expensive)
Although many nonprofit organizations still find themselves in this
situation, there are increasing numbers of tools available to help them
out of it. And as more and more organizational processes become
web-based (whether \"in the cloud\" or self-hosted), and as more and
more nonprofit-focused software includes open APIs (with some
unfortunate exceptions,) nonprofit data is looking less and less siloed,
and more and more like an ecosystem - many different software parts
talking to others. NTEN is trying to get a bit of a
handle on this with the Data Ecosystem
Survey.
I\'m very much looking forward to the result - looking to see where this
new set of tools that can talk freely to each other is working ... and
where it isn\'t - where there is still work to be done. Please take
time to fill it out!
Continue Reading
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On 12 Sep, 2009 By mpm
With 3
Comments
Beth Kanter tweeted
about an article by Gale
Berkowitz
relating to evaluation, which I found really fascinating - it is a must
read. In this article, Gale points to an interesting shift within her
organization (the Packard Foundation):
\"Over the past four years we have been shifting from evaluation for
proof or accountability ("Did the program work?") to evaluation for
program improvement ("What did we learn that can help us make the
program better?").\"
In some ways, it\'s a subtle shift - but as she says, the latter leads
to \"real time\" evaluation - something that happens as one moves
through projects, not just at the end. Nonprofit organizations often
have their feet to the fire to evaluate their programs and projects,
because funders and contributors often demand proof that their programs
work. And there has been an overall movement in the sector in the
direction of increased evaluation and learning. The community I\'m a
part of, the group of for-profit (\"for-little-profit\" as is often said
- we\'re small and lean) companies that serve the technical needs of
nonprofits, evaluation is generally not part of the process of the work
we do. But it should be. I\'ve talked about this
before. A lot. In a variety
of different contexts. To me, evaluation, both internal (\"how could we
have done this process better?\" \"\"How could we have worked together
as a team better?\") as well as externally with the client (\"How did we
do?\" \"What could we have done better?\" \"How could we have
communicated better?\") is a critical part of the work we do. It\'s a
tough balance. We\'re geeks, often busy deep in the command-line, SQL
and code. We\'re often extremely busy, juggling lots of projects and
demands at once. The bottom line, of course, for us, is always a measure
of how well we are doing, but I don\'t think that\'s enough. As our
sector as a whole moves further and further along the path of a
commitment to evaluation and learning, I think it behooves us to follow.
So, you ask, what are good strategies to start with? I can give you what
we try to do. Some of it is well worked out, and some is nascent. All of
these we aim to do, but it\'s easy to miss the target. Evaluation is a
learning process, like anything else, and the most important thing is an
intention and commitment to being a learning organization. The rest will
eventually follow over time.
- Spend time at the beginning of each project outlining evaluation
steps and process for the project.
- Spend time at the end of every project asking internally \"what
worked, and what didn\'t work?\"
- Ask clients at the end of the project a set of questions about the
process and the result.
- If its an ongoing engagement, ask periodically (we aim for every 6
months or so) for an evaluation meeting or call with the client.
- Write a report at the end of each project with lessons learned.
- When a proposal isn\'t accepted, ask a few questions, both
internally and externally, and write up a short report with lessons
learned.
- Ask internally how earlier lessons learned, are being applied to
current projects.
- Always be open to learning how to make things better.
Continue
Reading
On 11 Sep, 2009 By mpm
Some great tech and nonprofit tech stuff I\'ve come across lately:
Continue Reading
On 19 Aug, 2009 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'ve been a fan of user stories for several years now. User stories are
a way to describe a set of functionalities of an application in a way
that is focused on results - it\'s easy to connect to mission. An
example from an events management application:
The organization should be able to create several different kinds of
events, and determine for each kind of event which detailed
information will be taken. Those events can be displayed in a list or
calendar format. Users can register for events, and pay using a credit
card.
There are many ways to describe this story - it certainly can be a lot
more detailed, but what\'s clear is the result of this functionality.
And, of course, user stories are great for agile development process.
Developers would determine how much this function would cost (based on
our knowledge of the tools we use, and the time it takes using those
tools to generate this sort of functionality), and clients would know
exactly what they are getting from a functionality standpoint. When this
functionality is complete, everyone is happy. The developers get
reasonable compensation for a job well done, and the clients get the
mission-based functionality they asked for. And it would avoid a
situation which I have become recently far too familiar with - vendors
who underbid projects, and then feel the need to resort not to the
intent of the contract, but the letter. Everyone knows it is utterly
impossible to specify every detail in the letter of a contract -
sometimes letter of the contract, unfortunately, details things like
fields and queries, not functionality. The letter of a contract will be,
almost by definition unless based on functionality, an inadequate
representation of the final result needed. In this case, no one really
wins. The clients either don\'t get the functionality they expected, or
they pay extra for it, and they leave the project with a bad taste in
their mouth about the vendors, which will only come around to hurt the
vendors later.
Continue Reading
On 01 Aug, 2009 By mpm
With 11 Comments
The python community has started a
conversation
about diversity, with the ultimate goal of creating basically a
welcoming statement. It comes out of Kirrily Robert\'s keynote at
OSCON
about women and open source. There is a cool site from the Ruby
community called Railsbridge, and one of
their guidelines is to \"Reach out to individuals and groups who are
underrepresented in the community.\" There has been, of course, a lot
said about the fact that although women make up 20% of the tech field,
they only are approximately 1.5% of open source communities. There have
been long standing groups that have tried to address this, and new
efforts as well. Some open source communities are more diverse than
others. In her keynote, Kirrily talks about two open source projects,
Archive of Our Own and
Dreamwidth that have a majority of women
involved, which is rather unusual. A short twitter conversation I had
with a colleague brought up the issue of whether or not this is just an
exercise - will this actually lead to any lasting change? That\'s a good
question. Kirrily has a set of really good guidelines for open source
communities:
- Recruit diversity
- Say it, mean it
- Tools (Tools are easy)
- Transparency
- Don\'t Stare
- Value all contributions
- Call people on their crap
- Pay Attention
As a long time open source user and advocate, even though I am someone
who rarely finds people like me in open source projects (i.e other women
of color), I\'ve always seen the open source movement a potential avenue
for the greater involvement of people other than white, straight, young
men, because theoretically (this is the important part) one\'s
involvement in a community is pure meritocracy. But so many open source
communities have so far to go when it comes to being welcoming. I\'m
reminded of sitting in Drupalcon in DC and hearing Dries talk about the
\"beard length\" of the developers. And of course there was the huge
brou-ha-ha around a
presentation
at a recent Ruby conference. And, of course, there are other factors as
well. There are far too few places like The Community Software
Lab of Lowell, MA, who\'s mission is:
We write, administer and maintain open source software to serve the
underserved. We use and improve the skills of people with underused
skills We work to make hacker sub culture values (transparency,
meritocracy and generosity) the values of the entire culture and bring
about the post scarcity society. We work toward our mission by trying
to achieve our short term goals transparently and generously while
accumulating only necessary wealth.
So what will it take? Will this effort in the python community pan out?
I think it\'s a great start. I think the first step is definitely a
focus on community environment. Is it friendly? Is it welcoming? Is it
easy for new developers to start, and get deeper in? Are there good
mentoring models? All of that makes a huge difference. And having a
statement doesn\'t at all guarantee anything, but it provides something
people can point to and say \"this is our goal.\" Better than nothing,
and a lot better than many open source communities are doing.
Continue Reading
On 30 Jul, 2009 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Here at OpenIssue, we think a lot about the web.
I mean, a LOT. And we\'ve been thinking a lot about web hosting, and the
varied flavors it comes in. We\'re working to figure out what makes
sense for us to use and implement, and what makes sense for us to
recommend to our clients. A while ago, we decided, like many folks,
virtual private
servers were going
to be the preferred hosting set up. Not that it\'s right for all
organizations - but for many who invest significant dollars into
implementation of a website or CiviCRM, the advantages of a VPS will
likely outweigh the higher monthly cost. We started using
Slicehost, which was incredibly easy to set up
and use, and was acquired by Rackspace, which is
considered the premium dedicated server hosting company. I then soon
discovered a service called Cloudkick, which
allowed us to monitor all of our slices and our clients slices in one
dashboard. That was very cool. It turns out that in the process of
creating Cloudkick, the folks there came up with
libcloud - a library that service providers could
use to give developers access to the services needed by the servers -
list, restart, create, destroy, etc. There are now a number of cloud
hosting service providers, such as Rackspace cloud servers (used to be
Mosso), Slicehost, and Amazon, that are beginning to support libcloud.
Libcloud has become it\'s own open source project, and is under active
development. Hopefully, this will provide a plethora of options for
folks in terms of being able to monitor and manage the varied cloud
servers they\'ve got going. It certainly has already made our lives a
lot easier.
Continue Reading
On 03 Jul, 2009 By mpm
Here\'s a broad ranging list of interesting tidbits I\'ve found
recently.
Continue Reading
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On 02 Jul, 2009 By mpm
With 7
Comments
Any consulting shop that does significant amounts of implementation and
development (as we do) needs a project management and ticketing tool.
Basecamp seems to be a standard that many
people have reached for. We were using
Intervals for a while, which is really a
fabulous tool if you do a lot of hourly consulting. We also have been
using Google spreadsheets for some elements of project management. All
tools have their strengths and weaknesses. And, in addition, the best
tool does nothing without good human project management skills using it.
As a shop that practices Agile development (we use an adaptation of
scrum methodology that seems to work for a shop that does multiple
projects with small teams,) finding a good tool that facilitates instead
of hobbles Agile was critical for us. We found, and have chosen to use
Redmine for our project management/ticketing
system. You can think of it as a multi-project version of
Trac, which is a fabulous ticketing/wiki
system that we were initially going to go with. Redmine has the elements
of Trac that we liked, with the added ability to track multiple
projects. Like Basecamp, Redmine has document storage and messaging
systems. It doesn\'t have milestones per se, but it does allow you to
see tasks in calendar and Gantt views, which is very helpful. Unlike
Basecamp, you can add custom fields to tickets, users and other
features. Having spent many hours in Basecamp, I actually like Redmine
much better. It does even do time tracking, which we won\'t use, but is
nice to know is there. And the wiki is nice. Basecamp\'s Writeboards
seem so much more like an add on than integrated. It\'s a Ruby on Rails
application, and that was actually kind of fun to finally get to install
and play with RoR a tiny bit. And it\'s great that it\'s free and open
source. Although that wasn\'t an absolute requirement for us, it is most
definitely a plus, given so much of our work is implementing open source
web tools. And it\'s nice to save a few bucks per month.
Continue
Reading
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On 07 Jun, 2009 By mpm
With 8
Comments
I did a kind of radical experiment a couple of weeks ago: I de-friended
almost all of my nptech and client Facebook friends (cutting my friend
count by more than 60%). I had a few reasons for this, and over the past
couple of weeks that I\'ve been living this experiment, it\'s made me
quite happy. Of course, everyone is still on Twitter, and Linked in,
etc., so I still feel connected. Even though I tend not to blog anywhere
near as much as most of my colleagues about social networks (because
it\'s really not my passion,) I\'ve been a fairly early adopter, in the
broad sense (of course, if I compare myself to Beth
Kanter,
I\'m a laggard.) I have an account on all of the major social networks
(and some of the obscure ones, too,) listen often, and update fairly
regularly. A while ago, I realized that I would keep hearing the same
nonprofit technology related stuff, over and over again, and I realized
I was contributing to that by using Ping.fm to send the same status
notices everywhere, or connecting my twitter account to my facebook and
linked in accounts, etc. (actually, I think it might even be possible to
create an infinite loop doing that stuff.) I stopped doing that a while
back. Now of course it used to be that all of my Facebook \"friends\"
were other nptech early adopters. But around two years ago, a steady
stream of my real friends started to come on, and then about 40% of my
Facebook friends were non-nptech related. I noticed two important
things: first, a status notice that a real friend was having a hard time
would get buried in the cacophany of new reports, new campaigns, new
blog posts, etc. Not a good thing. Also, I noticed that I censored
myself on Facebook - I wouldn\'t say things to friends, or play games,
or take silly quizzes because I felt the need to be \"professional.\" So
all of that lead me to make Facebook a \"work-free\" space. I left
work-related groups, disconnected this blog from Facebook, etc. And
doing that led me to think a little bit about how we nonprofit
technology leaders use these social networks, and how we work with our
clients to use these services. I do think that still, the majority of
nonprofit organizations aren\'t all that connected to social networks.
I\'m not entirely utterly convinced yet that all of them should. And I
do wonder about the echo effect - if you are an early adopter, and you
are on multiple networks, you are going to hear the same stuff over and
over. Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Should we be suggesting that
organizations tailor much more specifically their messages, rather than
using the services that allow them (and us) to send the same updates
everywhere at once? The technology behind social network strategy and
implementation is way more my bad than communications strategy, but this
experiment has opened my eyes to some of the things we may be doing
wrong. And, of course, there is an entirely interesting conversation to
be had about the issues of work and personal life, but I\'ll save that
for my other blog.
Continue
Reading
On 03 Jun, 2009 By mpm
I spent a big chunk of my day dealing with a project that is, in no
uncertain terms, a trainwreck. The client has sunk a ton of money into a
product which is in, its current (first phase supposedly finished)
state, unusable (client and vendor shall remain unnamed.) My role in the
project has been strategic and as a liason, not technical, which to some
extent gives me a bit of a distanced view. Web development trainwrecks
are, sadly, far from isolated cases - they happen all the time, even
when all of the parties have good intentions. And as someone who is
building a business around doing this sort of work, it is of keen
interest to me as to why some projects end up in the state that this
project is in, and I want to make sure to avoid these kinds of
situations. So how do we avoid trainwrecks? Some trainwrecks we can see
coming miles away, but yet we are in complete denial about them. Some
trainwrecks are like sudden derailments - it\'s not at all clear where
it comes from. But I think all trainwreck projects have the seed of the
wreck somewhere in the history of the project. The hallmarks of this
particular trainwreck were so clear, that in retrospect, they scream out
at me:
- Lack of transparency about development process
- Lack of transparency about cost implications of increased scope
- Waterfall development process (well, the vendor said they
practiced Agile, but in practice, it\'s been waterfall)
As a practitioner of the Agile development
process (we
use a somewhat modified form of
Scrum, in
particular,) I\'m beginning to really see the value of this kind of
process. It makes visible all sorts of things that are often hidden. It
seems like the Agile methodology helps in a number of ways:
- Once educated, clients have a window into the development process.
They know what small chunks of development are going to happen in a
given time interval, and they know what they will get at the end of
that time interval
- Things are developed in priority order
- Clients can critique things early
- New functionality becomes a part of the \"product backlog\" and it
is easier to have clarity about what is and is not within scope
Of course, it is theoretically possible to be completely transparent in
a traditional waterfall methodology, and completely opaque using Agile,
but I do think that the Agile methodology makes it way more difficult to
be opaque. But it also takes some work and education of clients
unfamiliar with the methodology (as well as making mistakes along the
way on our part as developers.) And I\'ve been able to watch this
process work well, not only with our own projects, but also with a
project I was a strategic lead on. I was pretty skeptical a year or so
ago, but now I\'m sold. And since transparency has always been something
of real importance to me, a development process that encourages
transparency is a good thing.
Continue Reading
On 02 Jun, 2009 By mpm
As you can tell, I haven\'t had much time to blog lately. Here are some
great links I\'ve come across that I thought were worth sharing:
Continue Reading
On 03 May, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I don\'t have kids, but I do know how young kids ask questions. They are
innocent, and free of assumptions, and keep asking \"why?\" In the end,
the poor adults either get tired of the questions, or realize that there
are assumptions they\'ve been making for all this time that might
actually be worth questioning. Human processes mold around software. We
see this all the time. A CRM gives you these 5 canned reports, and you
get used to making do with what\'s there. A legacy client database
requires a certain order of data entry, and your intake forms have been
produced to copy that order. Your email software has particular
limitations, and you find behavioral workarounds. What\'s also true in
the realm of customized software, is that software is molded around
people. You put in your RFP that a package spit out data in X,Y and Z
ways because your ED is used to data in that form (maybe because a
package they had at their previous organization had those canned
reports.) You have a requirement that data be entered into the system in
one particular way, probably because that\'s the way you\'ve always done
it. Sometimes, you feel the need to replicate a process that the person
3 administrative assistants ago put in place that was molded around
their particular limitations, just because that\'s what you know. When
you are undergoing the process of creating or implementing a new system
of any sort, whether it be a CMS for a website, a CRM, some internal
system, it is a really good exercise to be like a 3 year-old, and keep
asking \"why?\" Why do we need this feature? Why will this report be
important? Why should the software work this way? Once you peel the
layers down to the bottom, you\'ll either have \"we don\'t know\" or
\"because we believe it will help us meet our mission in this specific
way.\" Then you know what you should take, and what you can leave
behind.
Continue Reading
On 03 May, 2009 By mpm
I got to spend one day at CiviCRM developer
camp
this week. Unfortunately, it came after 4 long days of conferencing,
after many exhausting days of work, so I wasn\'t at my peak. But I
learned a lot, and thought I\'d share some of what I took away from that
day. First, the core team shared some of the new stuff coming out in
version 2.3, and it is awe-some. One of the major reasons CiviCRM gets
dinged as a CRM/DMS is that it doesn\'t have reports. Well, that problem
is about to go away with the release of CiviReport in 2.3. There will be
a number of canned reports, and some really nice ways to create reports.
Plus charts! Yay! There were some pie charts, and regular bar charts. I
don\'t have the new svn trunk of CiviCRM installed, otherwise, I\'d show
some screenshots, but it looked really nice. (I\'ll be installing
CiviCRM from svn in the next week, and I\'ll probably blog more as 2.3
develops.) There are some really nice usability improvements coming up
in 2.3 as well - to make the basic contact pages much easier to
navigate. And there is a new menu system, which will make things a lot
easier. And, for Drupal users, some sweet Views 2 and CCK integration.
CiviEvent is getting waiting lists, registration approval, and
user-modifiable registrations, and some other improvements. The Alpha of
2.3 should be out by July. I also learned about CiviCase, which is
actually present in 2.2. I saw the example of it used for the Physician
Health Program in Canada. It\'s quite good, and there are some useful
docs
to see it at work on the CiviCRM wiki. I\'d love to find an
organization, such as a small human services organization, in need of
case management software, that could use CiviCase - it would be a great,
and relatively inexpensive alternative to current offerings out there.
And more organizations using CiviCRM for case management would help
CiviCase get even better. I also dug into some of the internals and code
of CiviCRM, and feel better equipped to start contributing more than
ideas and feedback to the project.
Continue Reading
On 22 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 2 Comments
NTC is coming, and I don\'t have to pack! That\'s
a good thing. But I will be BARTing my way into SF everyday, from
Saturday for Penguin Day, Sunday through
Tuesday for NTC, and Wed and Thursday for CiviCRM Developer
Camp.
I\'m very much looking forward to all of it, even though it seems like
it\'s going to be an exhausting 6 days. I\'d love to meet new folks and
see as many old friends as possible, so I figured I\'d share where I\'ll
be during these days, and perhaps we can meet up. You can email me,
\@pearbear on twitter, or give me a text
message or call ... if you know my cell, that is. :-)
Continue Reading
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On 20 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 2
Comments
In general, the activities of the big tech corporations have somewhat
limited and indirect effect on nonprofit technology. For large
enterprises, the activities of the big players is a much more immediate
and important set of issues to deal with. For us, it\'s generally much
more removed. However, today\'s news that Oracle is going to buy Sun
Microsystems
has some very important implications. Why? It has to do with the fact
that many, many nonprofit websites and web applications are built using
MySQL, the most popular open source database management system. Sun
bought MySQL AB (the company behind MySQL) last year for \$1 Billion
dollars, and therefore, MySQL AB now becomes a part of Oracle, it\'s
primary competition. There is some
suspicion
that there may be anti-trust challenges because of this, but if it goes
through, it raises some huge questions about what happens to MySQL
because of this. Of course, since MySQL is open source, there is no
danger of MySQL going away, someone can always fork it. And, ultimately
there is a great open source database alternative called PostgreSQL, but
support for it is not universal. However, the future of ongoing support
and development for MySQL is certainly in question. Most nonprofits
don\'t get any support from MySQL AB directly, but larger organizations
that might have been getting some support might see changes down the
road. It\'s something that those of us who depend on MySQL for our web
development projects will be watching quite closely.
Continue
Reading
On 15 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 3 Comments
On the right is my blogroll, that needs updating, but I thought I\'d do
some shout outs to blogs I\'ve lately been loving and really learning a
lot from, who are probably not on that list (yet).
- Wireframes Magazine - I\'ve been
doing Information Architecture for a very long time, now, but it\'s
great to learn new tricks and tools.
- Flowing Data - OK, I\'ll fess up, I\'m a
data geek. And I love data visualizations, and ways to make data
easily accessible. I am so envious of people with graphics skills
who can do that well. There are a whole lot of really cool things
here.
- RoughType by Nicholas Carr -
really smart dude, really interesting stuff.
- ONE/Blog - ONE/Northwest never ceases to
amaze me
- The Open Road - Matt Asay
has some interesting insights from the Open Source biz world
Continue Reading
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On 15 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 2
Comments
Third to last in my series on CMS and CRM integration (next up, Joomla
and Salesforce, followed by Drupal and Salesforce) is using web forms. I
wanted to talk about this because it is arguably the most common form of
\"integration\" between CRM and CMS that\'s out there (besides the
manual kind). You\'ve got a CMS, and you\'ve got a CRM somewhere else,
and you need some way for data from users to make it to your CRM. Of
course, it\'s not really integration - there is no sharing of data
between the CMS and the CRM in any useful way. But webforms can really
help you get things done. Here are some examples of things I\'ve done
and seen done:
- A custom donation page that\'s sitting on a service like Network
for Good that is linked
from the website, or framed within it
- The HTML for a \"Web to Lead\" form from Salesforce.com pasted into
a CMS page
- The HTML for a event registration form or donation form that goes to
a hosted service
In the first option, the form isn\'t hosted at all on your site. In this
option you have the least control over look and feel - the vendor
controls the look and the behavior. An example of this I\'ve run into is
when an organization uses Blackbaud\'s Raiser\'s Edge, and wants to have
online donations via NetSolutions, their older (and much cheaper)
\"integration\" tool. They provide a page, which hooks directly into the
users RE installation. But you can\'t customize the page in any useful
way, so if you\'ve just designed a brand-spanking new site, this page is
gonna look like crap. (Luckily, at least Network For Good\'s donation
pages look snappy and nice, but are going to look a lot different than
your website.) The other options are much better for look and feel - you
can take the HTML, and, in most instances, style it to look like your
site. You can even sometimes include Javascript for validation or other
functionality. But this is still strictly one-way communication - the
form data goes directly to the service (and does not pass go.) You
don\'t get any of it. This is a great start to integration, if your
budget doesn\'t allow for true, deep, two-way integration between CRM
and CMS. And it\'s a great way to get your feet wet in thinking about
what you might want to do with CRM and CMS. And, in some instances,
depending on both CRM and CMS, it might be your only option.
Continue
Reading
On 09 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I love Penguin Day. One of my favorite days of
the year. Always comes right around NTC. This
year, it\'s before NTC, on Saturday, April 25. It\'s a day dedicated to
conversation and community around nonprofits and open source software.
There\'s some great stuff on the
Agenda,
like:
- Introduction to Free and Open Source Software
- Fundraising with all free software
- Free And Open Source Online Advocacy: Tools And Best Practices
- Making sense of Free and Open Source Content Management Systems
- Introduction to Blogging with Wordpress
- Intro and Advanced sessions on Joomla! and Drupal
- CiviCRM vs Salesforce.com: What Are the Differences?
- Mobile Volunteering: The ExtraOrdinaries Project
- Creative Commons And Open Content
- And many more...
You can register at Penguinday.org. Thanks to
the generosity of Google, we\'re delighted to grant fee waivers to
anyone who needs one! I look forward to seeing folks there.
Continue Reading
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On 03 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 8
Comments
Now that the Idealware CMS
report is out, I get to
have my say about it. Here\'s the first post, there might be more to
come. The thing that is prompting this post is the little
storm about the
security metric that we used to try and get a handle on the security of
the 4 different systems we reviewed. More on that in a bit. You might
think that comparing four different open source packages that, in
essence, do pretty the same thing (in a broad sense) would be a cakc
walk. In fact, nothing could be farther from the truth. The developers
of each project have completely different sets of assumptions about what
the right way to do things is, and completely different philosophies and
ethos when it comes to building interfaces and functionality. Making
apples-to-apples comparisons of these systems was one of the most
difficult analytical tasks I\'ve taken on in a while (and, actually much
of the heavy lifting of designing the analysis was done by Laura Quinn),
and until you attempt such a thing, please be somewhat tempered in your
complaints about it. Now the security issue. One of the 12 different
aspects we are comparing is \"Scalability and security\". The report
isn\'t about security, it\'s a very, very broad comparison of the
systems, with security as a very small component. That\'s just the
context. Two (yes, just two) questions out of many relate to security.
First, a simple metric relating to security reports, and second, what
processes are in place in the communities to deal with security. This
wasn\'t designed to be an in-dept, complex analysis of security. If it
had been, we would have done a lot more work on how to measure security.
On the Four Kitchens
blog, they say,
\"While both reports above seem to identify Drupal (and Joomla! and
WordPress, to be fair) as having notably bad [emphasis mine]
security, they\'re also both based on one superficial metric:
self-reported vulnerabilities.\" Now I can\'t speak about the IBM
report (I
haven\'t even read it yet), but our report says no such thing.
Drupal gets a \"Solid\" on Scalability and security. Solid, which is
only one step below Excellent. And you know why it got a \"Solid\"?
Because, indeed, it does have more reported security vulnerabilities
than Plone (as do Joomla and WordPress.) David Geilhufe, who also takes
issue
with the security metric, has some good points. Yes, sheer numbers of
vulnerabilities are not anywhere near the best metric of whether or not
a system is secure or not. As a quick comparative look between a small
number of open source systems, it\'s hard to argue that it contributes
no information. Four Kitchens seems to suggest that part of the reason
for more vulnerabilities in Drupal compared to Plone is that it\'s more
popular. But, if you\'ve been an observer to the Linux/Windows FUD wars,
you\'ll remember that Microsoft has that exact same argument about why
there are more security vulnerabilities in Windows as compared to Linux.
And the Linux folks say, in response, \"It\'s not popularity, it\'s
design.\" I\'m sure that Four Kitchens, and most open source software
developers agree with that perspective. In reviewing Plone, and talking
with people who develop for Plone, I was convinced that the reason that
Plone had fewer reported vulnerabilities was not just because it was
less popular - it\'s because it (and Python and Zope) was more secure by
design. I am completely happy with Drupal\'s security (otherwise, it
wouldn\'t have gotten a \"Solid.\") I think the Drupal community takes
security extremely seriously, and if they didn\'t, I wouldn\'t have
chosen it as a platform for development. I also think that the Joomla
and WordPress communities take security seriously. In our estimation,
they were all really good. But Plone was just that much better.
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On 02 Apr, 2009 By mpm
Blackbaud announced, just in time for AFP, their new product, called
BlackbaudNow, in partnership with PayPal. It is
a curious service. It is an extremely low-end, low-cost online
website/online donation package from a vendor that spends most of its
time on the very high-end of the scale. It is simple. An organization
can sign up for a free account, get a 5 page website, including a
donation page, about page, etc. Editing a page is basically point and
click - it highlights the part of the page you can edit it, and you edit
it with a WYSIWYG editor. It\'s decently AJAXy, but no, it\'s not shiny
- at least not my definition of shiny. You have a small number of
templates to choose from (which, frankly, aren\'t so great looking - I
think they dedicated more graphic design time to their branding and
pages than they did to the templates.) It\'s free, although Blackbaud
takes a percentage off the top. People can donate to your organization
via Paypal only, and you can track donations in their very simple
interface. You can export your donation history into a CSV file, and you
can make your reports into PDFs. There are no APIs. This was developed
by the team that Blackbaud acquired when they acquired eTapestry. And,
it\'s designed to make migration to eTapestry easy - therein, I suspect,
is the key. I\'m betting this is a loss-leader - a product designed to
get people in the door, and when they are chomping at the bit for more
(which they will be in about 2 days after they set up their site,) there
is a more costly (and profitable) product waiting right around the bend
for them. Small nonprofits - especially those with few or no staff, are
always in a particularly challenging place when it comes to finding the
best solution for a web presence and online donations. But I don\'t
think that a tool like this is going to serve very many nonprofits for
very long, given its limitations. Of course, people like me, who make
our living building websites, and helping facilitate the web presences
of organizations, look askance at tools like this, so take what I say
with a grain of salt. But I have to admit that this seems to me a bit
too much like a gateway drug - get them hooked on free, then move them
slowly but surely to much more expensive systems. And in the end, won\'t
a modest investment (say, \$2K or so) on the part of an organization in
getting a better web presence going to serve them better in the long
run? Heck, I think a Wordpress.com site attached to a Network for Good
donation page will serve them better. At least they\'ll have a lot more
well-designed templates to choose from, and a real CMS engine. Honestly,
I\'m underwhelmed by this service, and, in addition, I have a bone to
pick with Blackbaud. The online
help for
BlackbaudNow is powered by the open source software
MediaWiki. It is well hidden, but a somewhat
savvy MediaWiki user will notice the telltale signs (the URLs are one
giveaway.) Of course, proprietary software makers use open source
software all the time, that\'s not the problem. The problem I have is
that they hid it. Why hide the fact that they are using an open source
tool to build their online documentation? Not even a small mention on
the About page. Did they do any modification to the code to make it work
like they wanted to? Did they contribute anything back to the MediaWiki
community? At the very least, they could have given credit where credit
is due.
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On 01 Apr, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I have some exciting news. For the last few months, I have been working
on a new collaboration called OpenIssue, which
is a growing, diverse, self-reflective and constantly-learning team. We
are focused on delivering quality web technology solutions to nonprofit
organizations and social enterprises. As you know, I have built a
long-time expertise in open source software and web applications,
particularly Content Management Systems (CMS) and online database
systems, including CRM. Thomas Groden, my new business partner, has
expertise in Software-as-a-Service Constituent Relationship Management
Systems (CRM), as well as much more broad expertise in technology
infrastructure. All technology implementors have to choose their tools
(unless they run a very large shop) and we have decided to focus on
implementation of both Salesforce.com and CiviCRM as CRMs, and Drupal as
a CMS. We are keenly interested in building on our expertise to
integrate these open platforms in really rich ways, to allow
organizations to create great online applications. I\'m excited to be a
part of a team - I\'ve been a soloist for a while, and it\'s nice to
build collaborations, and work together with people with shared ideals
on larger projects than I\'d be able to take on alone. And I\'m really
excited by the set of technologies we\'re working on, and the kinds of
applications we\'ll be building with these technologies. And you can
follow us on twitter.
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On 16 Mar, 2009 By mpm
With 4
Comments
Today, I was reading up on what the Plone community has done with
integrating their CMS with Salesforce.com. I am thinking that this might
be a good model for how we can do it with Drupal, but that\'s a subject
for another post.
{.alignnone
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group) There\'s a good
overview of
the integration on the developerforce
wiki. There are 5
components to the integration:
- a couple of toolkits that provide the basic back-and-forth between
Plone and Salesforce.com (they talk to Python and Zope)
- an auth plug-in that allows for Salesforce.com objects to be Plone
users, credential checking, caching of user data, and syncing of
data from Salesforce.com and Plone
- an integration of PloneFormGen with Salesforce.com for web-to-lead
forms, etc.
- an event management product that connects with Salesforce.com
- A PayPal integration product
This is a pretty robust set of channels for data to move back and forth
from Salesforce.com to Plone. There is a Plone/Salesforce.com
Integration group, that keeps
working on this, and a number of organization, including
ONE/Northwest, have invested huge amounts of
time and resources to working on this integration. This is, for sure,
one of the most robust open source CMS to CRM integrations out there,
and one that seems to be getting pretty close to providing very powerful
integration \"out-of-the-box\" - instead of having to piece things
together and do customized code, which is more common than not. I
haven\'t gotten my hands on this to try (not being a Plone person, I
doubt I will), but folks might want to talk in comments about how
straightforward the integration is, given differences in data for
different instances of Salesforce.com. I don\'t know how much code
tweaking is required to really get this going. But in any event, it\'s
great that it exists, and it\'s a great benchmark for CMS/CRM
integration.
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On 11 Mar, 2009 By mpm
With 7 Comments
This morning, I looked at both Salesforce.com, with the second nonprofit
template, and CiviCRM with a small group of colleagues. All of us
implement, or have used, one or both of the systems. But each of us has
expertise in only one of the systems.(I\'m one of the CiviCRM folks).
It\'s pretty interesting to compare them. The nonprofit template has
certainly helped to make it easier for nonprofits to do the brain
surgery required to use a for-profit sales tool for nonprofit CRM
purposes. Salesforce.com is, of course, much more sleek and polished.
And the power behind the application is pretty unassailable. And, there
is a huge ecosystem of add-ons available for Salesforce.com that
doesn\'t exist yet for CiviCRM. But there are significant modifications,
both in the way nonprofits think about data, as well as the way data is
manipulated, that have to take place in order for organizations to use
Salesforce.com. CiviCRM is really intuitive for organizations to use out
of the box. Donation pages, and event registration are built in to
CiviCRM, but have to be added into Salesforce.com. It\'s way easier to
create relationships in CiviCRM - you can create any kinds of
relationships you want. Can create groups and smart groups easily in
CiviCRM. This is harder in Salesforce.com, and smart groups don\'t exist
in Salesforce.com. Anyway, there\'s lots more, and you\'ll be hearing
lots more about both of these tools from me in the coming months.
Continue Reading
On 10 Mar, 2009 By mpm
It\'s been a few days since I got back from Drupalcon, and I\'ve had
time to let all of the things that happened settle in. It was a great
time, and I\'m really happy I went. We had a fabulous (and quite large)
nptech/progressive exchange/community organizing BoF. There was a
show-and-tell session for nonprofit websites (which I didn\'t make it
to). I went to some interesting sessions on Ubercart, Organic Groups,
and a BoF on Drupal in churches (where I wondered about the theological
spectrum, and guessed was populated mostly by evangelicals.) I met lots
of great people, and saw old and new friends. I think, also, I\'ve
completely drunk the Drupal koolaid. I\'m psyched to be working with
Drupal more intensely (I\'ve got 4 Drupal projects going at the present
moment.) There\'s lots of new things to learn, and challenges to face,
but I\'m excited about digging in a lot deeper. I\'m sure I\'ll have
more to say as time goes on. And I\'m looking for good excuses to go to
Paris for Drupalcon Paris! There were
lots of great talks, and the videos are
up!
Continue Reading
On 04 Mar, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
At the end of day one, I figured I\'d give a little report on how
DrupalconDC is going for me. I\'m having a good time, and learning a
lot. I went to three pretty intro talks (two of them were a bit too
intro for me, but I got a few good tips) and one advanced panel.
- Themers
Toolkit- I\'ve
only done a few themes, and modified a few, but I guess that was
enough for this panel to be too beginner for me. But I did learn a
few tricks I didn\'t know, so it was useful. It was a good talk.
- Totally Rocking Your Development
Environment -
also covered mostly stuff I knew, but I did learn a few tips (and
also learned a little from my next door neighbor. It was a great
talk by an incredibly enthusiastic speaker. I can\'t believe though,
that she suggested using Makefiles for Drupal!
- Organic
Groups -
since I haven\'t personally implemented OG, I didn\'t know a lot
about the innards, and how it really works. It was a great
introduction, and I\'m totally sold on it. He gave some sweet
examples of it\'s use (like teamsugar.com)
which is amazing, and made me totally rethink using
Elgg.
- Advanced Theming
Techniques
- A nice talk given by two folks from CivicActions, once of whom
I\'d worked with jointly on a client project. I learned a fair bit,
and now have some good techniques to think about using as I start
doing more serious theming (although, truthfully, I\'d like to
eventually be able to hand that off to folks who have a better
visual sense than I.)
Dries\' keynote was fun, and it
was great to hear a bit about the history, and also the ideas about
where Drupal is going. One thing he said in particular stood out:
\"Start thinking of the internet as one big machine.\" The idea is that
as barriers to the movement of data come down, doing things that were
never possible before become a lot more possible. And there is some
really cool stuff coming in the future like OAuth, Job Queues, RDFa
output, XMPP, and Activity logs. Really neat. I missed a couple of talks
I\'d wish I could have made, like the Drupal SEO talk, and Install
Profiles. I was glad to see that there are a significant number of women
here, and a number of women presenters, too. I hung out with Drupalchix
for lunch, and met new folks, saw some colleagues, and generally have
been having a good time. I\'m very much looking forward to tomorrow.
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On 04 Mar, 2009 By mpm
With 1
Comments
I get a lot of email all the time from people hawking various wares,
fundraising ideas, new ways to use Web 2.0, or this and that. I\'m sure
that this post probably won\'t make much of a dent, since I suspect that
at least 70% of the people who send me stuff (I get 6-10 emails a week
that fall into this category) have never read this blog (even though
they might say they love it.) I realized, in getting this stuff, and
trying to figure out what to do with it, that I needed to be better at
understanding myself what I was doing, and articulating that clearly.
Once I get this blog post done, I can clean out that \"To Blog\" inbox.
In the realm of things in my life that this blog is meant to cover, I
have two passions: data, and moving data around, and open source
software. Of course, I talk about both of these things in the context
both of nonprofit technology and the sector in general, as well as in my
role in the sector as a provider of ways and strategies to use the
latter to handle the former. It really is these things I want to focus
most on. I\'ll always be talking about CMS and CRM, and increasingly the
integration between them. I\'ll always be talking about open source
software, particularly as it relates to web applications, but more
generally as well. I\'ll probably be talking a lot about Drupal. I\'ll
also be talking a fair bit about SaaS CRMs in the coming months, for
reasons that will come apparent relatively soon. I\'ll always talk about
what it\'s like to do the work that I do, and talk more about how I do
it. I still will like to throw in the occasional post about Web 2.0,
particularly as it relates to moving data around. And you\'ll always get
a bit of shiny from me. And, you will get the occasional promo post
about something the organizations that I am on the boards of (Aspiration
and NTEN) are doing. I won\'t blog about fundraising or communications
strategies, or campaigns, or
skittles.
I won\'t talk much about communications, except as it relates to data,
or open source. I won\'t explain how or why to use twitter or facebook,
unless you are trying to put a twitter stream into a Drupal page
(moving data, open source.) Although I will talk about what kind of
data you should keep and move, and why. I won\'t post information about
what nonprofit has adopted what shiny software product, unless it\'s my
client, and it is to illustrate a specific point, or it\'s a case study
(and I generally don\'t use my client\'s names.) So, if you are part of
that 30% that reads this blog and sends me stuff to post, you have an
idea of whether or not I\'ll use it.
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On 26 Feb, 2009 By mpm
With 1
Comments
Mpower Open, the vendor who took their high-end CRM/DMS product,
MPX, open source last year,
has adopted a new name, Orange Leap. They have
also released two new products, called Orange Leap and the Guru. The
combination of Orange Leap and The Guru are a web-based CRM/DMS and
reporting system aimed squarely at Salesforce.com and Convio Common
Ground. The pricing of the hosted version is definitely competitive.
Orange Leap is possibly going for what is now often called the \"Open
Core\"
business model, although it\'s not entirely clear. Their new products
(as well as MPX) have \"community editions\" - mostly they lack
services and support, which makes sense. But Orange Leap Community
Edition also lacks \"Domain specific fields and rules\" and \"Outbound
Enhancements, Business Rules, and Processes\". It\'s not actually clear
what those are. There is mention of a \"community portal\" but it\'s not
evident anywhere I can find. You need to request a demo of their open
source tool, instead of the standard practice, which is creating an
open, public demo for everyone to see and play with. On their brand new,
quite lovely (and orange) website, as a developer, there is no place to
find the software, interact with others, or find a way in. There is no
community that is at all visible. I like very much what these folks are
trying so hard to do - provide high-quality, high-end open source
applications for the CRM/DMS space. But I\'m afraid they are going to be
squeezed to a pulp between the behemoths of salesforce.com and Convio,
on one hand, and the strong, vibrant open source community of CiviCRM on
the other. Their only way out is to build an equally strong, vibrant
community of developers and implementors - and that will be an uphill
battle.
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On 13 Feb, 2009 By mpm
With 27
Comments
What? She\'s talking about Blackbaud? Yes, it might be surprising, but
I got a friendly email from fellow NTEN Board
Member Steve McLaughlin, who also happens to be head of all things
internet (more formally, Director, Internet Solutions) at Blackbaud. He
gave me a demo and overview of their
NetCommunity
tool, which has been around for a while, and I figured it deserved a
blog entry. It is, in fact, a great example of integration of a CMS and
a CRM. Originally, I wasn\'t going to cover the one vendor solutions,
like this because, I believed (and, honestly, I still do) that you\'re
not going to get as powerful a CMS as you can as the best-in-breed CMS
tools. However, it is true that Raiser\'s Edge, the CRM/DMS tool that
this integrates with, is inarguably one of the most important tools out
there. Some call it the gold-standard. For many other CRM/DMS vendors,
it\'s the red spot at the center of the dartboard in their office. The
demo was pretty cool. But you know me, I fall for shiny, especially when
it comes to data. The integration between the web front end and the RE
back end is bi-directional and sweet. There were a lot of things you
could do, including accept donations, track personal donation pages, and
the like. and a lot of different ways to track what your donors and
constituents did, both online and off, and have those show up in really
interesting ways. It is, in many ways, the kind of CRM/CMS integration
that lots of organizations want and need. Organizations can get this
package in three different ways: On premises - installed inside the
firewall, hosted, or SaaS. Their SaaS offering is called \"NC Grow\",
which provides sets of fairly simple CMS templates to start with,
designed for organizations that, in their words, \"are ready to reap the
benefits of richer online marketing and communications, but may not have
the resources or expertise in place to make such a website come to
life\" The big kicker, pretty much as always with Blackbaud, is the
price tag. There is a \$10K license fee that you have to pay if you use
the On premise or hosted versions. Expect a \$35-45K price tag for
development and integration. Their SaaS offering, NC Grow has a
\$20K/year price tag. This all is, of course, above and beyond the
megabucks you\'re already paying for Rasier\'s Edge. I didn\'t get a
very close look at the CMS (I\'m wishing in retrospect that I had), but
the little bit I did see of it suggested to me that it was somewhat more
limited than CMS systems such as Drupal or Plone. Even if, perchance,
it\'s not, you still don\'t get the vibrant community of developers
making cool modules and add-ons to do just about anything you can
imagine - you\'ll have to either wait for Blackbaud to do it, or,
perhaps (I\'m not even sure if this is possible, but correct me if I\'m
wrong in comments) have someone custom develop special custom features
for you. And, you\'ll have an automatic \$10K price tag tacked on that
you won\'t pay with the open source tools. I have a hard time believing
that that translates to \$10K worth of feature value (one could argue
it\'s \$10K worth of integration value, though, but I\'m not sure about
that.) Bottom line: If you are an organization which has Raiser\'s Edge,
and is committed to keeping it, and you want to do sophisticated
integration between it and a web front end, then NetCommunity is
probably your best solution. But before you jump in, make sure that the
CMS is going to have the sophistication and power you need. And know
that because RE doesn\'t have open APIs, you are unlikely to be able to
create the kind of sophisticated integrations with a different CMS that
NetCommunity provides with RE. But, if you are not a RE user, or are
considering migrating off of RE, I don\'t think that the combination of
RE and NC is especially cost-effective. You can get this level of
integration with Drupal/CiviCRM for sure, and likely Plone/Salesforce,
and Drupal/Salesforce (with a bit more work.) More on those later.
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On 26 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 3 Comments
CiviCRM was the first nonprofit-focused open
source CRM (one of only two, at this moment.) It is a great tool for
small to medium-sized organizations who are looking for a CRM to track
members and donations, register people for events, and do mass mailings.
There are also some other features, like grants management and case
management that are more nascent, but promising for the future. I\'ve
implemented CiviCRM together with Drupal, and I\'m really psyched to
keep working with this great combo. CiviCRM originally only integrated
with Drupal, but recently a lot of work has been done to also integrate
CiviCRM with Joomla. CiviCRM acts in Drupal like a module, and in Joomla
like a component. This means that since the code sits in the same exact
place, and the databases could even be shared (or not, it\'s your
choice) in effect, CiviCRM is becoming part of your CMS. You install
CiviCRM inside your CMS installation directory, and the CMS and CiviCRM
talk to each other through PHP APIs (or \"hooks\") (there are some
examples of database calls across the CMS/CRM). There isn\'t much work
to be done by you, or by the person who implements it for you, unless
you want to do customizations, and expose CRM data in new and
interesting ways. Users in your CMS installation will become users in
CiviCRM when you install it, and be synched going forward. You can set
up web forms (for donations, event registration, etc.) and have them be
menu items. It\'s a very straightforward integration. Using CiviCRM and
Drupal is a great way to easily get powerful integration between your
CMS and your CRM. They are both installable on pretty standard
shared-hosting accounts (although shell access really helps.) It\'s a
really cost-effective way to get powerful features. The disadvantage of
this is that you have to choose CiviCRM and Drupal (note on Joomla
below). Both have their disadvantages, and you might have a variety of
reasons for not choosing one of them. Jon Stahl, in his comments on my
first post in this
series
said: \"a PHP API accessible only to other PHP apps on the same machine
is simply not sufficient integration in an age of web services, where
people run different apps on different machines and use languages other
than PHP for building web apps.\" I do agree with Jon to some extent. I
do know that CiviCRM has been working on their web services APIs, but a
really strong set of them would mean that people could integrate CiviCRM
with more CMS, which , from my perspective, would be a Really Good
Thing. That said, I do think that this combo would be a cost-effective
solution for good chunks of the nonprofit community. Note: My
understanding is that there are still some snags with the CiviCRM/Joomla
integration, and I\'m not very familiar with it. If you already have a
Joomla site (or you are about to choose Joomla) and you want to use
CiviCRM, you should talk to the CiviCRM-Joomla folks, or check out the
CiviCRM forums. One example: since Joomla
doesn\'t have granular ACLs (Access Control Lists) there must be issues
with how permissions work in terms of access to specific parts of
CiviCRM. If you have detailed info, please feel free to share in the
comments.
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On 26 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 3
Comments
As I talked about in my last post, there are a variety of strategies one
can use to move data between your CMS and your CRM. I\'m going to choose
a few examples to look at in some depth. Some of these are examples
I\'ve been working with clients on, or I\'ve played with, some are just
examples I know about, but are prominent, useful examples to talk about.
I\'ll talk a bit about mechanics, and talk about strengths and
weaknesses, and under what situations you might want to look at it.
I\'ll cover:
- CiviCRM/Drupal (with Joomla notes)
- Plone/Salesforce.com
- Using varied webforms (like DemocracyInAction, Blackbaud, Network
for Good, etc.)
- Drupal/Salesforce.com
- Joomla/Salesforce.com
You\'ll notice that only Drupal, Joomla and Plone are represented among
CMS. That\'s mostly because that\'s what I know, and there is a critical
enough mass for all three of them that some integration work has been
done in a systemic way (the exception to this is Drupal/Salesforce -
it\'s only half-way systematic.) I haven\'t included any all-in-one
systems (like Kintera), mostly because I don\'t think they are a good
idea - you might get a halfway decent CRM, but you\'ll for sure get a
crappy CMS, and there is no good reason for that. Another note: I\'ll
talk about this in detail later, but Salesforce also includes the new
Salesforce.com app, Common Ground, by Convio. From what I can tell (I\'m
learning a lot more fairly quickly) integrating Common Ground with a CMS
should be pretty much the same process as integrating Salesforce.com.
First up, CiviCRM/Drupal. I\'m choosing this first because it is a
pretty interesting example, and also is an example of what I would call
easy and tight integration.
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On 14 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I love NTC (NTEN\'s Nonprofit Technology
Conference). I would be dishonest if I said I didn\'t have a sweet
reminiscence for the Circiut Rider Roundups of old. But they are long
gone. As fields often do, ours grew up and professionalized. And what
has taken it\'s place is valuable to a much wider audience (and a much
larger one!) And, this year, for the very first time, I live in the same
city in which NTC is taking place. Hurrah! So, a few things to say about
what I\'m looking forward to from April 25th to April 30th:
- April 25: Penguin Day SF! It\'s happening
the day before NTC this year, not the day after. Gather with
folks and spend an exciting day peer-sharing about free and open
source software in nonprofit organizations. Any level of background
in the topic is welcome, and everyone learns.
- April 26-28: NTC. Another jam packed year full of great panels and
expertise sharing. I\'ll be involved in two panels this year. (And
lots of conversations on the side.)
- April 29-30: Hopefully, there will be a CiviCRM developer camp. Yay!
I\'ve been using CiviCRM for a year or so, and have begun to get
involved in implementation. Looking forward to digging deeper in.
And email me if you want to have coffee, or lunch, or a side
conversation in the Science Fair. And, you can help folks get to
NTC!
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On 14 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 17 Comments
If there are two acronyms that are at the center of nonprofit
communications, it\'s these two, CRM (Constituent Relationship
Management - and I\'m making this broad enough to include fundraising)
and CMS (Content Management System). And because of this, it makes sense
that integration of these two is something that is a need to be filled.
What\'s involved in this? First, the what - what to integrate? Most
often nonprofits want to capture information from web users. That sort
of information could be a newsletter sign up, a contact form that should
be responded to, an online donation or an event registration. The
organization wants to capture the demographic details, as well as make
sure that data is synchronized with the data they might already have on
that web user, so they can track their constituents over time. In
addition, sometimes nonprofits want to expose data from the CRM to the
CMS. One purpose is to allow users to modify their own information (if
the site allows logins.) Another purpose is for membership lists, or
group lists, or perhaps live tracking of donations from a specific
campaign. There are four strategies that can be used for this
integration:
- Manual. The old fashioned form of integration. Forms sent go to
email, or a separate database, and someone manually enters that data
into the CRM. Data from the CRM is manually reported and put up on
the CMS. It\'s amazing how much this still needs to be done. Some
CRMs still don\'t have openAPIs. Even if they do, it takes developer
time to write the code to do the integration, and that may be
resources that a nonprofit doesn\'t have.
- All-in-one. Some vendors have products that provide integration by
having both the CRM and the CMS together. Trade-off - you don\'t get
best of breed tools for both. Second trade off, all of these are
proprietary.
- Web forms from CRM vendor. This is integration of a sort. One sets
up a page (often donation or event page) on the CRM vendors web
platform and link your page to their pages. Or, one pastes HTML code
for a form into one of the pages of the CMS, and when the user
clicks \"submit\" the data actually goes to the CRM vendor.
- Integration. This is when actual code is written in the CMS (via
module or customization) which calls APIs on the CRM side to perform
specific actions, such as adding records, syncing records, grabbing
data, etc.
All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds.
Some take internal staff resources (especially the Manual strategy.)
Others take developer resources (especially the Integration strategy.)
Depending on the CRM, some require additional license fees for forms or
APIs. So what\'s the right strategy? That totally depends on a few
factors. First, are you happy with your current CRM and CMS? If so, what
specific types of integration do you want to have happen? What are the
specific tasks and data types you want to move between the CRM and the
CMS? The best way to accomplish those tasks depends primarily on your
CRM, although if you are using a proprietary CMS, a hosted CMS service,
or an older CMS, you might run into trouble with integration. If you are
in the process of reassessing your CRM or CMS or both, now is a very
good time to think hard about how you want these two to talk with each
other. I know that\'s one more thing in a long list of considerations
(and it\'s generally more important to think about for the CRM - the
CMS, if it is modern, and especially if it is open source, will provide
few barriers to integration.) I\'ll have follow up posts on specific
examples of this integration using open source tools (on one end or the
other, or both.)
Continue
Reading
On 09 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Some stuff from my inbox. (A lot of these are 2008 news, therefore,
kinda old. But still interesting to me.)
- Appirio releases their top 10
predictions
for cloud computing in 2009. One of the more interesting ones is
that \"a major SaaS 1.0 company will fail.\" I kind of wonder about
some of the early nonprofit-focused SaaS offerings, and how long
they might have to live, given the strength of Salesforce.com
- Third Sector New England, a Boston-based
nonprofit capacity-building organization launched a series of
\"FAQ\" videos for nonprofits. Useful stuff.
- NARAL Pro-choice America launched an innovative ad
campaign. Very neat stuff, and a
great use of video and YouTube.
Continue Reading
On 07 Jan, 2009 By mpm
With 1 Comments
This week was a bad week for online blogging services. First the
blogging service
JournalSpace,
with hundreds of users, just, well, died, because they didn\'t have a
proper
backup.
Today, the hacking
of the
blogging service SoapBlox,
which was used by many progressive political bloggers, such as Pam\'s
House Blend, became known, and it is
currently unclear how many sites have survived, and what will happen to
them. These are two fairly small, fairly low-profile services (although
SoapBlox is considered an extremely important part of the progressive
blogosphere.) They hosted a small percentage of the blogs out there (in
comparison to, say, TypePad or Blogger.) However, this is, of course,
devastating to those who had their blogs there. Lessons to learn:
- Always have your own backup of your data/content
- Remember when setting up a website or blog that if you use a
service, the data is not in your hands, but in someone elses
- Always have a disaster recovery plan
Continue
Reading
On 26 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Here\'s the top 10 list for 2008: 1) Remember when 1 MB was
alot? I wrote
this post back in 2005, and it is the most popular in 2008! It\'s
actually because someone included it in a Wikipedia
Article (no, it wasn\'t me.) 2)
Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on July
27th.
Don\'t know why this rose to the top, but the carnivals are fun to do.
3) No More Custom
CMS. Where
I rail against web shops that continue to suggest that people use their
CMS, when it\'s just not possible for one shop to replicate the
robustness, features, security and upgradeability of the Open Source CMS
offerings. 4) Blackbaud Buys
Kintera.
The proprietary consolidation of the CRM/Donation management system
space continues apace. 5) The Search for Good Web
Conferencing.
An exploration of options with my own particular requirements in mind.
6) Google Analytics vs.
Sitemeter.
Wow, this post is from 2006. 7) Getting Naked: Being Human and
Transparent.
This blog entry from 2007 is about being open about one\'s mistakes. I
think it\'s the word \"naked\" that does it. It has one of the highest
bounce rates of any post on this blog. 8) What is Cloud
Computing?
I define it, and explore it a bit. 9) Linux
Desktops? One
of my frank and painful posts on the topic.
10) Cake vs.
Symfony Where
I explore these two PHP frameworks.
Continue Reading
On 26 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 6 Comments
These span the range from tools I use every day or every week, to tools
use more occasionally, but depend on. They also span the range of
proprietary, SaaS, and Open Source. They are on this list because I
think they are great, because they have undergone a lot of change or
development this year, or because they are game-changing. Open Source
Tools 1. WordPress. I use WP pretty much
everyday, between my own blogs, and helping clients maintain theirs. WP
as a blogging tool rocks my world, and although I certainly could move
blogging to Drupal, since I seem to be becoming somewhat of a
Drupalista, it\'s just not worth it. WP is clean and easy, and virtually
hassle-free. There are lots of really great themes out there, and there
just isn\'t a reason I can find not to use it. 2.
Drupal. I\'m somewhat of a latecomer to Drupal.
Having been bogged down with my own open source CMS tool before 2005,
then having taken a break from development, I missed out on the prime
years of Drupal\'s development. But now, here I am, and I\'m impressed.
It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS, and is a very
able platform for creating all sorts of great web applications. 3.
Xen. I use this everyday, although I don\'t
really interact with it much. I am administering and/or responsible for
a couple of Virtual Private
Servers that use
it. Virtualization has really come into it\'s own this year, and will
continue to be a force to reckon with. I\'m betting that in 2009, many
folks will move from shared hosting to VPS servers. There are a lot of
good reasons to consider this. 4. Songbird.
Songbird is a brillant idea: build a music player using the Mozilla
framework. Songbird was a buggy mess just a year ago, but with the
recent release of 1.0, it\'s absolutely an application to get to know.
5. CiviCRM. Oh what a difference a year or so
makes. CiviCRM continues to mature, and is providing an interesting and
important new model for nonprofit software development. It is becoming
more popular, and is also highly recommended by those who use it. I\'ve
been getting to know it this year, and begun implementing it. I like it
more and more. 6. Freemind. This is
an awesome cross-platform mind mapping tool. I use it to create
sitemaps, mostly, but it\'s also great for brainstorming. 7.
Elgg. Elgg is the open source social network
management system. Install it on your own server, control your own data.
Don\'t use Ning, use Elgg. It finally looks like a project which will
allow me to explore the strength of that platform is coming around the
bend. Stay tuned. 8. MAMP. Wanna
set up a easy development environment on your Macintosh without
struggling with Fink or MacPorts? Use MAMP. Easy, fast, robust, and
powerful. Being a pragmatist, I do use proprietary tools, both the
Software-as-a-Service, or basic desktop tool types. I use these tools
because I haven\'t found open source alternatives for these functions
that work as well, or are as user friendly. SaaS Tools 9.
last.fm. I love last.fm. I love discovering new music,
seeing what people I know are listening to, and learning more about what
I listen to over time. 10. Twitter. This was the
year for twitter. This was the year that nonprofits discovered twitter,
and the year I integrated twitter into my workflow. 11.
Evernote. I haven\'t yet become an Evernote
devotee, but I might. It\'s an online note-saving service, with desktop
and iPhone clients. It\'s great to be able to take notes on my iPhone on
the fly, and know they are saved, and will show up on my desktop when I
want them. And it\'s great to have my notes wherever I go, without
bothering to sync my phone. 12.
Intervals. Having tried a variety of
project management and time tracking tools over the years, from the open
source tools like ProjectPier (used to be ActiveCollab) and GnoTime
(abysmal), as well as SaaS tools like BaseCamp, I have finally come
across what is, for me, the perfect mix of project management, time
tracking, and invoicing. It\'s not cheap, but it works well, and saves
me so much time invoicing, that it pays for itself several times over
every month. Proprietary Tools 13. Adobe
Air, and applications. Adobe Air is
an impressive framework for rich internet applications. I use TweetDeck,
Twhirl, and the Analytics reporting suite among others. 14.
Balsamiq. This Adobe Air
application deserves its own entry. (I\'ve been meaning to blog about it
for a while.) It\'s a really great tool for creating very rapid mockups
of sites that you are working on. It actually is good enough as a
wireframe tool. 15. Coda. Panic software
makes really good stuff. Coda is a great editor for developers. I like
it better than Textmate, which I know is another popular editor for
developers. 16. VMWare Fusion.
Even being the semi-religious Mac and Linux desktop user that I am,
every once in a while I am forced to use Windows. This makes it
tolerable. There\'s a nice full-screen view, if I want to really feel
the pain. There is also a mode called \"unity\" which allows you to run
a Windows application in a regular Mac window. It\'s kinda cool. So what
tools did you come to depend on in 2008?
Continue Reading
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On 19 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 4
Comments
Next year, given what is likely to be a grim funding year, nonprofit
organizations are going to be hunting for ways to save money on
technology. There are, of course, arguments that IT budgets should be,
at least, level funded during slim times, but the reality is that
organizations are going to reduce budgets across the board. One question
that will inevitably be asked: can free and open source software save
organizations money? The answer, of course, is a solid maybe, but also a
resounding yes. Confusing, huh? Open source software is both free as in
\"beer\" as well as free as in \"kittens.\" There are no license fees,
but it takes care and feeding. The most important part of the equation
is what you are implementing, and whether or not you need to factor in
migration costs. Nonprofit organizations that did migrations to open
source software from proprietary packages with large license fees during
relatively fat economic times are reaping the benefits of that change
now, and are in good shape to weather the storm. Organizations that
haven\'t been able to do that migration might find those costs to be
prohibitive at this time - which is unfortunate. But if you have a
migration planned anyway, now is absolutely the time to look at open
source software. At this point in the maturity of most open source
packages that nonprofits would want to use, the implementation cost is
very much in line with the implementation costs of proprietary software.
So that means that you are saving money - no cost to acquire, and no
long term license or maintenance fees. All of the above adds up to that
solid maybe - implementing open source software in your organization
might save you money depending on what you are implementing, and what
the costs are for migration. Where does the resounding yes come from?
This, if any, is the time for organizations to reject the standard
\"every organization for themselves\" mentality of software acquisition
and development. Find a solid open source package (like
CiviCRM, for instance,) and help fund
extensions to that software with other organizations that help make it
what you need. Find 5 organizations that do similar work, and
collaborate to build an open source application that can work for your
part of the sector. Release it so a community can develop around it,
make sure to make it modular so that it can be easily extended. Make it
full of APIs so you can hook other software to it. Build it with open
standards so the data is readable in perpetuity. Doing this will mean
you will get far more application for the money you spend. Of course, it
all takes effort and work. But it\'s worth it - and the entire community
benefits by an enriched software ecosystem. It also ends up not just
being about saving money. It also ends up being about building community
- and community will be an incredibly important asset in the coming
years. There is an appropriate popular culture
reference:
\"live together, die alone.\"
Continue
Reading
On 15 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 3 Comments
[caption id=\"attachment_398\" align=\"alignleft\" width=\"300\"
caption=\"Songbird screen\"]
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height="214"}[/caption]
I\'ve known about Songbird for a long time.
It\'s a cross-platform music player based upon the Mozilla framework. I
thought it was a brilliant idea years ago, but it was a buggy mess the
last time I tried it (about a year ago.) However, Songbird has emerged,
like many open source projects do, as a mature, stable, and, in
Songbird\'s case, a truly awesome application, because of the incredible
extensibility of the Mozilla framework (and the talent of the Songbird
developer community.) I\'ve only been running Songbird for about 20
minutes, and already it\'s linked with my last.fm
account, is showing me a picture search based on the artist I\'m
playing, as well as showing me a list of all of the concerts happening
in the Bay Area by artists in my library. I can read reviews, browse
videos, and read the lyrics of the song playing. It\'s happily notifying
Growl when new songs play. This qualifies as a
killer app, and it will give iTunes a run for it\'s money. I don\'t
really have a good reason to use iTunes anymore. Between open standards
that allow songbird to grab data from all sorts of places, as well as
the open architecture of Mozilla, allowing hundreds or thousands of
people to write their own cool plug ins that we all benefit from, this
really does show the power of open. Next question: can we get the
nonprofit version of the killer open source and open platform app?
Continue Reading
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On 06 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
Facebook Connect
was announced a few days ago, and, of course, it\'s the talk of the Web
2.0 world. Beth Kanter, as always, has a nice
overview
of what it is, and what it might mean. Google Friend
Connect
has been around for a few months, but they just opened it up to everyone
last week. What do these two toolsets mean? Are they truly open, and
based on open standards? Just a quick definition: the \"social graph\"
is, basically, your data about who you are, and who is connected to you
- who your friends are. A portable social graph would be one that you
can take with you, wherever you are - so the friends that are connected
with you on one network are also connected with you on another. It\'s
the holy grail of social network connectivity - you are connected to who
you are connected to, no matter what site you are on. Google Friend
Connect is a toolset based on three standards, two of which are open,
one of which could probably be considered an open standard, but it
originated with Google: OpenID,
OAuth and
OpenSocial. Any social
network that can use these three standards can be drawn into the open
social network web using Google Friend Connect. Any user on any of the
social networks that use these standards can connect with their friends
on others that use these standards. Facebook connect, on the other hand
is a proprietary process that competes with OpenID, and is only a two
way communication between other sites and Facebook - it\'s not at all
open. And, if you are not on Facebook, that other sites use Facebook
Connect won\'t matter to you. (For instance, it won\'t help connect
LinkedIn with MySpace.) Facebook Connect is not the portable social
graph we\'ve all been hoping for - Google Friend Connect is a bit closer
to it. Both Google and Facebook are interested in being the repository
for your credential and social graph data. However, the fact that Google
uses the open standard OpenID means that you can actually control where
that data lives - and that is not the case for Facebook. What is most
annoying to me is that Facebook Connect is proprietary, and it competes
with an open standard, OpenID. They could have just as easily
implemented the open standards - but they chose to go in a different
direction. For most of the social networks except for Facebook, the
walls of the gardens are coming tumbling down. But Facebook is basically
just enlarging their walled garden. What does this mean for most
nonprofit organizations: not a whole lot. This is going to take a long
time to shake out, and only the most Web2.0 savvy nonprofits are going
to be doing technology projects that will involve implementing either of
these new toolsets.
Continue
Reading
On 05 Dec, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
YouTube is everywhere - you see videos as a common part of websites, and
almost everyone has an internet connection with high enough bandwidth to
play video. This means that a lot of nonprofits are interested in having
video on their sites. So what does it take, and what considerations
should you think about as you embark on adding video to your site?
First, it is almost always a mistake to upload a video to your website
without thinking about the ramifications, both in terms of bandwidth, as
well as performance. If you have a standard hosting account, or even a
VPS (Virtual Private Server) do some back-of-the-envelope calculations
to make sure you won\'t end up with sticker shock at the end of the
month. Video is very bandwidth intensive. It is not at all difficult to
overshoot your bandwidth limitations on your hosting account with one
short video on your home page. A client of mine put a short video on
their home page after election day, and we had to take it down a week
later, or else they would have started to have to pay for extra
bandwidth. Take your average traffic for the page you\'ll add the video
on, and multiply by the size of the video. For instance, if you have a
3MB video, and you get 1,000 visits per day on that page, that\'s
potentially using 3,000 MB (3 GB) of bandwidth (of course, most people
won\'t play through the entire video, etc. but that\'s the place to
start.) And 3 GB of bandwidth for a month will exceed the bandwidth
limits of many virtual hosting plans. In terms of performance, lots of
people streaming a video from your website can bring a webserver to its
knees. If that video is more popular than you expected, you may end up
paying for it, both literally and figuratively. What about putting it
somewhere else? YouTube is the easy answer. Google pays the hosting
costs, you get easily embeddable video that can be viral, and you can
drive traffic from YouTube to your site. But what if it\'s not a public
video (perhaps you want to provide video for your members only, for
instance) or you want to stream live, or use a different format than
flash? There are a number of services you can pay for.
StreamGuys and Limelight
Networks are two examples of
companies that can provide that sort of service for you. Putting video
on your website takes both strategic thinking (why are we doing this?
What are the goals?) as well as tactical, technical thinking (what\'s
the best way to get this video to the eyeballs that we want to see it?)
Continue Reading
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On 02 Dec, 2008 By mpm
In general, although I am sometimes asked, I tend to avoid assisting
clients with choosing a donor database package. Mostly because, although
I actually know the field pretty well, it\'s at the 10,000 foot level,
rather than the 50 ft level that clients really need. And I know there
are plenty of folks out there who know the field really well at 50 ft,
and can step in with the best advice. As a 10,000 footer, NTEN\'s new
Donor Management System
Survey
is of keen interest. There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM
systems and Donor Management Systems. Many of the CRMs also show up
here, although there are quite a number of packages that did not show up
in the earlier survey. In some ways,
it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there
are. In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise - donor
management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits,
and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on
their donor management packages. By far the most popular DMS of the ones
surveyed was ... you guessed ... Blackbaud\'s Raiser\'s Edge. 18% of
users surveyed use that one, which also accounted for 35.5% of use in
very large organizations. Others I think about: CiviCRM had 4.8%,
Organizer\'s Database at 3%, Salesforce was at 2.6%, Democracy in
Action at 0.6% and MPower at 0.4%. I also have to wonder (shudder) how
many home grown Access and Filemaker databases fall into the \"Other\"
category of the survey, almost 20% of the total. So how did people like
these? They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a
package. In a three way tie for first included two proprietary packages
I\'d never heard of: NEON CRM and Donor Pro. In that trio was
Organizer\'s Database, the desktop open source DMS. 4th (since there was
a 3 way tie) was CiviCRM. Included in the bottom four are 3 properties
of Blackbaud: Raiser\'s Edge, eTapestry, and Kintera Sphere which was in
dead last place. (iMIS rounded out the bottom four.) Salesforce was
somewhere in the middle (ranked 9th). What\'s interesting is that they
did a size of org and recommendation analysis - to break down
recommendations by size of organization. Raiser\'s Edge, for instance,
did much better among large and very large organizations, and very
poorly in small orgs (which probably shouldn\'t be using it anyway.) The
reverse was true of Salesforce. (The numbers aren\'t always quite large
enough for these to be solid, but it\'s a great indication of what\'s
going on.) What can we say about the open source packages? There are
only three in this race: CiviCRM (web) Organizer\'s Database (desktop)
and MPower Open (client/server). CiviCRM and ODB were at the top of the
pack in terms of popularity, reccomendations and grading, and MPower had
very few respondents who used it, and it wasn\'t included in the ones
that were ranked. But its safe to say that these are good contenders,
and did well. Last but not least, the grading. Who\'s going to get into
med school? DonorPro and NEON CRM are at the top of the class, and will,
I\'m sure, get into Harvard Med. Donor Perfect, CiviCRM and Antharia\'s
On Deposit have solid A\'s, and will for sure get in. There is a large
group of packages, like Salesforce, ODB, Giftworks, that will probably
make it, but they might have to settle for second tier schools.
Raiser\'s Edge, eTapestry and iMIS are going to have to get themselves
into a special tutoring program, if they have a hope of making it. And
Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop.
Continue
Reading
On 21 Nov, 2008 By mpm
A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at
groups.drupal.org, thinking I\'d pick up
some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff
with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with \"Drupal for Good\"
and \"Drupalchix\") was the PostgreSQL group. Yesterday, in my RSS feed,
this post showed up. It was the
suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support
from the Drupal core. I was always aware that Drupal supported
PostgreSQL, and I didn\'t really have any plans to use it. And there are
varied opinions as to
it\'s usefulness (which I beg to differ on.) But as a long time lover of
PostgreSQL, I couldn\'t let this drop. And, I\'d been looking for a good
solid project to get me going in Drupal, so it looks like I found it. So
I\'ve adopted it. But, it turns out that with Drupal 7 (the development
branch) it\'s virtually impossible to install Drupal, and even though I
did wrangle an install (all of the right tables seem to show up in the
database), it doesn\'t actually work, and I can\'t yet figure out why. I
don\'t yet really grok the structure of Drupal, so it feels like sorting
through spagetti right now. There are several core modules with
PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on
those first, before I can think about tackling what\'s wrong with
install.php and PostgreSQL.
Continue Reading
On 19 Nov, 2008 By mpm
I don\'t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of
title, but that\'s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most
fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in
recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development
Summit,
which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all
sorts, and having lots of geeky fun. It was a great combination of
really detailed tech learning (like I learned a really cool trick using
JQuery to generate rounded corners, which is generally not an easy thing
to achieve,) and big picture thinking. I got to learn a ton, and
contribute a bit. Sessions I went to included:
There are lots of great notes there if you missed those sessions, and
I\'m looking forward to reading the notes from other sessions I wanted
to go to, but missed. Now, I\'m just going to sleep.
Continue Reading
On 16 Nov, 2008 By mpm
Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like
Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr
or delicious (I\'m starting to get used to writing that without the
dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their
pros and cons. What I have learned, though, is that a social network is
only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how
many of your real friends and colleagues use it. Sure, you can join
a social network, and \"friend up\" a bunch of people you don\'t know.
Perhaps you\'d meet some cool people. But you\'d primarily be wasting
lots of time. And if you\'re a nonprofit trying social networks out to
figure out how to leverage your modest resources for maximal impact,
it\'s really important to know where your constituents are. Over the
last two years, I\'ve joined more social networks than I can count (even
after I vowed, and only a couple of times violated my vow to only join
social networks that were based on open standards, like OpenID and ODD
(Open Data Definition.)) The content-focused networks, like delicious,
slideshare and flickr, I generally use as primarily a one-way method of
publishing specific kinds of content to people I know (and, of course,
people I don\'t know, since it\'s public.) I\'ve learned that there are
only a few that I really need to bother with:
- Facebook: I consider it a watershed moment when my partner
joined Facebook last week. The majority of people who are my
Facebook friends I\'ve actually met in person, and a surprising
percentage of my actual, real, in person friends are on Facebook
(considering that I am a relatively old fart of the Facebook set at
49.) I\'m not bothering with MySpace, Orkut, etc. etc. If,
perchance, there was a wholesale migration of my friends to a new
platform, I\'d certainly move, but it makes no sense to join a
social network that might be more open, for instance, if no one I
know is there.
- del.icio.us (sorry, I couldn\'t help it): I actually barely use
the social networking capacity of delicious. I use it as both my
personal repository of sites I want to keep tabs with. I know it\'s
public, and it also serves to share with people interesting stuff I
think is worth looking at.
- Flickr: I also don\'t use the social network capacity of flickr
much, except to keep track of the photos of a few real friends and
family.
- Twitter: The nonprofit technology community has chosen twitter
as the microblogging service that it uses, so even though I use
ping.fm to send status updates to plurk, identi.ca, rejaw, and some
others, I never actually go to those sites. Very few people I care
about are there (and they twitter too, anyway.)
- Slideshare: Again, a service I hardly use for social
networking - I use it to make public presentations that I\'ve done.
- LinkedIN: The professional, serious, network. I hardly use it,
but I know it\'s there, and it can be useful sometimes.
- Plaxo: Once just my address book backup, it seems to now have
become a social network on it\'s own. I only agree to be friends
with people on Plaxo who are actually already in my addressbook (or
I know should be.) That keeps the address book more likely to be
correct. I don\'t want or need Plaxo to be anything else,
thankyouverymuch.
- FriendFeed: The compendium, with comments and likes. It\'s great
that I can follow all of the content (blogs, tweets, Flickr photos,
etc.) of people that I want to all in one place.
An oddball one:
- Seesmic: I am completely conflicted about
Seesmic. For those of you who don\'t know
Seesmic - it\'s a video conversation social network. I\'ve had some
great conversations with people (including Deepak Chopra, who
seems to not post much anymore.) It\'s fun, and I love the idea, and
I think it has the potential to be very powerful. But, I have to say
that it feels like 85-90% of the conversations on Seesmic are, well,
inane. There are some great exceptions to this, like a recent
conversation about electric cars. But then it seems like with
interesting conversations, some guy pretenting to be a robot, or
someone else will post something completely inane, and then it
devolves from there. Of course, some large percentage of tweets are
inane as well, but there isn\'t the same overhead. It will take me
half a second to scan the \"I\'m cleaning my garage\" tweet (and
another second more to scan the responses, if any,) but do I really
want to spend 5 minutes hearing about it? And spend the time playing
the responses to it? Not hardly. Also, unlike the others, there
really isn\'t a nonprofit technology presence (who has the time?) So
conversations I care about aren\'t really going to happen there
until that changes.
Continue
Reading
On 15 Nov, 2008 By mpm
I was perusing the program for a local \"green\" event, when I noticed a
full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it\'s software was
\"100% organic.\" I
kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean? For Firefox, it
means, \"open source, community-powered.\" And I realized that they had
an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that
Yochai Benkler made in his book \"The Wealth of
Networks,\"
that a ecosystem full of open source, community-powered software was, in
a sense, more sustainable, and promoted more, not less innovation than
the proprietary software ecosystem. So now I think I agree with the
Mozilla Foundation that a good metaphor for open source as any is that
it is to software what \"organic\" and probably \"fair trade\" is to
food. Too bad the metaphor doesn\'t go both ways, because then organic
and fair trade food would be free, too. And, like both of those labels
are complex and not entirely easy to nail down with food, so it is with
software. But I think it works.
Continue Reading
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On 13 Nov, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I\'m learning Drupal bit by bit - one of the first tasks was to learn
how to make a new theme. It\'s one of those things which is actually
fairly straightforward-seeming ... until you hit a snag. And then it\'s
opaque. One thing I learned is that it is incredibly sensitive to typos.
One space accidentally inserted between the \"\<?\" and the \"php\" led
to a completely blank page. Ah well. I\'m certainly learning what
mistakes can lead to what kinds of issues, which is good. Eventually
that becomes second nature. But, in any event, by the end of an hour or
so of hacking, I\'d turned a template that I found online at Open Web
Design into a Drupal template. I felt
accomplished! I\'m going to do a few more, and see how sophisticated
with it I can get. One thing I ran into (and haven\'t been able to solve
yet) is that it\'s not easy to have navigation that requires more than
just the standard \<ul>\<li> tags. Adding \<span> tags, for instance
(which makes possible some more interesting looking navigation buttons)
seems, at least at first, far from trivial. I\'m making a list of
little(ish) projects that I want to do - sort of like problems I think I
want to know how to solve.
- Drupal and google docs single sign on. There is already a SSO Module
for Drupal 5.x, and someone submitted a patch for it, but it\'s
still up for review. I\'d also have to cough up \$50/year to get a
google account that has the SSO API, but it might be worth it.
- Drupal sidebar connecting with the NPR API - perhaps to provide a
targeted news stream?
- Doing a google map mashup of data in Drupal
- Working with getting flickr photostreams to show in Drupal
I\'m still looking for a good project to try out in Cake. Unfortunately,
the module Drake, which is meant to
be a bridge allowing you to run Cake applications within Drupal, seems
moribund. There is only a development snapshot for the 5.x branch, and
no one seems to be picking it up for 6.x. Sigh. There is, for sure,
another whole blog entry about Drupal modules.
Continue
Reading
On 06 Nov, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I\'m going to go out on a really thin limb here, and feel free to saw it
off in the comments. :-) If you haven\'t been to
change.gov yet, you need to go. Now. I\'ll
be here when you come back. There is little question that Obama was
Presidential Candidate 2.0. And it\'s becoming increasigly clear that
he\'ll be President 2.0. What made this possible? Of course, without his
intelligence, and desire to be involving and inclusive, it wouldn\'t
have happened. But there is no question that there is a technical aspect
to what made this possible. New technologies, the web, Web 2.0 services
like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, text messaging, all of these made
this possible. Plus some amazing underlying technical infrastructure. It
engaged voters (largely young voters, but others as well.) It allowed
people to get involved and helped motivate. So, to go even deeper, what
made all of this possible? Well, Web 2.0 depends largely on two things:
open standards, and open source software. It is my arguement that
without these two things, Obama would not have been able to harness the
technology in the way that he did. He might have won anyway, but I think
that these two factors made it a lot easier. And I think that they will
be key to providing Government 2.0, which is as technically transparent
and open as it hopefully will be in actuality. Open Source software and
open standards are the foundations of Web 2.0. Open standards are now
becoming de-riguer for application developers, and even proprietary
vendors are adopting longstanding ideas and methods from free and open
source software. I think the next 4-8 years are going to prove Yochai
Benkler right.
Continue Reading
On 05 Nov, 2008 By mpm
With 10 Comments
In my new explorations of PHP web application development, it seemed a
good idea to get a look at both CakePHP and
Symfony. Both of them seem to be
PHP\'s answer to Ruby on Rails. The approaches are similar and different
to each other. I set up both on my laptop, and tried out some really
simple app development. In Cake, the database build is separate from the
application building (you do it yourself), whereas in Symfony, you use
Symfony to build the database with schema files written in
YAML. Then, you build forms and
such using the schema as a foundation. They both use the
MVC pattern, and
both use object oriented PHP, which is great. I got a lot further with
Cake in one evening of playing with both than I did with Symfony. At
this point, I really prefer Cake - it feels like it jives with my own
coding sensibilities better. I also don\'t like the overhead of learning
YAML. I can imagine, though, that the Symfony approach can be powerful.
Looking at Ohloh, Cake is more popular than
Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot
more developers (81 vs 17). They both have good documentation and active
communities. For now, unless something strange happens, I\'ll settle on
Cake - although I\'ll not be spending too much time on it, since I\'m
working hard to grok Drupal. But perhaps a cool project will manifest,
and I can use it. Update: I learned that Yahoo and delicious have a
huge investment in Symfony (which, I guess, might be why they have so
many more developers.)
Continue Reading
On 05 Nov, 2008 By mpm
- One of the underlying stories of the 2008 election victory of Barack
Obama is the really intelligent use of
technology,
in a way that will permanently change how campaigns are run in the
future.
- Open Source Hardware: can it be
done?
I hope so, and I\'m looking forward to see its progress.
- There have been a number of possible \"Exchange Killers.\"
Open-Xchange just got a bunch of
\$. Perhaps
it\'s the one?
- The Free Software Foundation revised the GNU Free Document
License
(GNU FDL) to allow public Wikis to relicense their content (by
August 1, 2009) to the Creative Commons By-SA
3.0. Apparently,
they were asked by the Wikimedia foundation to do this. The CC By-SA
is the most FDL-like of the CC licenses.
- Firefox 3.1 adds a very
cool
tab preview function. Woo hoo!
Continue Reading
On 03 Nov, 2008 By mpm
With 4 Comments
As I said last week, today is my day to host the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants.
I chose this as my question of the week: \"Is your work changing because
of the economy? How? What adjustments are you making?\"
Somewhat tangentially related:
I have been doing a lot of thinking myself about the economic meltdown,
and what it means personally for me as a consultant. I\'ve talked a
little before about some changes I\'m
making, both because
of personal interest as well as what I feel is changes in the wind in
terms the kinds of new priorities that might be emerging.
Continue Reading
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On 29 Oct, 2008 By mpm
Monday (the day before the election) I\'m hosting the Carnival of
Nonprofit
Consultants.
My focus: is the economy changing the way you work, or the way you
think about your work? In what ways? If you\'d like to submit a post,
do so by Saturday midnight. Go to
BlogCarnival.com to submit
your post using the form there or send an email to npc.carnival AT yahoo
DOT com with your name, your blog's name and the URL of the post (not
your blog homepage).
Continue
Reading
On 23 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'m in love with Firefox. I\'ve actually been in love with Firefox
since 3.0, when it seems like a few of the things that plagued it
finally got ironed out. More and more websites are designed not only
with Firefox in mind, but sometimes even primarily with Firefox. Here\'s
a short list of the Firefox
Addons that I use all the
time:
- Firebug -
it\'s a great tool for HTML/CSS/JS development
- Web Developer -
a nice toolbar, also useful for development
- Google addons, including the
toolbar, and Google notebook add on (although I\'m beginning to use
Evernote more, because I have a copy of
notes both on my desktop and online.)
- Feedly -
it\'s a really nice tool for making your feeds more readable, and it
syncs with google reader, so that when you read something using
Feedly, it\'s marked as read on Google Reader.
- Fire.fm -
I\'m in love with both Pandora and Last.fm. Fire.fm provides a nice
toolbar - where you can play stations from, etc. It\'s a nice
integration.
- Delicious
Bookmarks -
this is the official plug in from Yahoo. It\'s sweet - a button to
easily tag the pages you are visiting, and a nice sidebar to see
your bookmarks from.
- I also use varied greasemonkey scripts to make things more
interesting.
There are a gazillion (well a lot) of add-ons for Firefox (and other
Mozilla tools as well.) What do you use?
Continue Reading
On 21 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
As many of you know, I have been using
OpenOffice.org, the free and open source office
suite since before it was OpenOffice.org. That would be when it was Star
Office. That was a long time ago. So I\'ve seen it develop and change
(and helped a tiny, tiny little bit along the way by submitting bugs.)
The Apple OS has been the poor stepchild when it comes to OpenOffice.org
for a long time. With Windows and Linux, there were native versions that
were easy to install and use. With OS X, you had to either use the most
recent version of OpenOffice.org with X Windows, which most Apple users
don\'t use, and didn\'t have the nice Aqua window dressing, or you had
to use NeoOffice, which
was steps behind OOo, and had some serious memory leak problems (it got
better over time, but it still was pretty unstable last time I used it.)
But, while I was busy doing other things like moving, OpenOffice.org
released version 3.0, and with it, native Aqua
versions for
Intel and PowerPC Macs. Can you see me doing a happy dance?
OpenOffice.org has been a great alternative to Microsoft Office for
Windows users (and really the only full-featured office suite for Linux
users.) But now, Mac users don\'t need to sacrafice to get the latest
OOo goodies.
Continue Reading
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On 21 Oct, 2008 By mpm
For a while, I\'ve been watching MPower
Open, the (not so) newly open
sourced (but Windows-based) fundraising package. In general, I\'ve been
impressed by its feature set, and that they made the choice to go open
source. MPower has traditionally been used primarily by faith-based
organizations, (by the way, that\'s not a small niche, even though
it is one that is somewhat neglected by the nptech community,) and they
have been quite committed to expanding from that niche. One of my prime
concerns once MPower went open source has always been \"how are they
going to build a community of users and developers?\" They have a tough
road ahead of them. First, it\'s a hard road for company-based open
source projects, but luckily, there are a few that have done some
road-building ahead of them (see below). Second, Windows developers (and
savvy users), for the most part, aren\'t used to open source communities
(DotNetNuke is one exception, and there are other projects with some
Windows ports and components,) and open source developers and users are
primarily used to working on Linux (and Mac) platforms, so building a
critical mass of interested developers and users is going to take work
(it takes work anyway, but it will take more.) At present, on their
Sourceforge
page,
there are a very, very few forum posts, no bugs reported, and many days
with few if any downloads. This is not the sign of a healthy open
source community. But, perhaps, there is change on the horizon. MPower
announced today that they are hiring a new VP of
community. His
name is Matt McCabe, and he is very familiar with the nonprofit
fundraising space, having spent time as a consultant at Convio. I had a
great chat with him yesterday, and was impressed by his background,
knowledge of the sector, and his committment to grow the community
around the MPower Open product. He has a lot less knowledge of open
source communities, and how they work, so I have some homework for him:
- If you only read one blog, read Matt Asay\'s The Open
Road. Matt Asay is a key member of
the company behind Alfresco, an open source Content/Document
Management system.
- Have a chat with the people at
SugarCRM - both the company, and
developers/partners. They have built a fascinating ecosystem around
what is basically a commercial product (with an open source
version.)
- Have a sit down with some of your current partners, including the
engineers behind the managers. Find out what they want and need.
Need more homework? I know a consultant you can hire ;-) In any event,
I\'m quite pleased to hear that they have moved in this direction, and I
am really looking forward to seeing what comes of this. If they can
really move this forward, it would be fabulous to have feature rich open
source CRM options with healthy and vibrant user and developer
communities in both the web based, and client/server spaces.
Continue
Reading
On 16 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I think that if I had to pick only one thing that would help people
understand the character of Drupal, it would be the WYSIWYG editor that
comes standard with an out-of-the-box Drupal installation. That would be
NONE. There is no standard WYSIWYG editor that comes with
Drupal. You have to figure out how to find one, and install and
configure it yourself. So if you want to start adding content to your
new site, and you need a little formatting, or a picture, etc., well,
unless you know a bit of HTML, you are S.O.L. On the other hand, this is
actually, from my perspective, a really good thing (can you tell I\'m
becoming a Drupalista?) There are several to choose from, and they
differ both in difficulty to get installed and working, as well as
features. Want something barebones? There\'s one for you. Want something
with all of the bells and whistles? There\'s one for you, too. There is
a great review of five of the major
ones. I\'ve been getting to know a
few of them (and, yes, they can be a pain to install, and they depend,
generally, on other libraries that you have to install as well.) I
don\'t have a favorite yet, but I\'m thinking I don\'t need to have one
- just to know which ones are well-maintained, and what the differences
are in feature set. Then I can choose the one that makes the most sense.
Continue
Reading
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On 09 Oct, 2008 By mpm
- This is old-ish news, but the acquisition of companies behind open
source software by big behemoths continues
with
the acquisition of Jabber by
Cisco.
- Matt Asay makes some interesting
points about
the fact that proprietary vendors spend time and effort protecting
their investments in their proprietary tools, rather than focusing
effort on looking toward the future. He says: \"Red Hat and other
open-source companies, in other words, are focused on the future,
because that\'s what their model requires in order to earn renewals
from customers. The proprietary model is more about \"build once,
charge everywhere...and as long as you can.\" It\'s a great model
for the vendor, when it works, but it encourages stasis in markets
and silly lawsuits designed to horde, not grow customer value.\" At
this point, proprietary vendors in our nonprofit neck of the woods
aren\'t spending time litigating (thankfully) but I\'d argue that
for a while, at least, stasis in markets was most definitely
encouraged. Things might be shifting, though, due to both open
source and SaaS as catalysts for change.
- Some folks
think
that the more users an open source project has, the better, and the
healthier the ecosystem. I agree, and I think that bodes well for us
as more and more open source software is adopted in the sector (like
CiviCRM, for example.)
- It doesn\'t have to be SaaS vs. Open Source, it can be SaaS
and Open Source. SugarCRM is moving forward in that
direction,
which is cool. Too bad CivicSpace OnDemand is
dead - could have been an an avenue
for CiviCRM.
Continue
Reading
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On 08 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I\'ve been working with Drupal a fair bit over the last few weeks, with
the ultimate goal to basically be able to really work with it to create
sites. I converted my (very simple) consulting site to Drupal, without
any bells and whistles. I\'m working now on a site that needs some bells
and whistles, like translated pages and a WYSIWYG editor (ah, the
WYSIWYG editor thing in Drupal is going to get its own blog entry, I\'m
sure).
My next step is to try and create a simple theme (so I understand how
theming works,) and write a module (so I understand how modules work.)
There are still lots of things that are mysteries to me, but perhaps
I\'ll learn more at Bay Area Drupal camp this weekend.
I\'ve also been digging a lot into the new(ish) social network software
Elgg, and beginning to develop a members-only site
with it for a client. In my estimation, it\'s amazingly promising, as a
platform for interesting private sites. And, since it has OpenID (which
seems to have bugs, though), OpenDD, and
OpenSocial, it\'s not such a bad idea for public sites either (although
I\'d still not suggest that nonprofits spend the time to do this.)
Maybe someone will use it to create the Facebook killer (I kind of doubt
it, but I can hope, can\'t I?)
As well, I\'m still honing my WordPress skills, mostly in the realm of
dealing with themes and moving the darn things around and upgrading from
ancient versions. I\'ve done some theme hacking, but haven\'t yet
written a plugin (I can\'t think of one to write that hasn\'t been
written yet.)
And, on top of all of that, I\'m re-writing in PHP some core functions
of a web-database/CMS framework I wrote in Perl a gazillion years ago
(and still is in use for an application called
EASE.) That\'s been fun. What\'s also fun
in retrospect is that the framework (the erstwhile Xina) was written
basically using the
MVC architectural
pattern before I knew it existed!
It feels like I\'m beginning to focus on a core set of tools and
technologies (PHP, Drupal, WP, Elgg,) and that in a few months, I\'ll be
up to speaking PHP fluently, like I spoke Perl a while back. And I\'m
looking forward to getting to work on the kinds of projects that I\'ve
been watching as a spectator in the last year.
Continue
Reading
On 08 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I keep being surprised by how frequently I hear clients tell me that a
vendor has suggested they \"build them a CMS,\" or by proposals from
vendors that include custom building a CMS. I hear people suggesting
building their own social networking website. I even occasionally still
hear tell of organizations who want custom CRMs. The web software
landscape has changed dramatically over the years. Five years ago, it
was full of custom built systems of all sorts - and the \"build vs.
buy\" decision was, I think, more difficult, because the available
software to buy was fairly cruddy. (And, for the purposes of this post,
I\'m using \"buy\" exceedingly loosely - including purchasing
proprietary software, installing open source, or using SaaS.) But the
landscape is different now, and I think that, in some senses, the
\"build vs. buy\" decision is much more straightforward. First, the
software available, whether it be open source, SaaS, or proprietary, is
much better all round. There are new types of software being developed
all the time (like, for instance, the new crop of \"Social Network
Management
Systems\"
both open source and SaaS, like Ning.) In addition, the increasing
openness of software, whether it be open source, or open platforms like
Salesforce.com, means that customizing software to your needs, or
integrating different pieces is much more straightforward, meaning it\'s
a lot easier to create exactly what you need by integration or
customization, rather than building from scratch. This is not to say
that there is no role for custom built applications. I\'m in the process
of working with two organizations to create just that. But they are both
for quite highly specialized functions. And I\'ve also been involved in
projects to create interesting and somewhat customized web functionality
- but those are being done with adding custom modules to an open source
CMS. From my perspective, exhaust all of the \"buy\" options: open
source/proprietary/SaaS out-of-the-box, customized open source/SaaS, or
integration of already existing components, or building modules on top
of open source tools, before you take on building something new from the
ground up. You\'ll save money and time, as well as be able to take
advantage of an upgrade path as web software changes and improves,
meaning you won\'t have to build whole systems again.
Continue Reading
On 02 Oct, 2008 By mpm
With 5 Comments
I used to spend most of most days hacking (mostly Perl) code. It had its
ups and downs, although in retrospect, the downs weren\'t really about
coding. I haven\'t done daily coding now for about 3 years, and I\'m
missing it, terribly. So ... I\'m going back to it, slowly but surely.
I also have to admit that my gut tells me that in the coming economic
landscape, going back to using my coding skills will likely increase my
chance of keeping myself in iPhones,
BeagleBoards, and microbrews, as well as the
more necessary, but boring things like keeping a roof over my head.
Strategic planning is already something that\'s somewhat of a hard sell
for organizations. Methinks its only going to get harder as grants and
donations start to dry up. In my last post, I was talking about platform
choice, and although to some extent, I can appreciate the argument that
Python is a better language than PHP (just like in 1999, Perl was a
better language than PHP was at the time.) However, PHP is the basis for
Drupal, which is inarguably the most popular open source CMS system, and
WordPress, inarguably the most popular Blogging platform. It\'s also the
basis for Joomla, a CMS I appreciate. There are also some very cool PHP
development frameworks, like Cake and
Symfony, that I\'m excited to
explore. It\'s also the basis for CiviCRM, a
project I\'d love to be able to contribute code to. I\'m psyched to
learn jQuery (OK, that\'s not PHP, but I figured
I\'d stick it in there.) And I don\'t have to learn a new language
(I\'ve done a fair bit of PHP some time ago, and it\'s not so unlike
Perl.) So PHP it is, starting with Drupal. So my first steps are to find
some projects to help out with, volunteer for, etc. and take it from
there. Maybe start doing some work with CiviCRM. It\'s such a different
landscape than it was even 3 years ago. But it\'s a landscape that
presents itself with all kinds of amazing possibilities for creating
totally amazing applications that we couldn\'t even dream about a few
years ago.
Continue Reading
On 01 Oct, 2008 By mpm
Over the past year and a half, I\'ve been fulfilling a definitely
different role with nonprofit organizations than most times in the past.
I\'ve been an intermediary, rather than an implementor. In this role, it
has been my task to provide advice for organizations around technology
choice and vendor selection. Many times, I narrow down the technology
options as a part of the RFP process. I do this based on my knowledge of
the options out there, my own opinions about them, and, most
importantly, the feature match. For many projects, a wide range of
options are possible, and in talking with vendors who specialize in one
toolset or another, I\'ve been intrigued by the ways in which vendors
talk about their chosen tools. For some projects, there is no question
that one tool may be better than another. But for a lot of projects,
what\'s way more important than the tool is the approach of the
vendor/developer, and the quality of the work they produce. And some
things surprise me. I am actually still surprised at how many small
vendors are still selling their custom CMS. Having written and
maintained my own for a few years, I know that the investment is hard to
let go of. But in terms of long term sustainability, from my
perspective, picking one of the well developed open source CMSs and
running with it, can\'t be beat. There will be an initial investment of
time, but the time savings later, and the added opportunities will
almost inevitably outweigh the cost of maintaining and improving (as web
technology gets more sophisticated, clients expect more from their
websites) your own. And I guess what\'s less surprising is that people
are pretty wedded to their toolset, and ready with long lists of
arguments as to why theirs is better. I\'m sure that when I was doing
implementation, I focused some energy on \"why my tools are better\"
(and, actually, I was right and wrong at the time. For instance, I chose
perl over php and postgresql over mysql in 1999.) I know that\'s just
part of the package of being an implementor. Some arguments I can
certainly appreciate better than others (the Python vs PHP ones are
fun.) But I\'m sorry, I\'m not going to be convinced that ColdFusion is
a platform I should choose. I mean, it doesn\'t even have objects!
(That\'s actually not the most important reason, but the fact that a web
development platform that has been around for 13 years still doesn\'t
have objects is telling.) And as I think about going back to doing
implementation, platform choice is certainly something to ponder. (More
on those thoughts in a forthcoming post.)
Continue
Reading
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On 26 Sep, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I\'ve been working with NOSI (the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative) for
more than 5 years. In addition, I\'ve worked with Aspiration a lot in
the past few years as well. It is a great pleasure for me to announce
that NOSI is becoming a project of Aspiration, and I am re-joining the
board of Aspiration. I think the two organizations together will provide
a really strong focus for advocacy and resources for open source
development and use in the nonprofit sector. See the press
release for more detail.
Continue
Reading
On 24 Sep, 2008 By mpm
With 8 Comments
I just finished writing a
post
for the Idealware blog about choosing SaaS vs. Open source. I said in
that post:
At one level, whether or not the software underneath the SaaS is open
source is not relevant. You are not obtaining the software, and
whether or not you can see the code, or modify it, is really not the
key issue here.
And, at the level of most nonprofits choosing software, this is, in
fact, correct. But the real story is much more complicated. SaaS is not,
by definition either proprietary or open source. There are a few
examples of SaaS that are based on open source projects, although most
SaaS are proprietary - the code is never meant to be released. One of
the most important things to understand is that SaaS is primarily built
upon open source tools such as Apache, MySQL, and MySQL. It would not be
as cost-effective (and thus, not produce as much profit) if these SaaS
developers had to pay license fees for the software they use (besides
the fact that these are the most stable and robust platforms to build
upon.) So SaaS vendors are taking good advantage of open source
software, and, in many situations, not giving a whole lot back. This is
not uniformly true - some SaaS vendors give back in a variety of ways -
contributing code back to those projects, having their own programs to
give back in some way or another (like Google Open Source, or
Salesforce.org) Bur in any event, SaaS based on proprietary software
violates the basic software freedoms - you can\'t use it freely, you
can\'t see the code, you can\'t modify it, and you can\'t release the
modifications to others. And, in some situations the existence of SaaS
can inhibit open source development in the spaces in which it is
popular, especially if the SaaS is cheap or free (how many good open
source webmail clients are there, for instance?) From my perspective,
the key is openness. Some SaaS, like Salesforce.com, and increasingly
the nonprofit CRM SaaS vendors, are open platforms. From my perspective,
it\'s all about balance, and having an active ecosystem, with healthy
open source options present. The more SaaS vendors can contribute to and
not detract from that ecosystem, the better.
Continue Reading
On 22 Sep, 2008 By mpm
I changed my Word Press theme, mostly because I was getting a bit tired
of the old one, and wanted something really simple. Also, it coincides
with a new installation of Drupal for my consulting
website, using the same basic template (called
\"Blueprint\").
I\'d been working with Drupal for NOSI (we\'ve had
the site in Drupal for a while now,) but I\'d never installed and
configured and messed with Drupal from scratch, so I did that. So far,
it\'s been largely painless. I\'m quite excited about really getting my
hands dirty working on some plug ins, or some such, really learning the
ins and outs of Drupal. It will be interesting to learn the innards of a
CMS. The last time I coded in a CMS was when I was working on the (now
dead) perl CMS I wrote many moons ago. So I\'m polishing off my PHP
skills, and we\'ll see where that leads.
Continue Reading
On 19 Sep, 2008 By mpm
Here are a few interesting tidbits that have come my way over the course
of the last few days
- There is a new online fundraising platform, founded by an ex-Convio
person. It\'s called Kimbia, and it\'s got
some interesting features, and seems to be focused mostly around
creating campaigns. The interesting thing, too, is that their model
is that they take a percentage of what you raise (5%.) No setup fees
or anything else. That\'s an interesting model, and, if the software
is decent, sounds like it could be a good option for some
organizations. But, of course, as with anything, look (a lot) before
you leap.
- There are some fabulous sessions proposed for the 2009
NTC, running the whole gamut of nonprofit
technology, from planning to Web 2.0, open source, etc. Vote for
them, especially the one I\'m
helping out with (David Geilhufe is the spearhead) on open source
CRM.
- I\'m really psyched about the Nonprofit Development
Summit, happening
here, in my (current) fair city, Oakland (I love it that I don\'t
have to travel so much anymore.) Funny thing: it\'s happening the
same week as the Convio
Summit, and the Blackbaud
Conference.
Go figure. Anyway, if you are involved in any way in developing
software for nonprofits (and, I guess, you don\'t code for Convio or
Blackbaud, or, heck, even if you do) please make your way out to the
left coast for Nov 17th.
- Speaking of Convio, Salesforce\'s M.Tucker McLean weighs
in
on Common Ground, Convio\'s new (frackin\' brilliant) fundraising
app written on top of Salesforce. I\'m still watching the fallout on
this one. It\'s going to be interesting. Under my hat is a blog post
about open source and SaaS. It might be interesting.
Continue Reading
On 19 Sep, 2008 By mpm
Note: This blog entry was originally
posted
on Idealware\'s new community blog.
I\'m honored and happy to be contributing blog posts there. Nonprofits
have become intimately familiar with Content Management Systems (CMS).
Some, especially those that are very content/document heavy, have become
familiar with Document Management Systems (DMS). What they might not be
so familiar with are Learning Management
Systems (LMS). An
LMS, or learning platform, is a system that is designed to facilitate
some sort of learning process over the web. What can an organization use
a LMS for? Well, that depends of course, on the organization. Many
organizations provide trainings, courses, and varied sorts of learning
activities to their constituents. If your organization does this at all,
and you are interested in investigating how to enhance or deliver those
learning activities through the web, an LMS is for you. Learning
platforms, of course, are varied. They can be very complex course
management systems which are designed to do things like quizzes and
grading (as well as discussions and have places to store course
materials.) Some have fewer features, but all have some basic qualities:
- Ability to handle multiple courses (or activities) and enroll
individual students
- Courses can be done either with specific deadlines, or at any pace
- Course calendars
- Messaging (between teacher and students and between students)
- Group discussions
- Document repositories
- Assignments and grading
Most post-secondary institutions are using LMS for management of both
regular and distance learning courses. Increasingly, a wide variety of
training opportunities are being delivered via LMS. So what LMS should
you look at? There are both proprietary and open source LMS. Most
proprietary LMS are geared specifically toward the college/university or
corporate training markets, and are thus quite expensive. These include
Blackboard,
ANGEL, and WebCT (now owned by
Blackboard), among others. There are open source LMS, some of which are
quite well developed, and some also geared toward (or developed by)
colleges and universities.
- Moodle - probably the best known open
source LMS. It is very easy to install, and there are an increasing
number of consultants and companies offering support for Moodle.
- LAMS - not as much an LMS as a
curriculum development tool. Can be powerful if integrated with
Moodle
- ILIAS - developed by the University of
Cologne, is another open source LMS
Continue
Reading
On 19 Sep, 2008 By mpm
NTEN has a great program, called \"Office
Hours\", where folks can talk to people
and get their burning questions asked about everything nonprofit
technology. I volunteered to be the \"expert\" in residence for the
\"Program\" track of Office Hours. The description: \"[Talk with
Michelle about internal software systems - document and knowledge
management, CRM, client management databases, intranets,
etc.\"]{.event-description} So, come join me. Fridays, 10:00am
PT/1:00pm ET
Continue Reading
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On 11 Sep, 2008 By mpm
With 6
Comments
I have been thinking about the software tools we call \"Management
Systems\" - like Content Management Systems, Document Management
Systems, Learning Management Systems... I\'ve also been playing a lot
with an open source tool called Elgg, and have
also played, in the past, with
Crabgrass, another open source ...
\"SNMS\"? What do these tools allow you to do? They allow you to create
stand-alone social networks. Think a whitebox version of Ning, or
Facebook. Elgg, a LAMP(hp) project, started it\'s life as a learning
platform with social network features, but has transmorgrified into a
social network platform with learning features. It\'s definitely a new
project, and a very new community (with some huge warts) but it is
promising for organizations that want to create private (or public,
perhaps) social networks that include groups, discussions, document
sharing, bookmarking, blogs and other things. Crabgrass is written in
Ruby on Rails, and has groups, messaging and wikis, among other
features. It\'s a particularly interesting project, because it has a
definite political purpose:
Designed for social movements working for social justice, Crabgrass
will consist of tools which allow people to connect, collaborate, and
organize in new ways and with increased efficiency. In particular, we
aim to help groups to communicate securely, network with other groups,
and make decisions in a way that is easy to understand, transparent,
and directly democratic. Where traditional social networking is about
connecting individuals, Crabgrass is social networking to facilitate
network organizing.
In the end, I don\'t advocate that organizations build new public social
networks in the vast majority of situations - I think they should find
the people where they already are. But private social networks have
their place, and can provide a compellingly interesting platform for our
nonprofit standard \"members only\" websites. People are getting more
and more used to social networks as the vehicle for connecting to
others, and this is one way to provide this in a private setting.
Continue
Reading
On 04 Sep, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
The hiatus is over with a short entry about Google
Chrome, the new browser from Google that
I learned about on the twitterverse while I was stopped at one rest stop
or another. I can\'t test it, because my Mac that has a Windows virtual
machine is packed. But I will say this: that doesn\'t matter. I won\'t
be downloading it, or trying it, even when they release Mac or Linux
versions. Why so curmudgeonly you ask? It is open source, after all. And
it has some cool features. Yes, it is open source, and I applaud Google
for releasing open source software. However, there was an initial
brou-haha about the
EULA,
which initially suggested that everything you type into the browser
belongs to Google (talk about All Your Base Belong to Us!) Yes, they
changed it, but it made me realize that it is a Bad Idea to put all of
my eggs in one basket. Google already knows enough about me (it reads my
mail, my feeds, my search history, and a few shared documents, to boot,)
I\'m certainly not going to add virtually everything else I do (the
percent of things I do using a protocol other than http(s) is dwindling
by the second.) If someone releases a \"Chrome minus Google\" - that is,
a version of Chrome with all of the \"phone home\" code completely
eliminated, then I\'ll think about using that version, just to see what
it\'s like. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.
Continue Reading
On 26 Aug, 2008 By mpm
As many of you know, I\'m about to make a big move: to the left coast,
to the big city of Oakland (or thereabouts). This is a good move for me,
in many ways. In one particular way, I\'m psyched to get to be in one of
the hot spots of my field, and actually have a casual beverage with lots
of colleagues I\'ve gotten to know over the years, but have only seen
once a year (or less often, even.) I\'m driving cross country, leaving
Friday, and arriving sometime during the weekend of the 6th and 7th of
September. Taking a slow, leisurely drive. I won\'t be blogging here,
and I know that my work will be cut out for me in terms of catching up
when I land. I\'ll be blogging on my personal
blog as I drive (well, not while I\'m
driving) and tweeting as well.
Continue Reading
On 14 Aug, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I just joined identi.ca. identi.ca is a
microblogging service based on an open source project,
Laconica, and all of the updates are
copyrighted by a Creative Commons (Attribution) license. You can log in
using OpenID. All really great stuff. I imagine, too, because it\'s
based on an open source platform, developers will begin to code in data
portability (or have they already?) The documentation is a bit lacking,
and it\'s clear that it\'s a very new project. There are an increasing
number of third party apps that can use it (it supports the Twitter
API.) So I\'m on identi.ca now (follow
pearlbear). Like all social networks, they
are only as usable as people in your social graph use it, and it\'s
pretty sparse for me right now. But hopefully that will change.
Continue
Reading
On 13 Aug, 2008 By mpm
With 5 Comments
Yet another great
NTEN project is happening, spearheaded by Beth Kanter, to develop a
Social Media toolkit for Nonprofits. It\'s called
\"WeAreMedia.\" I have been really slow on
the uptake with this project (it started while I was on vacation, and I
never caught up after I got back,) but I hope that I will be able to
keep up, and participate more fully in it as it evolves and grows. The
first set of modules, on the \"Strategic Track\" are already done. The
next set of modules, that are more tool based (with case studies) are
next to be developed. The project took a short break to catch its
collective breath, and Beth has some
thoughts
and ideas that came out of that conference call. I\'m excited about this
project - it\'s gathering the knowledge and expertise of a great group
of folks, and it will provide a free source of information and case
studies so that nonprofits can best figure out how to step into the
frothy waters of social networks. A note: Most people will notice that
I have pretty much lost my curmudgeonly approach to social media. A year
ago, I was bear-ish on Facebook, and said I wouldn\'t Twitter. Now, I
tell my clients that they really have to think about a Facebook
strategy, and that nonprofit staff can gain a lot from networks like
Twitter. I\'m up to 1,700+ updates on Twitter, and keeping up with my
lifestream on FriendFeed is about as
difficult as knowing where I\'m moving to
next. No, I
didn\'t go soft in the head (well, some people might think so.) What has
happened is basically a sea change in the landscape. Not only are Gen Y
and Millenials engaged in these social networks, but a wider and broader
range of people are. It\'s fairly clear to me that going forward,
increasingly, social networks are a major way people are interacting on
the web - and nonprofits need to understand how to engage their
constituents given those changing realities. Of course, I\'ve been a
wiki fan since the very beginning, and I haven\'t lost the desire for
true data portability, and open
source alternatives to the current social networks. however, as you all
know so well, I\'m a realist.
Continue Reading
On 13 Aug, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I love these tidbits blog posts. I come across a lot in my varied net
wanderings, and people send me stuff, so it\'s a nice way to talk about
some of it, without having to go into too much detail.
- I was profiled on Linux.com.
That\'s kinda fun! I \"live the open source lifestyle.\" That must
have been before the iPhone.
- This blog is rated 8.2 (very good, they say) on
Blogged.com.
I\'m not sure exactly what that means, but I guess that\'s a good
thing. And why is this in \"social issues\" and not \"technology\"?
But, anyway, I\'m not putting the silly badge in the sidebar,
sorry.
- MPower has started to
generate
some community-driven development. These look like pretty
interesting, and useful applications. But I still haven\'t seen much
activity on the sourceforge page, nor does it seem that the code for
these new projects is available. So the reality is still pretty far
behind the hype. I sure hope the reality catches up.
- This news is so old it\'s embarrassing - NPR opened up their
content
API.
Way to go, NPR!
- Some really interesting things are brewing with CiviCRM. First, they
are putting the wraps on a new version, and there are some
interesting projects happening, like integrating voter files, phone
banking, and my favorite, case
management.
I\'m excited to see what community-driven development can do!
- A new site was launched called \"Green
Nonprofits.\" It
looks interesting. It looks to be a joint venture by a group of
nonprofit-focused for-profits, none of which I\'ve heard of (which
doesn\'t mean a thing, really.) Something to watch.
Continue Reading
On 12 Aug, 2008 By mpm
I once joined the \"iPhone non-buyers\" group on Facebook. I swore up
and
down
I wouldn\'t get one. I said:
I will not be buying an iPhone until they sell an unlocked version
that doesn't need to be hacked to use third party applications.
Well, the iPhone 3G changed the equation, some. The iPhone 3G does have
3rd party apps, but they have to be vetted, etc. by Apple, which is a
mixed bag. The iPhone 3G had some compelling features and 3rd party apps
(like Pandora, which, I have to admit, is
about 1/2 the reason I got the phone.) So, I got one, about two weeks
ago. And it\'s been a combination of sheer joy, and sheer frustration.
In general, the phone actually works quite well. The phone interface is
great, visual voicemail rocks, reading email is really good, and surfing
the web is decent - way better than on a blackberry. But the apps, and
the app store (where to get apps) have been the cause of crashes, iPhone
lockup requiring multiple restorations (which, luckily, are relatively
painless.) There are some great apps and games, some really good for
really cheap (or free.) But getting them onto the iPhone, or getting
them to work, is sometimes a pain. Syncing is way slower than on a
regular iPod, and backups can take 1/2 hour, which is absurd. There are
multiple threads on multiple sites about problems with the iPhone 3G -
clearly, some software fixes need to happen, and the faster they happen,
the happier I\'ll be. But driving down the highway, listening to my
favorite Pandora stations is
the best thing since sliced bread. My suggestion: if you like gadgets,
are addicted to being connected at all times, and you feel like you need
reading glasses to read email or the web on the Blackberry screen, the
iPhone might be a good bet, but I\'d wait until software version 2.1
comes out. And if you are eligible for an upgrade, it\'s cheap
(relatively speaking for smartphones.) I know some folks are holding out
for an Android phone, which, from what I can tell, are going to be
pretty similar.
Continue Reading
On 11 Aug, 2008 By mpm
With 5 Comments
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height="300"}
You\'ve likely heard a lot about \"cloud
computing\". And what\'s
true is that the sales-talk about computing in the cloud certainly makes
the conceptual issues behind it, honestly, well, cloudy. So I\'m going
to try and lay out the details of what cloud computing is, and how
it\'s useful for nonprofit organizations.
Quick definition: Cloud computing is basically running applications on
the web via \"Software as a Service (SaaS)\". That includes applications
from Google Documents, to Salesforce.com, to
Gliffy.com, (the service I used to create that
graphic.) It also includes applications that you might develop (or have
developed) that are hosted outside your network. That\'s really all it
is - there isn\'t anything fancy about it. It still requires the
hardware and operating systems, and databases that more traditional
applications that are inside your network require, but, generally, you
hand off that responsibility to the folks that host your application,
and access the application through the internet.
Advantages to cloud computing: The basic advantages are that you
don\'t have to maintain infrastructure for applications, saving you
labor costs, as well as electricity costs. Also, you can access the
applications anywhere you go. Disadvantages to cloud computing
Depending on the vendor and the application, you are dependent on them
to keep the application up and your data intact. Changes in the
application happen without your knowledge or consent. Your data is not
directly in your hands, but in the hands of a third party. You are
dependent on your internet connection - which could be a problem for
mission-critical applications.
What makes it possible: Cloud computing is made possible and easier by
two trends, two that have happened closely in parallel, one that is
relatively recent: High bandwidth to the curb and massive data centers.
High bandwidth to your home or office is a necessary requirement to
cloud computing. Cloud computing just doesn\'t make any sense, or work
in any reasonable way without it (have you ever tried to use Gmail on
dial up?) As the bandwidth available increases (via
FiOS, and other methods)
cloud computing will get even more attractive to organizations and
people. Huge data centers are being thrown up everywhere, and more and
more companies are getting into the business of providing hosting for
SaaS developers. Companies such as Amazon are creating massive grid
storage and computing services for applications in the cloud.
What makes it usable: Newer applications are using AJAX and Flash, to
give the kinds of functionalities we\'ve come to expect with desktop
applications - so it\'s just like having a desktop application with our
data - except it\'s \"in the cloud\" not on our desk. As the limitations
of both AJAX and Flash are overcome (and as both develop further) expect
even more usability for online applications. And, further, efforts like
Adobe AIR, and Microsoft
Silverlight, are bringing
full-fledged desktop application functionality to applications in the
cloud. What you should do
- Make an assessment - will using this online tool really save money
or time, or facilitate collaboration in ways that is not possible
with local apps?
- Always read the privacy policy - if you have sensitive data, this
might be a deal-breaker
- Always maintain your own backups. If the provider goes belly up with
your data, you\'re toast.
- Make sure access is secure. Read up on the security of the
application
Continue Reading
On 05 Aug, 2008 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I have been thinking for the last few days about what it means to \"keep
up\" with the technology field, particularly \'net technology. I\'ve
been helping a client hire a temporary project manager, and so in the
interview process one of the questions I ask is how people keep up with
change in the field. In some ways, I have been blessed with the gift of
osmosis. I\'m a fantastic book learner, which means I\'m a great
blog/twitter learner, too. Also, one of the things I do is blog - so I
regularly have to process and digest information to write decent blog
posts. One of the prompts for this post was also that I\'m preparing a
post on \"cloud computing\", just reviewing what it means, and what it
is, and why it\'s important - and that will undoubtedly help me to keep
up with that whole set of things. How do you keep up? And, in a bigger
picture way, how important do you think it is for people who work with
nonprofit organizations on technology issues to keep up? How bleeding
edge do we need to be?
Continue Reading
On 30 Jul, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Here are posts from a small sampling of bloggers I regularly read:
- Holly Ross shows her geek cred in a great post about
DNS.
I love Holly\'s approach to technology.
- Amy Sample Ward let\'s us know how to give
green.
Amy is a great source for nptech tips of all types.
- Beth Kanter
asks
whether or not we can add some more steps to Chris Brogan\'s
fabulous 50
steps
to create a social media presence. Beth is, of course, THE web 2.0
and social network guru for the nptech community.
- Allan Benamer talks
about
Convio\'s new big client, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, for their
Salesforce-based application formerly known as Aikido, presently
known as Common Ground. I trust Allan\'s gut instincts about CRM
technology.
- David Geilhufe
ponders
how technology solutions split communities, and issues of a lack of
strategic vision. It\'s a great, thoughtful post. David is always a
great source for thoughtful insights about open source.
- Michele Martin talks about developing a personal learning
plan.
I read her blog for great tips on professional development and
technology.
Continue
Reading
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On 27 Jul, 2008 By mpm
With 6
Comments
This week, it is my pleasure to host the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants. This week, I asked the
question: What is the biggest mistake a nonprofit can make with their
website. I got some interesting answers:
- Ken, at the Nonprofit Consulting Blog, talks about
transparency,
and how it\'s a big mistake not to be transparent. He has some good
ideas and suggestions about how to be transparent as an organization
through the website.
- Kivi in her Nonprofit Communication\'s blog
suggests
that a website needs to be about the visitor and not about the
organization: \"The biggest mistake that a nonprofit can make with
its website is to use it as an old-fashioned brochure, where you
immediately hit the visitor with your long, jargon-filled mission
statement, right at the top or smack in the middle of the home page,
followed by bulleted lists of \'projects\' or \'services.\'\" She
gives some great suggestions and examples
- Joanne Fritz talks about three big
mistakes -
outdated information, insufficient contact information, and outdated
design. She makes some great points, and gives good tips to make
changes.
- The Hack Artist
suggests
that it\'s important to marry direct mail efforts and a web
presence.
- James Young, on the Connection Cafe, suggests that we think about
constituent
empowerment
when we think about organizational websites.
- And, since I\'m the host, I get to add a couple of bonus mistakes. I
think one of the biggest mistakes that an organization can make with
its website is to promise more than it can deliver - make sure that
the resources to create that blog, or podcast, or photo gallery, or
whatever bells and whistles that you promise on your website, are
there when the website goes live.
- I do think the biggest mistake an organization can make in the
re/creation of its website is to go with the vendor with the lowest
bid. It\'s a lot more than price - it\'s quality of work, whether
you like their previous work, their overall reputation, as well as
their fit with you as an organization.
Continue
Reading
On 25 Jul, 2008 By mpm
- Between the Connection
Cafe, and the new
name for their fundraising database: Common
Ground
(formerly known as Aikido,) I have to admit that I\'m beginning to
think of coffee, when I think of Convio. Is this a bad thing?
- Myspace is going with
OpenID!
That\'s a great step. There are some other interesting moves
outlined in that great post by Marshall Kirpatrick, my currently
favorite ReadWriteWeb blogger
- Android for the masses, iPhone for the rich? Read an
interview
of an Android developer. It\'s an interesting question, what Android
might (or might not) turn out to be. So far, it\'s simply vaporware.
- Not waiting for Android vaporware (my research suggested it was
probably a long time coming, and would not be on my carrier, AT&T,)
I decided to succumb, and buy an iPhone 3G. More on that in a later
post.
Continue Reading
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On 14 Jul, 2008 By mpm
With 9
Comments
I had a startling realization a few days ago. I seem to spend inordinate
amounts of time responding to
people (proprietary
software vendors, to be specific) harping on the idea that \"open source
software is free\" is a myth, and blathering on about how it\'s not
really free, because you have to hire a geek to install it, and
maintain it, and blah blah blah. No credible nonprofit technology open
source advocate has ever suggested that open source software was
free to implement. In fact, we all go out of our way (like in the open
source primer) to talk about total
cost of ownership, and how cost-wise, implementation of open source
software is sometimes a wash with proprietary, etc. I\'ve been caught
using the \"free as in kittens\" metaphor many more times than once. We
talk much more about the value and values that free and open source
software bring to the table. My realization was this: the myth is
entirely of the making of these proprietary vendors who claim it is a
myth. There would be no myth if it were not for them. No one would
think that anyone thought that implementing open source software was
without cost. And from now on, instead of writing some long-winded
response, I\'m just going to put in a link to this post.
Continue
Reading
On 10 Jul, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I finally had the reason to begin to more completely articulate my
theory of practice. My theory of practice is different than my
consulting philosophy.
They certainly are consistent with each other, but they are distinct. A
theory of practice, in my mind, outlines the methods and ideals behind
how I get work done with clients. This theory includes the following
elements that I think are key to my work:
- Listening. Listening, both at the beginning, and consistently
through an engagement, to their goals, ideals, \"points of pain\",
and points of confusion.
- Educating. One of the most important roles I play is educating
clients about the technology that they will be engaging with, based
upon what I\'ve heard while I\'ve listened. This is also an ongoing
process.
- Intermediation. The role I play most often currently is
providing a clear and understandable avenue between the client and a
technology vendor (such as web or database development shop). The
client is quite knowledgeable about their organization, mission, and
goals for a project, but often not knowledgeable about technology.
The vendor is expert at what they do, but cannot always provide a
channel of communication that the client can really work with. I
provide that clear channel, so both sides benefit.
- Learning. Those first three elements make up the communication
arm of my practice. The other arm is learning. I can\'t do what I
do without being a technology expert. And I can\'t stay a technology
expert without continually learning. Reading, research,
collaborating with others, getting my hands dirty with servers and
code, playing with new applications and new APIs - all of those
things keep my technology expertise fresh.
More specifically, what methods do I use to help clients make their way
through the entire process of a technology project:
- Qualitative and Quantitative (where appropriate) assessment of
requirements and needs, including surveys and interviews with
internal (and/or external) stakeholders
- Research - both standard internet research as well as outreach and
interviews with relevant people
- Writing - writing requirements, RFPs, documentation
- Project management - keeping a project on track
- Evaluation - evaluating projects as they are happening, and when
they are done.
Continue Reading
On 06 Jul, 2008 By mpm
With 5
Comments
This is old news, but I\'ve been busy. What\'s kind of funny is that I
was quoted on the press
release, which
was out 3 weeks ago or so, but it\'s taken me this long to blog it. Bad
Blogger! (I think my clients thank me for being a bad blogger.) So
what\'s the news? MPower Open is now on
Sourceforge, they released
their product under the GPL v3. These are good steps forward. This is
what I said (in what I think is my first quote for a press release):
By adopting a well-regarded license, joining the SourceForge platform,
and launching its community, MPower is making great strides in
creating an open source community around its application," said
Michelle Murrain, Principal, MetaCentric Technology Advising, and
Coordinator, Nonprofit Open Source Initiative (NOSI). "I look forward
to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the
MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit
organizations.
So my hope is that they really begin to use the platform. So far, there
is basically no activity in the forums and mailing list. It\'s going to
take some real elbow grease of reaching out to people who might begin to
form the kernel of a development community to get that going. \"If we
build it they will come\" only works in the movies.
Continue
Reading
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On 25 Jun, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
I got some interesting comments on the last
post about
Linux desktops. I realize that I haven\'t talked about this in a while,
and I\'m not sure I\'ve actually ever articulated this completely on
this blog. So here goes. I got involved in Linux a long time ago. I was
a professor at the time, and a nonprofit organization wanted to get on
the web, and give some of their staff email, and at the time, colleges
and universities were the only organizations that had easy access to the
internet, and virtual hosting companies cost a fortune, way beyond what
a nonprofit could afford. The date was sometime in 1995. We set up a
little box in the corner of my office, and loaded several piles of
floppies containing the Slackware distribution onto this box. After a
few hours (as opposed to the few minutes it would take now) we
configured that server to hold a website and serve email. The old
site
is still up on the Wayback Machine.
I co-administered that box for a few years. Eventually, they got a T1,
and moved the server in-house. I left academia to do that sort of thing
with nonprofits full time. In fact, that experience, and the work I did
around it with that organization, was the first step into this whole
nonprofit technology field. What I learned about Linux back then was
that it was a way (along with the help of a college) for a nonprofit
organization to get on the web easily and relatively inexpensively. It
leveled the playing field, so that an organization without many
resources could do what at that time, required a lot of resources. In
many ways for me, the most important aspect of free and open source
software is that it does just that - it levels the playing field so that
people and organizations with few resources can have access to quality
tools to do what it is they need and want to do in this software-driven
world. I\'ve learned a lot about FOSS since then, of course, and the
other aspects of FOSS have also come to be very important to me. I do
agree, fundamentally, with the four
freedoms laid out by the
Free Software Foundation:
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your
needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for
this.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor
(freedom 2).
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to
the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access
to the source code is a precondition for this.
And ultimately, in Michelle\'s perfect world, all software, all
content, all hardware, etc. would all be free (libre). But we don\'t
live in Michelle\'s perfect world, we live in this world. This broken,
very imperfect, very problematic, and quite capitalist world. And in
that world, I am a realist. I am ecstatic, and do many happy dances a
day, that there are people who write and support free software. I think
of myself as one of them (Besides working with NOSI,
I\'ve been involved in several projects over the years in varied
capacities.) The number of situations where one can still argue on a
functional and cost level that proprietary software is a better bet get
fewer and fewer. I could easily argue that for the overwhelming majority
of places you need an operating system, the free and open source
alternatives are better (if you count the BSD core of the Mac OS. If you
don\'t, it\'s still the majority.) There are innumerable really great
free and open source desktop applications that can run on any OS, and
there are more every day. And, surprisingly to me, I\'m quite happy that
lots of big corporations are now really getting into free and open
source software support. I think, ultimately, it\'s when big
corporations want to ditch Windows on the desktop that the biggest
strides will be made in Linux desktop usability and support. That\'s a
tide that will really lift all the boats. Bottom line for me: free and
open source software is about leveling the playing field, free access,
community benefit, and community control allows this. That\'s why I got
into it in the beginning, and that\'s why I\'m sticking around, and
doing what I can, even though I\'ll be using my Mac (with, of course, a
lot of free software applications on top.)
Continue
Reading
On 24 Jun, 2008 By mpm
With 12 Comments
I\'m doing a
webinar
on Linux Desktops next month, and it\'s making me think a lot about my
own experience using Linux on the desktop, and where I think things are
going. If you\'ve read this blog for a while, you\'ve heard my various
sagas around using Linux on the desktop. I
migrated
to making it my primary desktop about a year ago. I have had varied
problems,
from issues of software integration, video problems, wireless issues
... The list is getting very long. And, guess what? I\'m giving up. At
some point, when I\'ve saved up enough pennies, I\'m going to buy a Mac
laptop again. I\'ve basically switched to using my Mac mini for just
about everything except the bit of systems admin and coding I do,
because it\'s just so much easier to set up things on Linux for that
type of work. What happened was I felt like I was wasting too much time
on things that should be easy. It should be easy to plug in a new
monitor. It should be easy to get wireless, it should be easy to add a
new printer. It should be easy to play a DVD. These things are far from
the fault of Linux. On the Windows side the hardware manufacturers make
proprietary drivers for Windows, and very few make drivers for Linux, or
open source their drivers so that Linux developers can use them. On the
Mac side, Apple controls the hardware, so there never is a problem with
it. (And, of course, there are plenty of peripherals that don\'t work
with Macs.) And then there are the proprietary codecs and DRM, that are
all tied to an OS. So what does this mean for Linux on the desktop? This
experience has made me think a lot about where organizations should
think about using Linux, and where they should steer clear. My theory is
that where Linux is going really work is in dedicated devices built from
the ground up to run Linux, and used for relatively limited purposes.
The eePC is a great example, as are cell phones, media players, etc.
This is where Linux will shine. And, of course, there are some other
situations where Linux also shines: kiosks, internet cafes, computer
labs and email/web workstations. There isn\'t good reason, at this
point, *not* to use Linux there. I think it can also work for the
folks who perhaps use laptops as their primary machines, and don\'t do
anything except email and web. And, of course, always, for developers. I
probably will always have a Linux desktop around, even if it ends up
being a virtual machine, for the varied (small, at this point)
development projects I have going. It\'s just dead easy to use Linux for
development - easier than using the Mac, even though it has BSD as it\'s
basis. Where is Linux not a good idea? Most creatives and knowledge
workers who are not developers. There are just too many things we need -
too many cool new peripherals, we want to manipulate too many kinds of
data and media, etc. And we don\'t (at least I don\'t) want to spend to
much time getting all of that to work. And there still are lots of newer
software and services that aren\'t coming out in Linux versions (for
instance there does not exist a decent usable twitter client for Linux -
gwitter is not very usable at all, and the others just don\'t work.)
And, of course, designers need software that just don\'t have high
enough quality open source alternatives yet. I think that for a while,
at least, Linux won\'t be a good desktop option this broad group of
people. Which is unfortunate, and I hope it changes. Linux has made huge
usability strides in the past few years, as has open source software in
general, so I think the future is still bright.
Continue Reading
On 19 Jun, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Beth, of course, suggested
this,
and I\'m jumping on her bandwagon. I realized, in being introduced to
Edupunk, that I have been
doing it for, oh, almost 20 years now. In 1989, I joined the faculty of
Hampshire College (and stayed for 10 years).
Hampshire\'s motto is \"Non Satis Scire\" - to know is not enough. From
their website:
Some of the features that distinguish Hampshire from more traditional
liberal arts colleges include student-designed academic
concentrations; an active, collaborative, inquiry-based pedagogy; an
interdisciplinary curriculum; and a narrative evaluation system.
Sounds a lot like Edupunk, doesn\'t it? But in the nonprofit realm, my
perspective on helping nonprofit organizations with technology issues
has a lot to do with client empowerment, learning based on what\'s
needed at the moment, and active collaboration. I got a chance to test
this out in a more orchestrated way (as opposed to the usual
consultant/client interactions) when I facilitated/taught an
OpenOffice.org
\"untraining\"
earlier this month at Google HQ in NYC (some more details are on the
Google
Blog.)
I learned a lot. The unconference/camp model of learning about
technology issues is really great, but falls a little short when dealing
with a specific tool, and an audience that is mostly unfamiliar with it.
So the model that I am coming up with is a combination of that model,
and what I would call an \"inquiry based\" model - helping people in a
more structured way come up with specific questions and problems before
the event, and then use the event to collaboratively answer those
questions, and solve those problems. The questions and problems are
generated exactly from the needs of the participants - what do they need
to do? Anyway, I do hope at some point to have a chance to do this kind
of thing again. And I think it would be great to have an nptechpunk mini
movement!
Continue Reading
On 17 Jun, 2008 By mpm
With 4 Comments
That\'s what I said to Tompkins Spann, of Convio, when he told me last
week (after I duly signed the requisite NDA) that Convio was going into
the donor database
business
by building an app on top of Salesforce.com. Actually, I didn\'t use the
Battlestar Galactica
expletive,
I used the one you\'re more familiar with. :-) Convio is launching the
new application, built
on top of the
Force.com
platform. It is named, as of now, Aikido. It has the kind of
functionality you\'d expect from a donor database. It seems in a
business sense, to be a brilliant move. Leverage the power of the open
platform of Salesforce.com, and do the work that nonprofits (and
consultants) have been having to do to bang Salesforce.com into shape as
a donor database. And make it reasonably priced. They are starting with
a \"charter\" program - a few nonprofit organizations, to iron out all
of the varied issues, both technical and logistical, I imagine. This ups
the ante major league for Blackbaud, for sure, as well as other long
time desktop donor database providers. It may, depending on pricing,
even give the open source CiviCRM a bit of competition. And it means an
interesting dance for those in the nonprofit salesforce community. Of
course, the proof will be in the pudding - we\'ll find out over time how
this app works, and whether organizations like it. But the whole CRM
field just got more interesting.
Continue Reading
On 11 Jun, 2008 By mpm
- The Tides Foundation is accepting applications for the 2008 Antonio
Pizzigati prize, a \$10,000 annual
award for outstanding contributions to software in the public
interest. The competition, judged by a panel of national leaders in
public interest computing, is now entering its third year. The
application deadline for this year's prize: September 1, 2008. Last
year\'s winner was Barry Warsaw, lead developer of the awesome
Mailman mailing list manager.
- Ruby Sinreich is a new
phenomenon! You go girl!
- NTEN keeps surprising me with cool stuff for nonprofit tech peeps.
And I\'m on the board! Check out the book
club,
reading Media Rules!:
Mastering Today\'s Technology to Connect with and Keep Your
Audience, by Brian Reich
and Dan Solomon.
- Check out the new images and videos of
Android,
the open source phone. And the video with the kids is very cute.
Wait for this, or buy an iPhone? I might wait, depending on
carriers...
Continue Reading
On 10 Jun, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
{.alignright
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height="282"} Today, someone
on the progressive exchange
list asked about a tool
called Rapleaf. A story about Rapleaf in
Clickz (a newsletter for online marketers) says
this:
Rapleaf allows you to quickly and inexpensively find out the social
networking footprint of those you\'re marketing to. Just send the
company your e-mail list and tell it what social networking sites
those on your list are using, their demographics, the numbers of
friends they have, how many widgets they\'re using, even their
interests. Rapleaf digs into the usual social networking sites
(Facebook, MySpace, etc.), as well as newsgroups, commerce sites (like
Amazon), review sites, forums, and news groups, and even searches the
general Web to find out where your people are and what they\'re doing
online.
An interesting conversation ensued on the list - with some arguing that
this was a problematic thing. I actually thought this could be quite
useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources
in the Web 2.0 space. But that\'s not the point of this post. I realized
that one of the most important things that we can do is educate the
organizations we work with (as well as individuals) about privacy issues
and data. When is data public? When is it private? How do we know? How
can we assure privacy? It is important to understand that Rapleaf is
just gathering public information on people, based on their email
addresses. It is an inevitable result of our desire for social networks,
as well as our desire for information to be portable (like in RSS
feeds.) What\'s important is that we understand what is actually public,
and what isn\'t, and how to keep what we want to be private, really
private.
Continue
Reading
On 29 May, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
NTEN just released their CMS satisfaction
survey.
There is some great food for thought, although in some ways, the results
aren\'t so surprising. Most people (67%) want an easy to use interface.
Most people (57%) also want ongoing support. The single largest CMS used
was Drupal, at 15%, followed by Plone and Joomla (approx 8% each.)
Wordpress (which was not originally in the survey, they parsed this data
out from the \"other\" category) was at 2%. Further, in looking more at
the \"other\" category (which made up 29% of the CMS) there were quite a
number of other FOSS CMS, including ImpressCMS, Zope, Movable Type, and
Typo3. All of the free and open source options did quite well in
terms of Quality, Usability, and Value. The other questions, that are
really more geared toward particular vendors, for FOSS CMS are not
really applicable to the CMS itself, but to the consultants or vendors
who implement it - which is bound to be variable. Only two proprietary
CMS systems, Antharia\'s and Ektron, had scores as good as the open
source CMS.The CMS options from the big three (er, now the big two)
didn\'t score as well. Anyway, the survey report, and survey data are
worth looking at if you are shopping for a CMS.
Continue Reading
On 29 May, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
In retrospect, this probably was inevitable. And I\'m sure that the
very low stock
price of Kintera\'s
certainly made a buyout of it by Blackbaud easier. Today, Blackbaud
announced the acquisition of
Kintera. So,
there is now one less nonprofit CRM vendor to choose from, and Blackbaud
keeps getting bigger. But will it get better as a result? Hard to know.
In Kintera, Blackbaud certainly got it\'s hands on a platform with
pretty good open APIs (Allan Benamer
argues
they are better than Convio\'s.) Will they continue in that direction?
Blackbaud\'s other recent acquisition, eTapestry, did open up their
APIs
recently, although they leave much to be desired. It will be interesting
to watch what happens with Kintera, and especially, what happens with
their APIs. And how will Convio react? And, of course there is still
Salesforce.com, as well as the developing realm of free and open source
options, like CiviCRM. It\'s going to get interesting, for sure. But, in
all honesty, if I were part of the teams of any of those options, there
would be no shaking of boots because of this merge. Update: Allan
Benamer has some more
information
that\'s worth reading.
Continue Reading
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On 20 May, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
Yesterday, the big news is that Google
Health launched. Google says:
\"Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our
overall mission of organizing patient information and making it
accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be
empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records
online.\"
Sounds pretty interesting, but hold on a second. Before you sign up,
read the privacy
policy carefully. And
note: this application is not
HIPAA
compliant. Here\'s
why.
They do have a point - since they don\'t provide health services, they
don\'t need to comply with HIPAA. The language (especially in this
table) seems to suggest that
the privacy they are providing is better than HIPAA. I\'m not so sure,
and, in the end, it comes down to \"trust us\". I\'m just not so sure
how far I should trust Google with my health care data. It gives me
enough pause to trust them with my email.
Continue
Reading
On 19 May, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
There are some really interesting tidbits of stuff out there. Here are a
few: The blog at the Nonprofit Times, called \"Don\'t Tell the Donor\"
has a very interesting entry on the flurry of benchmarking studies that
came out recently. It\'s titled \"Benchmarking With a Warped
Stick.\" It takes
aim at Convio\'s recent benchmarking study. To their credit Convio asks
this question on their
blog:
\"Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer
these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply
self-serving marketing fluff?\" What do you think? This is what I think:
Convio should partner with neutral players to underwrite benchmarking
studies that get data from a much wider sample of organizations than
just their clients. Everyone (including them) gets better data.
Speaking of metrics, Drew Bernard has an awesome
post
about how to use web analytics based on the functions of specific pages
or sites. Way to go! Allan Benamer points out that Kintera is about to
be
delisted
by NASDAQ. Blackbaud hasn\'t been doing so
well, in the stock price department
either. Commenters on Allan\'s post wonder about the fate of Convio\'s
IPO. It does make me think a lot about this whole space, and wonder if
the fast moving train of Salesforce, and the slower moving trains of the
open source alternatives, are beginning to bear down on the old guard,
and how they will respond to them (or not, which would spell doom.)
Speaking of the responses of the old guard, eTapestry, which was bought
by Blackbaud last year, is opening up it\'s API this
week.
Allan, in his inimitable way, points out how bad the
API is. And yeah
after reading the docs, I agree, it\'s bad. So is it good news, when
companies open APIs that don\'t make it easy to really use? Are these
attempts at \"OpenAPIWashing\" (my new term for companies that might
spend more \$ promoting their APIs than actually developing them) or are
they just steps along the way to finally really good, solid, usable
APIs? Time will tell.
Continue Reading
On 12 May, 2008 By mpm
As you\'ve probably noticed, I haven\'t been blogging a whole lot
lately. I\'ve been pretty busy with a variety of projects. I\'ll be on
hiatus for about another week, and will have some long awaited new FOSS
tools, as well as other posts that have been brewing for a while.
Continue Reading
On 23 Apr, 2008 By mpm
NTEN is doing some great work getting information
about the use of different kinds of tools in the sector, and how people
are using them. and how they like them. They are doing a CMS
satisfaction survey, and the more info that they get, the better. So go
rate your
CMS!
Continue Reading
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On 21 Apr, 2008 By mpm
In honor of the webinar
that is happening in a couple of weeks, I figured I\'d talk a bit about
CiviCRM. CiviCRM is a nonprofit-focused open
source tool, centered around membership, fundraising, events and such.
CiviCRM was one of the first (of a now growing number) of
nonprofit-focused open source tools. It originally came out of the idea
of making moving eBase (the CRM based on Filemaker
Pro) to the web. CiviCRM has 4 basic components: CiviContribute,
CiviMail, CiviMember, and CiviEvents - which allow you to track
contacts, donations, members, send out email blasts, have event
registration, etc. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0,
which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality.
CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need
CRM functionality. In order to insure email deliverability on blasts,
you\'ll need to have it hosted somewhere where they are actively dealing
with whitelists, etc. Otherwise, it\'s easy to host it on a generic
hosting account, if you don\'t need that functionality. It can integrate
with both Drupal or Joomla, and there is a new stand-alone version as
well. Drupal integration is better, but there is a lot of active
development going into improving the Joomla integration. CiviCRM ranked
#1 in satisfaction in the recent NTEN CRM satisfaction
survey.
Continue
Reading
On 17 Apr, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I guess because I\'m a blogger, I get these interesting tidbits in my
mailbox. I don\'t always have a lot of time to investigate them, or
figure out if they are useful, but I do like to not completely ignore
the ones that look interesting. I do hope folks will comment if they
know something about these, or have an opinion.
- ReviewBasics is a collaborative
editing and reviewing tool. I\'ve perused the demos, and it does
look like it would be useful for reviews of things like specs,
wireframes, etc.
- Zoomgrants looks like it is trying to be
some sort of one-stop-shop for grantors and grantees. As a funder,
you can put up RFPs (at a cost), and people can apply directly
online. It looks interesting, and potentially useful. I wonder how
many foundations will go for it, though. I started a little Twitter
conversation about it, and people seemed intrigued.
- BlueAvocado is a new online
blog/magazine/website specifically for folks who work in and with
nonprofits. It looks very promising. I\'m looking forward to reading
it.
- Convio is getting into some interesting territory these days.
They\'ve been doing some nonprofit
research.
They have released two studies, one on the \"wired wealthy\" and
another which is a \"nonprofit benchmark index\" study - basically
providing some benchmarks for organizations to measure themselves
against, traffic, email newsletter click through rates, etc. It\'s
actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read. Of course,
it\'s only a study of Convio\'s clients - but it\'s interesting
nonetheless.
Continue Reading
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On 14 Apr, 2008 By mpm
With 3
Comments
I am so far behind, it\'s not funny. I\'ve got to catch up. My goal
is to catch up by the end of this month, so that I\'ll still be on track
to make it to 100 free and open source tools by December. This post
gives me the chance to finally write the very belated post on
MPower I\'ve been meaning to write since I
got back from NTC.
MPower is not a new product. It\'s been around for quite a while, and
has a solid user base. It is an enterprise-class client/server CRM, and
has the kind of features you see in such packages as Blackbaud\'s
Raiser\'s Edge. What\'s new about MPower is that it has very recently
been released as open source. I had a great sit-down with Randy
McCabe, CEO and Leo
D\'Angelo (CTO) of
MPower at NTC. I heard a lot about the product, and their plans, and I
was impressed with their thinking, and with the direction they are
heading. Their basic idea makes a lot of sense to me, and it clearly is
an idea that lots of companies that release open source products are
thinking: don\'t increase revenue by trying to milk as many current
customers as possible (which is, frankly, the goal of many proprietary
software vendors, especially those with very niche packages without much
potential for growth in customer base,) broaden the number of customers
out there greatly by making barrier to entry low. They expect to make up
the difference in revenue that they got from licenses from services sold
to a greater number of organizations that would not have been customers
otherwise. Lots of open source companies (RedHat, MySQL AB, Novell,
Alfresco, SugarCRM, Canonical) are doing similar things. For you
purists: don\'t get all upset. Yes, it\'s a Windows product. Yes, it\'s
written in .NET and C#. Yes, it requires MSSQL server. So what? It\'s
open source, and it is yet another option for organizations - and it is
an open source replacement for Raiser\'s Edge. How cool is that? And
it\'s open source - so someone who really cares can port it to work with
MySQL, etc. And, it\'s got completely open APIs. All of that said, there
are a few things I hope that they consider. I hope that they decide to
go with an OSI approved license (they are currently using their own,
which is a modification of the Apache license. Having looked at it,
it\'s a fine license, but it would help them if they used one that is
known already, like the GPL, or LGPL, etc.) They also have, at this
point, no community. They have a partner program, which is like a lot of
partner programs - you have to be vetted, yadda yadda. Not at all in
alignment with the open source ethic. They need to open their doors,
make installing MPower easy (it\'s not, at this point) and set up some
community functions to help grow a community around the product, which
will help it grow, and really help to begin to provide the avenues for
developers to get involved, and continue to help build the product.
I\'ll be following MPower closely over the next months and years. I have
high hopes for it. And Blackbaud may well be shaking in their boots.
Here\'s some other coverage:
Continue
Reading
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On 14 Apr, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I like hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants.
Mostly, because I get to read blogs by people that aren\'t on my list of
feeds I read regularly. And I get to highlight the work of some of my
favorite bloggers, too. Joanne Fritz asks the
question
that is probably on the minds of lots of folks in the nonprofit sector:
what are we going to do in facing the current problematic economic
climate? She suggests not to panic, and not to change course - keep
steady, and keep communicating. SOX First, which is a new blog to me,
and focuses on
Sarbanes-Oxely
compliance, asks whether nonprofits hold the ethical high
ground.
Their answer: they may well be losing ground. James Young, writing on
Convio\'s newish blog, Connection
Cafe, talks about how to find, and
create,
influencers.
What are \"influencers?\" Read the blog entry. It\'s pretty interesting.
Marketing and Fundraising Ideas tells us about how not to
ask
for a major gift. There is an interesting case
study
of the marketing of Tampax and Africa on the Cause Related Marketing
Blog. And Katya tells us why Seth Godin is
right
about people being lazy and in a hurry, and gives us some tips on how to
use that. And lastly, since I\'m hosting, I get to mention my recent
post on
Twitter and nonprofits. Next week, the Carnival is being hosted at A
Small Change - Fundraising Blog.
Continue
Reading
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On 11 Apr, 2008 By mpm
(Photo by
frankienose) I\'m
hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
here, next week. So send in your best of the week!
Continue
Reading
On 10 Apr, 2008 By mpm
With 9 Comments
This actually was a post to the Progressive
Exchange discussion
list. I love twitter, which in some ways surprises me, and in some ways
doesn\'t. It provides for me a sense of community, and a sense of what
people I know and care about things I care about are talking about (in a
certain realm, on other realms, not so much). I think that Twitter is,
in many ways, a harbinger of the future - I think eventually, a lot of
things that happen between people over the net will work a lot like
twitter, even if it\'s not actually twitter - social networks carrying
short snippets of people\'s thoughts, ideas and events. But right now,
at this moment, twitter\'s demographic is both tiny and highly
nonrepresentative of the population of the world. It is made up of
people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend
inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices. We are
still in innovator phase here, not even early adopters have signed on.
There is no question that you will get out of twitter what you give.
And, wow, yeah, you can be highly successful in twitter. And so what on
earth does that []{.moz-txt-tag}really[]{.moz-txt-tag} mean? If your
organization\'s mission will be greatly benefited by making connections
with the twitter demographic then, yeah, twitter makes tons of sense.
And organizations and movements can certainly use twitter to organize -
I think that\'s a great strategy - as long as the majority of those to
be organized are on twitter - which is quite a stretch for most orgs or
movements. But there is no way on earth that I am going to suggest that
a client of mine whose demographic is mostly women over 50 that they
even spend any time on twitter in trying to accomplish their mission, or
even get the word out about what they are doing. Should the
communications person use twitter to connect with other nonprofit
communications professionals? Heck, yeah, I could easily argue it will
help them in their work. Should they spend a bit of time tying their RSS
feed (if they have one) to a twitter account? Sure, why not. But should
the organization as a whole put resources into a \"twitter strategy\"?
Or even a social network strategy? I\'d be really hard pressed to
suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that. I know
that people are doing fantastic work around the ways in which social
networks can be powerful tools. And there are, for sure, some
interesting case studies. And there are also some organizations for whom
this makes sense, and who have the resources, and are ready to take good
advantage of all of these tools, including twitter. But from my
perspective, working with organizations that are sometimes having a hard
time moving from a static website to a CMS, social networks in general,
and twitter specifically, are a long way away. I feel like what happens
all the time is that we nptechies grab onto a new technology, and the
first thing we think is that we gotta get organizations using it. And
people in orgs hear all this buzz about this thing or that thing, and
feel hard pressed and stressed to get on the bandwagon. And I feel like
we don\'t spend enough time thinking about whether or not it is
appropriate - whether it makes sense, whether it really is going to
benefit the mission of the organizations we work with.
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On 03 Apr, 2008 By mpm
Here\'s a few interesting tidbits gleaned from the net:
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On 27 Mar, 2008 By mpm
Someone mentioned to me that from what I write on my blog, she wouldn\'t
know what it is that I actually do in my consulting work. I kinda
thought that was surprising, but in thinking about what I write, I
realize that people could get the wrong idea (or, more accurately, fail
to get the right idea.) And, I guess truthfully, the blurb on my
consulting site is
kinda dry. Gotta work on that. So, what do I do? I think of myself in
these terms: I educate, facilitate, mediate, and problem-solve. For
one client, I am their technology go-to person, since they are really
small, and have no tech staff. I don\'t implement much for them
(although in a pinch, I\'ll set something up, or fix a specific
problem.) But I help them plan their technology initiatives (a new
database, a new website, etc.,) help them find the vendors that will do
the work by helping them craft good RFPs. I answer all of their tech
questions, and solve pretty much all of their tech problems (mostly by
helping them figure out who they should call.) I\'ll be the project
manager on their big new client database project, and help them think
about how far to dip their toes into Web 2.0. For another client, I
helped them vet vendors for their new website, taught them the
difference between Joomla, Drupal and Plone, and I helped free them from
a vendor who was particularly egregious in their hosting charges, among
other things. (\$1200/month for an old and therefore crappy custom CMS
and not much support. I. Kid. You. Not. I myself wrote a custom CMS a
long time ago that would be considered crap now, so I don\'t blame them
for that, but the charges???) For a third client, I helped them
translate their ideas about what they wanted their website to do, to
things that could actually be implemented in a CMS. I helped them vet
CMS vendors, make sure the CMS that was chosen could do the complex job
they were asking it to do (some were not up to the task) and am the
intermediary between the current web vendor and the client, lending my
expertise as needed, and helping to move the project forward. I think my
clients benefit from one particular thing that I think is pretty unique.
Although I am deeply experienced and knowledgeable in implementation of
technology, from networks to web applications and databases (I really
know how DNS works, can write a left outer join in SQL, and know the
difference between REST and SOAP) since I don\'t do implementation or
coding anymore, I\'m not wedded to one set of technologies. I can bridge
the gap between technology vendors and clients in a way that is pretty
unusual, and, honestly, that I\'m proud of. I know when a vendor knows
their technology, and when they are blowing sales language at me, and
might not be up to the technical task. I can evaluate previous projects
based on what I see is the underlying complexity, and figure out how
much experience a vendor has had with a particular set of problems. I
know when a technology is really appropriate, and when it\'s not. I have
other kinds of projects as well - those that use my talents somewhat
differently. I do a ton
of technical writing, and I have become the \"documentation
facilitator\" of the OpenMRS project
- it is an open source medical records system, designed to serve clinics
in low-resource areas (such as sub-sarahan Africa) that treat patients
with HIV/AIDS. Since we\'re starting with the developer documentation,
one of the coolest things about this project is that it\'s making me
learn Java and
Eclipse, plus get
my hands dirty with
Tomcat. Yum! I love
learning new stuff. I like the range of projects I do. I\'d like to do
more of all of it. I\'d also love to consult with for-profit vendors who
are thinking about dipping their toes into offering support for open
source projects, or open sourcing their software. OK, enough of that.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. :-)
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On 27 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
Since I\'ve been covering CRMs for the webinar today, I figured I\'d
switch categories on my free and open source software list. So for the
next few tools, I\'ll be describing CRMs
(Constituent/Contact/Community/Customer Relationship Management). The
first one is one that I\'ve been using recently for my consulting
business - SugarCRM. Unlike CiviCRM,
which is targeted to nonprofits, SugarCRM is a system targeted toward
sales in for-profit companies. It has three versions: Enterprise,
Professional, and Community Edition. That\'s the one I\'ve been using.
They also have a newer on-demand version (that is, software as a
service, like salesforce.) I\'ve been hearing good things about SugarCRM
from organizations that use it. It also gets kudos from NTEN\'s
satisfaction survey (it came
in third, after CiviCRM and Salesforce.) Anyway, SugarCRM is basically
\"enterprise class\" CRM, and is worth a look.
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Reading
On 26 Mar, 2008 By mpm
I\'ll be doing a webinar on open source
CRMs
tomorrow. In the process of going deep into those CRMs, I\'ve been
thinking about how nonprofits might choose CRMs to begin with. Of
course, all nonprofits already have a CRM (even if it is a spreadsheet)
- the issue is, generally, migration to a new system, or integration
with what they already have to add new features. Idealware has a great
article on CRMs,
and how they are different, and how you can begin to figure out what
might work best. I also wrote a software choice
worksheet,
that can help with the process of looking at a wide variety of tools.
One of the fascinating things to me is how quickly the CRM space is
evolving. New open source players entering
the market (more on them soon), high satisfaction for other open source
tools, and SaaS vendors throwing the doors open so that nonprofits can
integrate their systems well (I\'m psyched to hear about all the new
connectors, mashups and apps happening all the time.) The lesson here, I
think, is that CRM, even for large organizations, is changing rapidly,
and the days are numbered where systems that are expensive, proprietary,
and closed rule. I\'m glad to see that. And I think that nonprofits
should make sure when they choose to look at the wide range of options,
some of which are very cost-effective, and open. And you don\'t need to
feel overwhelmed by vendor sales-talk - it\'s possible to get things
translated to language you understand. After the webinar, I\'ll be
putting the slides up in varied places, and NTEN will have a recording
of the webinar.
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On 24 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
It was a great week. I got to see lots of people that I only see once a
year (or even less often,) I got to meet a lot of new people, I had
interesting and deep conversations, and I got to hear a lot about what
people are thinking about the nonprofit technology field. I\'ve got
several posts on tap about specific aspects of the conference, or
specific products and such that I\'d come across during my time at NTC
last week, so stick around. I want to give huge props to Holly and all
of the NTEN crew for putting on a fabulous conference. It was incredibly
well organized and smooth running, the food and snacks were great, and
the parties rocked. The conference was rich with great speakers and
content, and it\'s great to see how far things have come. And, as a
member of the NTEN board, I\'m really proud of what\'s been
accomplished. There are, of course, some tweaks we can make to make sure
that everyone really can gain value from NTC, and we can sustain the
richness that it contains. And I\'m already looking forward to NTC in
San Francisco in 2009!
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On 20 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 7 Comments
I\'ve been having a great time here at NTC - running into lots of folks
I\'m happy to see again, and meet, learning about new things, being
involved. I don\'t have lots of leisure to go into detail about what\'s
happening here, but I thought I\'d highlight a few things, and then when
I get back home, and have time for it all to digest, I\'ll write in much
more detail.
I\'m looking forward to having time to digest all that has happened
here.
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On 17 Mar, 2008 By mpm
Tomorrow, I step off the plane in New Orleans, to go to the Nonprofit
Technology Conference, and see folks I only
get to see once a year, meet new people, chat and hang out with people
I\'ve been emailing/blog commenting/twittering, etc. I\'m looking
forward to it. I\'m on the Evaluating Open
Source
panel, with Laura Quinn and Catherine Lane, which should be great. I\'m
also holding the consultant spot on the panel \"Changing your CEO from
barrier to
partner\"
with Marnie Webb, David Geilhufe, and Steve Heye. Lots of wonderful
folks, should be great panels. I\'m in a little bit different of a place
this year, than last. Last year I was just re-emerging from having taken
a break to go to seminary, and not quite exactly sure what I was doing.
This year, I\'m much more clear about the directions my work is going
in, and what I\'m looking for at NTC. And of course, there is Penguin
Day!! I\'m
excited to be doing it again, in a new city, with some great partners,
including Aspiration, of course,
Joomla, PICnet, and the
Chicago Technology Cooperative. I think
it will be a great time. (And I hope to bring home a penguin!) So, if
you want to catch up with me, email, and I\'ll send you my phone # so
you can call or text me, or twitter me.
Continue Reading
On 13 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
In a surprising move, the US Navy will stop buying proprietary hardware
and software, and only buy open
systems.
["The days of proprietary technology must come to an end," he said. "We
will no longer accept systems that couple hardware, software and data."
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Basically, it seems the motivation is that open systems allow them to
upgrade their capabilities rapidly, and they need to be able to share
data freely. This could be a watershed moment. The process of
governments in Europe starting to shift to open source software, and
software that used open standards, rapidly increased the use of FOSS in
Europe. It could happen here.
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On 10 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Michele Martin, one of my fave bloggers, has a great post today on
Reflective
Practice.
Both reflective practice - that is the process of reflecting on what you
do, and how you do it, as well as conscious, deliberate evaluation of
projects, are things that are not very common in our field, nor things
that are valued or encouraged. In many ways, we are focused on solving
technology problems, or completing projects. But I have really come
to believe that the way that we work with people is as important as the
\"final\" outcome. We might be able to build the most wizz-bang amazing
website ever (in a technological sense) but if we haven\'t really
thought about how we moved through the project, never evaluated how the
project really went, and didn\'t learn from the process, in the end, the
project wasn\'t the success it seemed to be. In fact, it\'s amazing how
much we can learn from projects that might be considered failures by
technological criteria. In the last few months, I was involved in
helping three organizations choose vendors for varied technology
projects, and in the course of that time, I talked with almost a dozen
technology vendors of one type or another. One question I asked all of
them was about whether they had a process of reflection and evaluation
of their work, as it was going on, and when the project was coming to a
close. Unfortunately, none of them had an answer to that question. That
is something I would love to see change.
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On 09 Mar, 2008 By mpm
As some of you who follow me on Twitter
know, I ran into frustrations a few days ago with
WPA. In Kubuntu,
the distribution of Ubuntu I had installed, the WPA-enabled Network
Manager isn\'t installed by default (or at least it seemed not to have
been installed when I did it - could have been my fault.) I knew that I
should do it at some point, but I hadn\'t encountered a WPA network
until last week, so I hadn\'t bothered. Needless to say, I\'m doing that
right now. But what I realized was that the whole WPA thing with my
laptop added to the pile of \"little problems I haven\'t solved yet.\"
Now, of course, as a techie, and someone with a home network, and
multiple computers, and varied projects, there is always a list like
this. But I\'ve come to realize that now that I use Linux as my primary
desktop, this list has grown much, much larger than it ever has been.
- After spending close to five hours on the X windows/driver problem
I vented
about
last week. I gave up. I attached the nice brand-spanking new monitor
to my Mac Mini, and have been quite enjoying using it. Needless to
say, I did absolutely nothing to get it to work. Plugged it in, and
it just worked.
- It took me a couple of frustrating hours or so to configure samba
(editing the samba.conf file and testing) so that I could share my
home directory, with music and video, with my other computers, and
share my printer. Of course with my mac, I opened up the system
preferences, checked a button, and, voila! Directories were shared.
- I have outstanding issues or decisions to make with my kernel not
seeing all the memory I\'ve given it (therefore requiring a
recompile, which I have been postponing for weeks) sound, a webcam,
a scanner, and accounting software. And there were several problems
I never solved - including syncing calendars and addressbooks,
finding a good time tracker. The problems I \"solved\" by offloading
the functions onto the web.
There are several issues here, of course. First, although I\'ve used
Linux on the server for so many years, so I\'m used to getting things
done via the command line, my primary desktop was a Mac for 20 years, so
I am GUI spoiled. So desktop functions (as opposed to server functions)
that some people probably find trivially easy to do with the command
line, I\'m looking for a good GUI. Also, having used a Mac for so long,
I\'m also \"it just works\" spoiled. In fact, what\'s funny is that
things that do in fact \"just work\" with Linux almost surprise me. And,
as Dustin pointed out in the comments to my venting post earlier, a lot
of this is not the fault of open source desktop software developers.
Hardware vendors don\'t release drivers for Linux, or if they do, they
remain proprietary. This does, for sure, hobble the usability of Linux
on the desktop. Apple has the luxury of a hardware monopoly, so of
course things are more likely to \"just work.\" And, of course, there
has been a lot of resources and money poured into server software for
Linux, but not as much for tools for the desktop. This is my dilemma. I
am committed to the ethos of free software. And I\'ve talked about how
the means and the ends are the same - so it\'s important to me to use
open source tools. But I also have to get work done for my clients. And
I have to eat, too. Adding extra hours to the week dealing with
technology problems are hours I don\'t spend working with clients. (I
estimate that 2-3 additional hours/week are spent just because I use
Linux on the desktop.) The WPA fiasco a few days ago fell exactly at the
moment when some really important work needed to get done for a client -
so it sometimes hampers my ability to get things done. I do demand a lot
of my system. I\'ve got tons of peripherals, I\'m constantly changing
and modifying things - I\'m a power user. If pretty much all I did was
documents, email and the web, like many people, I wouldn\'t be having
these issues. I guess I\'m looking to find the right balance, being able
to use Linux on the desktop, and actually not feel too bogged down in
problems I need to solve. But I\'m not there yet. Not only have I
offloaded functions to the web, I\'m beginning to offload some things to
my Mac again (like scanning.) It\'s easier for me to think about
spending minutes rather than hours getting things to work.
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On 09 Mar, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I\'m running behind, so I need to catch up in the next week or so. I\'m
still on internet clients, believe it or not, and still have some to go.
Today, I\'m talking about Flock. Flock is the
\"social browser.\" For bookmarking, it uses your del.icio.us account.
It can bring in your photos (and the photos of your contacts) from
flickr. It can keep track of your Twitter friends, etc. You can also use
it as a blog editor, which I am going to start trying out. It\'s
amazingly good. I\'d tried it a couple of years ago, and it was buggy,
crashed, and seemed like something that was a great idea, but not
realized. Now, it\'s realized. It\'s really quite nice. It\'s based on
Mozilla Firefox, and apparently the developers of Flock contribute a
fair bit back to the Firefox codebase.
Update: I\'ve been using it now as my default browser for the last day
or so, and it is really growing on me.
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On 03 Mar, 2008 By mpm
Somehow, given that tomorrow is such a big day in the political realm,
it seems quite appropriate that I\'m headed down to DC to give a talk at
the Politics Online Conference. It\'s a
conference that is an event of the Institute for Politics, Democracy
and the Internet. I\'ve never been - online politics
has never really been my focus. But I\'m quite looking forward to it.
I\'m giving a talk on the panel on Open Sourced
Advocacy, where
I\'ll be speaking with my colleagues Ryan Ozimek (of
PICnet) and Jo Lee (of
CitizenSpeak), as well as Michael
Haggerty, of Trellon, and Alan
Rosenblatt,
of the Center for American Progress. I\'m looking forward to talking
about free and open source software to this audience.
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On 29 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 8
Comments
OK, so we all know that I have been eating my own dogfood (that is,
using Linux on the desktop) for a while now. I even decided not to buy
Leopard for my Mac Mini. And, for the most part, I\'ve been happy. I\'ve
been able to do everything I need to do, and do it well. But there have
been a few snags along this road, and I hit a very big one yesterday. I
got this brand new, wonderful LCD monitor - 22\", high contrast,
1680x1050 resolution - I was happy. I thought I\'d be a pig in sh*t - I
have been living with an ancient, ancient 15\" LCD with dying pixels for
a while. But Nooooooooo. No happiness for me. None. I spent 3 hours
struggling with the Nvidia drivers (that\'s the on-board video that my
motherboard has) and my xorg configurations still don\'t work. (X
Windows and xorg - the current software
implementation of X Windows - is the way that Linux displays the
graphical user interface.) Every combination of a new version of
xorg.conf leads me down a garden path to nowhere. I downloaded the
brand-spanking new nvidia drivers, so that I\'d be ready to deal with
such a high resolution. No go. At this point, I still have to futz with
the configs every time I start up, and it still isn\'t right. I\'ll send
off queries to the right mailing lists and forums, and probably
eventually get it all worked out. But plugging in a new monitor just
should not be this hard. X Windows has always been the bane of my
existence. I really have come to think that xorg has it in for me. My
refrain about it has always been \"I hatesssss xorg, I hatesss it.\"
Someone in an IRC channel last night who was trying to help me as I tore
my hair out said \"why does xorg suck so bad?\" With all of the amazing
examples of really great free and open source software, here is an
example of one that just isn\'t what it should be.
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On 26 Feb, 2008 By mpm
Miro used to be called \"Democracy Player\".
Miro is basically a video player, which can recognize RSS feeds, and
automatically download videos. There are channels for everything. PBS
has quite a number, as do various and sundry video podcasters. I get
Democracy Now, ABC politics, the Webb Alert (a daily geek news headlines
show,) Bill Moyers Journal, and lots of others. It can download videos
via Bittorrent as well. You can search YouTube, Google video or about 10
other video sites, and make those searches a new channel. It\'s a pretty
amazing tool. And it makes disseminating your organizational videos easy
as well. It\'s cross-platform (available on all platforms) and works
really well (the old player was a bit buggy, but those have been really
smoothed out, of late.) It is, I imagine, what the future of television
will be.
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On 18 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 10 Comments
This is a rant. And it is a rant on behalf of the hundreds (thousands?)
of nonprofit organizations whose website is stuck behind a custom CMS -
one that was written by some web development shop or another, and
migration off of that custom CMS is going to be a nightmare. As the
author of a custom CMS (it did have the advantage that it was released
as open source, but it never caught on, so it still counts as custom) I
know what it is like to put my heart and soul (and time) into a CMS, and
want my clients to get what they want. I wrote that CMS back before
there were any really good open source ones, like most of the custom CMS
out there. But, that was then, and this is now. There are quite a
number of really good CMS systems (both open source and proprietary -
I\'d say there are a good solid dozen) that have large user bases, many
developers and vendors who implement them, and their are lots of new
modules and functionality being added every day. There is absolutely no
way that one single web development shop can provide a CMS solution that
is better in quality or functionality than what is available out there
right now. In fact, even if you just focus on the \"big three\" open
source CMS - Drupal, Joomla and Plone, 85% of nonprofits will likely
have their needs fully met. The other 15% might want or need a more
specialized CMS (like OpenACS, or a proprietary one,) or might need some
modules developed for them. Most custom CMS that I\'ve seen lately are
sorely lacking in features and/or usability, in comparison to what\'s
out there, and available. Of course, one could argue that migration off
of one of the more popular CMS to another one is difficult - as
difficult as migration off of a custom CMS. This isn\'t the case for a
couple of reasons: 1) The more popular these CMS get, the more people
need migration help, and the more resources are available for them (just
google \"joomla drupal
migration\".)
2) More people than just the person who set the CMS up can help do the
migration. Unfortunately, relationships with vendors go bad, and being
stuck with data in a custom CMS makes migration away from a bad
relationship that much harder. This is the moment for nonprofits to
stop accepting proposals with custom CMS, and to make it clear in the
RFP that a custom CMS will not be acceptable. It\'s also the time for
web developers to let their babies go, and start building their business
on a well-developed CMS. (Hint: I hear there is way more Drupal demand
than supply of expertise.)
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On 15 Feb, 2008 By mpm
Azureus (now called Azureus Vuze) is
the best
bittorrent
client I have ever used. It\'s quite amazing. It\'s got a lot under the
hood. Way more than I could even talk about intelligently. But that is
great - if you know your stuff, you can get a lot of performance out of
Azureus. Bittorrent is a bit of an arcane art (and, of course, getting a
bit of a bad rep, since it\'s the major avenue for P2P pirating.) It is
cross-platform and written in Java (and, I think, shows off the strength
of the Java framework.) People have written all sorts of cool
plug-ins for it. The
next version of Azureus, called Vuze, which I
haven\'t yet used, looks like it incorporates a media player and
channels and such. Basically, becoming a serious competitor for
Miro, which I\'ll talk about in the next
post. This isn\'t really such a useful tool for most organizations,
although having a bittorent client around for downloading Linux ISO
images is really useful, and on breaks, you can watch the occasional
episode of the Daily Show... (just kidding.)
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Reading
On 14 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
These are tidbits of things I\'ve gotten recently from vendors, or
gotten via feeds or twitter.
- Kintera opens a Developers
Challenge.
Developers who code solutions that integrate with Kintera using
their open API platform,
Connect,
can win \$15,000 or \$5,000 (not the \$25 K their big logo seems to
suggest - that\'s just the total they will award.) But first, of
course, you must be \"verified\" as a Kintera Connect partner. Sigh.
When will people learn that to be open, you need to really be
open?
- Click and Pledge, a company that does SaaS for nonprofits, released
a new product, called
\"Trio\". Trio is an
integration of SugarCRM, Joomla, and a credit card payment system.
This is not only cool from the perspective of the integration of two
great open source web apps, but it also is a very interesting
business model. Setup of all three has a one time fee. Then, all
monthly hosting fees are waved if more than a certain amount of
money is transacted using the payment system. The hosting costs, if
you don\'t qualify for free hosting, are pretty reasonable.
- Matt Asay, blogger of all things in open source biz models, thinks
Google Code may have overtaken
Sourceforge. He
asks:
\"Will the world notice a diminished Sourceforge? I think so, but
maybe I\'m just nostalgic.\" Um, Matt, Sourceforge has been
basically irrelevant for years, since people started moving their
projects off of that platform, and onto their own platforms. New
projects seem to crop up more on Google Code than on SF now a days.
- Mozilla Labs announces the
winners
of their Extend Firefox2 contest - the best Firefox add-ons. Some
definitely cool stuff I\'ll have to have a look at.
Continue Reading
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On 08 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
Those of you steeped deeply in Web 2.0 know danah
boyd. She\'s a brilliant
academic who studies social networks. A couple of days ago, she made a
call on her
blog
for academics to stop publishing articles in closed journals.
On one hand, I\'m excited to announce that my article \"Facebook\'s
Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence\" has
been published in Convergence
14(1) (special issue
edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I\'m
deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it.
It is not because you aren\'t interested (although many of you might
not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers
who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind
heavy iron walls. Even if you read an early draft of my article in
essay form,
you\'ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will
you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming,
crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that
are also in this issue. That\'s super depressing. I agreed to publish
my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but... I vow that this is
the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get
access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I\'d like to ask
other academics to do the same.
It\'s really worth a read. If I were still an academic, I\'d totally
take her up on it. She is also realistic - she describes in detail in
the post what people can do, whether they are tenured or not. I agree
with her that open journals are the future. She says, at the end of her
long entry:
Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every
invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away
at the old system. I don\'t have tenure (and at this rate, no one will
ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we
have a responsibility to stand up for what\'s right. Open-access is
right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn\'t. It\'s time
for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to
help me make this change reality. Let\'s stop being silenced by
academic publishers.
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On 07 Feb, 2008 By mpm
I decided that most of the tools I\'ve been talking about so far (except
WordPress and Joomla) are internet clients for one type of protocol or
another. I figured I\'d keep on this track for a while - there\'s lots
to talk about. Next up, Filezilla.
{width="303"
height="193"}
I\'ve used more FTP clients in my time than I can even begin to
remember, from command-line ftp, to WS-FTP, and lots and lots of others
(I have this memory of a really old, clunky FTP client for Mac OS 7 or
something that I was using a lot, when all filesharing was via FTP.)
Sometimes, I wish I had something like
Transmit for Linux - which is a Mac OS
X client, and the slickest, most feature rich FTP client on the planet
(but, sadly, not free in any sense of the word.) No, it\'s not slick,
but Filezilla does the job nicely. It has shortcuts for all of your
servers, has nice drag and drop for moving files around, allows you to
do all sorts of remote actions on files, etc. It handles FTP, SFTP and
FTP over SSL/TLS. I use it all the time, and I really like it. I do
think that it\'s probably the best GUI FOSS ftp client for Linux there
is. Oh, and there is a Windows version, too.
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On 06 Feb, 2008 By mpm
If you\'re not so connected either to the \"twitterverse\" or the web
industry, you probably haven\'t heard a lot about the buzz that is
currently happening around the issue of data portability, and the
dataportability.org organization and effort. I figured, since I\'ve been
getting a bit involved in the community, I\'d give a bit of a summary of
what\'s going on, and what will possibly come from this effort.
Dataportability.org - the
organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately
because some very big players recently
joined. These
include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others. So first, what is
data portability? Basically, it means that the data that you put into
social networking sites, like profiles, social graph (those who you are
connected to,) media, etc. are *yours* to do whatever you want with.
In addition, they are portable - you can move your data from place to
place. And you have control over who can see what. There is a good blog
article,
which, in some regards, might be seen as a criticism of the
dataportability.org group, but which, to my mind, actually defines quite
well what I\'ve thought data portability means. He talks about data
\"accessibility\", \"visibility\", \"removal\" and \"ownership\" - all
things that, to my mind, are components of data portability. I\'m
involved in the evangelism action group. So, I\'m evangelizing. I\'ll be
doing an entry soon, sort of \"how social networks could use open
standards 101.\" I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more
and more using Web 2.0 tools, they need to understand the implications
of what they do, and demand that the tools use open standards.
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On 05 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
While I\'m on the subject of chat, I figured I could talk about
Pidgin. Pidgin is a multiprotocol IM (Instant
Messenger) client. It can handle quite the long list of chat protocols:
AIM, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, Google Talk, Groupwise, ICQ, IRC, MSN,
MySpaceIM, QQ, SILC , SIMPLE, Sametime, XMPP, Yahoo!, Zephyr. A number
of these I\'ve never heard of. I don\'t use it for IRC (see last post,)
but I do use it for AIM, GTalk, MSN, ICQ and Yahoo messenger (yes, I
have accounts using all of those protocols. Should I hunt up Zephyr?)
Pidgin is available for Windows or Linux. It used to be called GAIM. The
engine underneath Pidgin is called libpurple - which is also underneath
the FOSS IRC Client Adium, for Mac OS X.
(Adium is what I used when I was on a Mac desktop.) Pidgin is great
software. It\'s the best FOSS IM client I\'ve used so far (and I\'ve
used quite a few.) It\'s got great plug-ins, too.
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On 05 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
This is, really a post both about a tool
(XChat) and about
IRC (Internet Relay Chat.) XChat is
one of quite a few IRC clients. XChat
is available for both Windows and Linux. There is a port of XChat called
XChat-Aqua, that works
natively on Mac OS X. IRC is an incredibly useful tool. It is basically
group synchronous chat. It is a tool which is used predominantly in the
open source world, for developers and users of open source projects to
talk to one another, and get support. I use IRC every day. Quasi-social,
quasi-professional. (like right now, on the
Linuxchix IRC channel, we are discussing
elections, HFS+ filesystems and terabyte switches.) Of the IRC clients,
I like XChat the best, although I\'ve tried quite a number. The
interface is easy to learn, very clearly laid out, and there are lots of
options. It\'s also scriptable. I know that for people who work in real
offices, with real other people, IRC is a difficult tool to use -
because it takes you away from the environment you are in, and makes it
hard to be a part of multiple conversations. On the other hand, a lot of
people are IMing, and tweeting, etc. I like it because I can get fast
technical help, and since I don\'t have many people around me most days,
it does provide a bit of a social atmosphere. Like the water cooler to
go to when you\'re taking a break. And if you want to find me on IRC, go
to either the Linuxchix IRC server or to irc.freenode.net, #nosi and
#nptech.
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On 05 Feb, 2008 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Last week, I spent too much time watching
demos from
DEMO, which is this twice yearly event that
showcases the most bleeding edge internet technology. It looked quite
like it might be a fun event to be at, but the hefty \$3000 price tag
for admission wasn\'t something that I could possibly stomach, so I sat
in front of my laptop, watching people describe new tools. There
weren\'t a whole lot of new tools that looked especially useful in the
short term for nonprofits, but I\'ll highlight a few that I think might
be.
- Of course, there is a lot of buzz about
Sprout. Sproutbuilder is this
amazing drag-and-drop widget maker you\'ve just gotta try (invite
here - just start, and it
will prompt you to create an account when you want to save your
sprout.) Carnet Williams, of nptech fame, did a demo of
Sprout
at Demo.
- Another really amazing tool is Blist. Think
of Blist as a really interesting combination of really pretty Excel,
with some very cool features thrown in from FileMakerPro, in a sweet
looking interface, that works in any web browser. It\'s being billed
as the \"easiest database\" and I pretty much have to agree. Have a
look at the
demo.
It\'s still in \"private\" beta (ask for an invite, you\'ll probably
get one - I did.) There are a lot of features that are unfinished,
but what\'s done is polished, and pretty smooth. You can share these
Blists. So this is definitely a tool to watch.
- good2gether is an interesting
concept. Watch the
demo.
Basically, they partner with localized web media outlets, and
provide widgets that contain information about local nonprofits that
are connected to content. So if the article is about a fire, you
might see on the widget information about the American Red Cross, or
other local nonprofits that address the needs of victims of fire.
Corporations sponsor the widget, so there is a brand showing. As a
nonprofit, what you would do is set up a profile, and I imagine tags
or keywords would indicate where your link would show up.
- Seesmic is also getting a lot of buzz,
certainly in the \"twitterverse,\" but also elsewhere. Seesmic is a
video conversation
site.
It\'s an interesting concept. I think like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, I
think it will take a while to figure out how nonprofits can use it.
I am, of course, waiting for
Beth to tell us.
There were a bunch of other tools, and I look forward to seeing which of
them emerges to become more mainstream.
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On 31 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
This almost feels like cheating, talking about Firefox. Firefox, is, of
course, the FOSS application that is on more desktops than all the
others, combined. Although among browsers, its market share is still way
behind IE - but that\'s mostly, of course, because IE is the default
browser for every windows machine. Firefox is arguably the best web
browser there is. It is certainly better and more secure than IE. What
makes it even more powerful, is that there are tons of
add-ons that make it even
better. Right now, I\'ve got AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey (which is a
scripting platform that allows for lots of other interesting addons,)
Tor (allows for anonymous browsing,) a bunch of google toolbars, some
great web developer tools, etc. And, further, because it\'s open source,
there are some great spin-offs, that I\'ll talk about later. And, I
can\'t really talk about Firefox without mentioning
Iceweasel, Debian\'s rebranded
browser, based on Firefox. (And yes, it would be cheating to make
that a separate blog entry!) Because the Firefox artwork is proprietary
(and therefore a violation of Debian\'s free software guidelines, the
browser was rebranded.
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On 31 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 4
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Back in August, I did a
review
of web conferencing tools, with a decidedly unusual slant - as a
presenter, I had to be able to share my Linux desktop. It was, perhaps
an odd perspective, but in any event, I figured it was time to revisit
this, and review what I\'ve found. Earlier, I\'d found that the only
tools that would work with presenters using Linux were
ReadyTalk and
WebHuddle. ReadyTalk is proprietary and not
free (as in beer). WebHuddle is free, and open source. There does seem
to be an active (but small) user community. There is, however, only one
developer, and there hasn\'t been a release in a while, so it\'s unclear
how long-term viable WebHuddle is. I had been encouraged to look again
at Yugma, because they said that Linux desktop
sharing would happen before the end of last year. Well, it seems that it
still is \"coming soon.\" But interestingly, Yugma is now integrated
with Skype, which totally changes the whole audio on a separate channel
issue. It does mean that everyone who is involved in a webinar needs to
install Skype - but that seems to be a minor issue, to my mind. But, you
can\'t use the Skype edition on Linux yet, either. I went back to look
at DimDim - and lo and behold - DimDim went
GPL!
They now have a community edition, and there seems to be an active
community of users. In addition, DimDim has an integration with Moodle
(PDF)!
And also an integration with SugarCRM. Now things are getting
interesting. Perhaps if DimDim were also to release a version that
integrated with Skype ... I can\'t figure out from looking around their
site whether it is cross-platform enough to share desktops, but I signed
up for the beta, so I guess I\'ll test it out. In doing a bit more
research (which I guess I hadn\' t done this summer) it turns out that
Webex seems to allow desktop sharing with
Linux.
I\'m hoping to test it out soon, as well. This is what I want: The
community edition of DimDim that integrates with an open source VOIP
system and Moodle. That can share my Linux desktop. That would be
the holy grail. But at least it does appear that there might be
increasing numbers of options out there for the likes of me.
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On 29 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 5
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I don\'t exactly know where the exclamation point came from, but if you
want a scarily easy CMS to install, Joomla is a
place to start. Like any powerful CMS, though, there is quite the
learning curve in order to get a site up and running. But at least the
first technical hurdle to jump over is a small one. Joomla is growing
fast. They just released version 1.5, which, I must say, rocks. I\'ll be
migrating my main consulting site over to it quite soon. They have an
amazing user community, and there are places to get amazing
themes. I\'ll mention the other FOSS CMS
systems in other posts. I\'ll have to admit to my preference for Joomla,
although Drupal is growing on me more and more. I haven\'t spend enough
time with Plone to really get a feel for it. Joomla does have an
interesting history - it
was the fork of a project (called Mambo). Mambo is way less popular than
Joomla at this point. If you want to try and get a small website going
for your organization - Joomla is a good place to start. It installs
easily on generic virtual hosts, and has a very sweet, eye-candy full
admin interface. It will take some time and effort to get a site up, but
that\'s standard for any website. It will probably take you less time
than a generic HTML site will.
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On 29 Jan, 2008 By mpm
As you might have noticed, my blogging has diminished a bit. It\'s
because, basically, I am about as busy as I\'ve been in a very long
time. It feels quite good, actually. And I have lots of thoughts about
what I\'m doing. I\'m spending about 1/2 of my time being Coordinator of
NOSI. As you\'ve probably seen, we\'ve been pretty
busy lately. Soon, we\'ll be updating the
primer, releasing a report on our
survey, starting a training and consulting program, doing a webinar
series
... phew! Lots happening! And, I\'m learning a lot about what it\'s
like to be a leader of a small, struggling nonprofit with big ideas. The
other 1/2 of my time I\'m doing consulting
work, focusing exclusively on helping
organizations without a lot of technical expertise navigate their way
through the maze of creating and getting through technology projects. I
love this work. I have some great clients, and I feel like I get to be
an educator - I spend lots of time educating my clients on the ins and
outs of the varied technology issues presented (and what is, and is not
a technology issue.) I get to use my expertise in web application
development, but not have to do any web application development (which
feels to me a lot like having my cake and eating it too.) And, I think I
also get to educate the varied vendors and developers I\'ve been in
contact with. Educate them about the clients needs, and, to some extent,
hear about, and share best practices in doing this kind of work. And, I
get to be agnostic. Yes, indeed, for some clients, and some situations,
there are appropriate proprietary solutions. And I\'ve come to
understand what I value about some development shops, and what I don\'t
value about others. I like proposals that focus more on the project, and
show clear understanding of the project. Pretty presentation with no
content is useless. I am pretty instantly aware of when the person I\'m
talking with knows what they are doing. I\'m made comfortable by folks
who speak what I think of as a good mix of development-speak and normal
language. I\'m turned off instantly by sales-speak. I appreciate shops
that I know are giving back to the community, and that are known
quantities in the nptech realm. I hate to be pushed. I am beginning to
get a really solid understanding of what it takes for nonprofits of all
sizes to navigate the technology waters. What\'s great is that although
it\'s true that there are sharks in the water, there are also lots of
great dolphins to swim with, and I\'m happy to be helping organizations
find them.
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On 24 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 1
Comments
It seems like a good day to talk about WordPress. Why?
Automattic, the makers of
WordPress, and WordPress.com, just got a big
chunk
of \"series B\" funding. (Not being much of a capitalist, I don\'t
really know what \"series B\" funding means, but I\'m imagining it\'s a
very good thing.) Here is yet another amazing free and open source tool
getting a lot of good attention. Anyway, WordPress is a blogging tool
(in fact, the one that runs this blog.) It is a great blogging tool. It
is another of those open source software applications that \"just
works.\" Installation of WordPress is scarily easy. WordPress is
expandable with tons of plugins. The best one, by the way, is
Akismet, which is also made by Automattic. It
basically eliminates comment spam, which, as you probably know, is the
bane of bloggers everywhere. Because WordPress is so easy to use, people
have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. I think this is
generally a Bad Idea, since there are so many easy, good CMS tools out
there (I\'ll be naming a few in this series.) But if your organization
decides to blog, and you want to make it easy on yourself, install
Wordpress on your hosting account, or go to
WordPress.com and set up a free blog. I
doubt you\'ll look back.
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On 17 Jan, 2008 By mpm
I just though I\'d take a brief pause to explain my criteria for these
100 tools that I\'ll be covering this year. All of the tools I will
cover are tools that:
- I use every week, perhaps less often, and for a few I will have at
least installed and tested out.
- Have an active user and developer community
- I know I can get my questions answered from the community
- are good enough so that you can get real work done using the tool
(in fact, under most circumstances, you could do mission-critical
work with it, if your mission called for it.)
- You don\'t have to code to do what should be basic tasks using the
tool (for instance, this eliminates a good time tracking program,
which at some point I might blog about, but that you have to learn
scheme[1] to get customized reports with any complexity. )
I\'ll describe what you\'ll give up with these tools (if anything)
compared to their popular proprietary counterparts. These aren\'t
half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in
organizations. [1] Scheme is an obscure programming language that most
Computer Science students learn, but almost no one else does, and almost
no one produces production code in scheme.
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On 17 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 3
Comments
GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program.
I\'ve come to depend on it, first because I couldn\'t justify paying for
a Photoshop upgrade when I moved to an Intel Mac. Now, it\'s one of a
very few choices that work on Linux - and it\'s the best by far. GIMP is
a very full-featured image manipulation program. Just about all of what
Photoshop does, it does. I\'m not a designer or photographic expert, but
it\'s a pretty amazing program. If you want good info, there is a great
book by a fellow Linuxchix, called
\"Beginning
GIMP\"
by Akkana Peck. If you are a serious
designer, GIMP has its drawbacks, specifically it\'s lack of CMYK and
Pantone color spaces, which, I understand, is pretty much a requirement
for serious printing (but who prints, nowadays? Just joking.) There
are some other things that GIMP lacks that Photoshop has, but 90% of
users probably won\'t notice. I would say if there is one really major
complaint about GIMP, and it\'s one that I harbor, is that the UI, well,
leaves much to be desired. It\'s not just that it doesn\'t look like
Photoshop (you can check out
gimpshop - it has a Photoshop UI
on top of the GIMP libraries.) It just isn\'t intuitive to use
(Photoshop isn\'t either, really.) I think because of this, GIMP is
missing out on the chance to become a much more popular program. If
you\'re a geek, you are used to getting to know new UIs, and putting up
controls that are difficult to understand or get used to. But if you\'re
not a geek, GIMPs UI is a major hurdle. And if you\'ve been used to the
Photoshop workflow, it will take a lot to get used to the very different
GIMP workflow. Oh, and one more thing. The name has to go.
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On 17 Jan, 2008 By mpm
- Sun Microsystems buys MySQL
AB
for \$1 Billion (yes, that\'s ONE BILLION DOLLARS)
- Acquia (a Drupal company) gets a large chunk
of change (no, actually that was last month in FOSS, but it\'s
part of the picture.)
- OpenAds, an open source ad server (very
cool) just got tons of
\$
in financing.
- A company that provides services for Ruby on Rails got a bunch of
funding.
So what does this mean for you, o struggling nonprofit organization?
Open source is becoming mainstream, and people (that is, people with
money) are starting to throw big bucks in the direction of open source
projects, and companies that provide services for open source projects.
This is going to make these projects better, and make support for them
more available. Because these applications are not proprietary, and
anyone can get their hands on them, and install and use them, this means
that nonprofits get the benefit. Because of the nature of open source,
more money in the open source ecosystem is a good thing, and it is my
belief that unlike \"voodoo economics\" this will actually be a tide
that lifts all boats.
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On 16 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 4
Comments
I\'ve had a few interesting things happen lately which is making me
wonder about what\'s happening with open source, and the perceptions of
open source in the nonprofit sector. As you know, NOSI is doing a
survey on
the use of FOSS in the nonprofit sector. It\'s been quite slow - we have
only gotten about 85 responses (so please, please, if you haven\'t yet,
fill it out.) I know that surveys only get small subsets of the
communities they are trying to assess. But this seems very low,
considering that probably 5,000+ people saw the announcement (adding up
the totals for the varied list subscriptions.) Also, we have been
accused in creating a biased survey. In a sense, we are, of course quite
biased. It is NOSI\'s purpose to advocate the use of FOSS in the sector.
But I wondered about whether or not simply being in that position means
that we will garner certain kinds of responses, and not others
(interestingly, though, 25% of those filling out the survey use open
source less than daily, and considering Firefox, I thought that was
interesting.) Another interesting thing was that I wrote an article for
TechSoup, on \"The True Cost of Free and Low Cost
software.\"
I got some interesting
comments
(especially the one that said \"the author doesn\'t really seem to
understand the distinction between free, open source, and proprietary
software\", which I thought was a hoot.) Anyway, they were looking for
a different article - one that was more about the advantages of FOSS,
not about the broad category of free (as in beer) and low cost software,
which includes FOSS, proprietary, and SaaS. I said this at the end of my
response:
This makes me wonder whether things have changed. In the past, people
cared much more about whether or not something was free (as in beer)
or cheap, and whether or not it was open source wasn\'t on the radar.
Now, it seems that people well understand that acquisition cost isn\'t
everything, and what\'s more important to some is free (as in libre).
Perhaps it\'s time to change the message, a bit.
Of course, one can\'t base anything on two forum comments, but I wonder
if we haven\'t turned a corner in the conversation. Perhaps we don\'t
have to spend so much time on this issue anymore. Comments?
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On 15 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I have become a fan, nay, a devotee of
DokuWiki. I\'ve
always liked wikis, and I have used MediaWiki a lot in the past, and I
do like it. Dokuwiki is different in a number of ways, most primarily in
that it is one of the wiki systems that stores things in files, not
databases. This means that it is easier to back up and migrate, but
doesn\'t scale well. Dokuwiki was designed for small scale
installations, primarily documentation and such. The one feature that
makes my day: draft autosave! I love it! One drawback is that the syntax
of Dokuwiki is different than MediaWiki, and so the more I use it, the
more I forget when I use MediaWiki. But I\'m converting my tech
wiki to from MediaWiki to
DokuWiki. I also use it installed on my home desktop, for notes,
journaling and the like. It\'s a great replacement for text or word
processing files. Anyway, it\'s worth checking out.
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On 08 Jan, 2008 By mpm
Last week, I
covered
the Richard Scoble dust-up. Thanks to twitter (hat tip to
marshallk), I learned about today\'s big
news: Google, Plaxo and Facebook joined the Data Portability working
group.
This, of course, doesn\'t mean that all of a sudden, everyone\'s social
graph and data will become portable, but it\'s a very good sign that
perhaps, after all, things are moving in that direction. I think that
people are getting wary of social networks where they have no control
over their own data. And, of course, nonprofits should be especially
keen on being able to keep control of their data. This is a good sign
that things are going in the right direction. I\'ll keep you posted, for
sure. Read/Write
Web and
TechCruch
have good coverage of this. Update: LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and
Twitter have now
joined
Dataportability.org. This is, of course, great news. But the real
question is: will this actually result in data portability?
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On 07 Jan, 2008 By mpm
In my work with NOSI (the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative,) I\'ve
become really interested in how FOSS is used in nonprofit organizations.
I think this is data we need to know, so that we can understand better
what gaps are preset, and what we can do to fill those gaps. This is the
first of an annual survey, and we\'ll be releasing a report next month
with the results of the survey. It will take about 5-10 minutes to fill
out. Please take it no matter what the level of use of open source
software is in your organization - data on as wide a range of
organizations will be helpful to us. Please encourage your colleagues
and clients to take this survey as well. Take the
survey
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On 06 Jan, 2008 By mpm
This is an amazing example of the kinds of
flexibility that is difficult or impossible to get with proprietary
software. Miro, the free and open source
media player, has released a Firefox
plugin, which
automatically inserts their affiliate code when you buy something from
Amazon. It\'s really simple to use, and one doesn\'t have to have links
on your website, etc. This seems like something many nonprofits might
want to try out. Hat tip to Jon
Stahl
for the heads up.
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On 04 Jan, 2008 By mpm
I am in the process of writing a survey for NOSI, which you will hear
all about next week. I had originally done the survey in
Surveymonkey, which is a slick on-line
survey tool. But, a very nice soul at
MayFirst/people-link, where we house the NOSI site, set up
Limesurvey for us, so we\'re using that.
Limesurvey is actually quite powerful. Like many free and open source
software tools, it leans toward the powerful, flexible side, rather than
the slick, easy to use side. So it has its challenges. The admin
interface is nice looking, and fairly intuitive. The surveys could stand
some graphic design help, but you can design templates for it. It\'s a
LAMP stack
application. Worth a look if your organization does surveys.
Continue
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On 04 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Some interesting things are happening in Web2.0 land. There has been
quite the dustup, started by Facebook kicking Richard
Scoble
off, because he\'d violated the Facebook terms of service. As a result,
Scoble joined the group
dataportability.org, which I\'ve been
monitoring for a few months now. Why did Scoble get booted (he has since
been reinstated)? Because of a
script
that scraped names and email addresses from Facebook, called Plaxo
Pulse. I think people are finally realizing
that the current state of affairs - where we can pump data into Facebook
and other social networks, but not get data out of them, is untenable.
There\'s a poll on
mashable.com, where the
sentiment is most certainly heavily in favor of Facebook opening up the
social graph. So after my brief
lapse,
I\'m going back to my promise: no more social networks until the data
flows both ways, and I can take my social graph with me.
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On 03 Jan, 2008 By mpm
With 1
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Before the holidays, I
promised
that I\'d do 100 posts this year on free and open source tools. So, I\'m
starting with Mozilla
Thunderbird. I use it every
day, nay, almost every waking minute, since email is such a critical
beast. Generally, Thunderbird falls into the category of free and open
source software that \"just works.\" It\'s easy to set up accounts, move
mail around, and do sophisticated filtering of mail, and such. And,
because it\'s in the Mozilla family, it has a plug in architecture which
can add some really neat features. I\'m using one that allows me to see
a calendar (I use it to view my google calendar) - it\'s a good quick
way within Thunderbird to see if I\'m free on a certain day. Thunderbird
is cross platform, too, so if you\'re like me, and hope between
platforms, Thunderbird is there with you. And its secure, makes doing
GPG signatures and encryption easy (although I haven\'t gotten around to
doing them, though. Shame on me.) Thunderbird is in the
process
of being spun out of the Mozilla Foundation
into it\'s own organization, dubbed \"MailCo.\" I don\'t know if that
name will stick. But I think that Thunderbird has suffered from the
Mozilla Foundation\'s focus on Firefox, and some good solid focus on it
as a product is welcome news to me, as a daily user.
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On 20 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
This will be my last post of 2007 - I\'m taking some days off from work
and blogging, and won\'t return until the beginning of the year. First,
links for the day:
- High Tech
Trash -
it\'s an in depth photo essay and interactive feature on the
National Geographic website. It\'s sobering - as much as I love
technology, it scares me how much damage it can do to both people
and the environment, once we\'re done with it, and ready to upgrade
to something new.
- Many nonprofits have Linux file servers in their back offices. In a
huge
agreement,
Microsoft agreed to share information about Windows to the Samba
project, so that it can keep up to date easily. This was to appease
the European Commission. This is great news.
- OpenOffice.org is coming
closer
to doing PDF import. Happy dance, anyone?
I\'ve got a number of ideas up my sleeve for next year for this blog,
one of which is to take up the challenge that Beth
mentioned,
and do 100 posts on something. So next year, I\'ll be doing 100 posts on
particular free and open source tools. And now, the top ten posts of the
year, according to my Google Analytics stats:
- Getting
Naked:
Being Human and Transparent. Hmmm, think it was that keyword?
However, the bounce rate on that one was well below average, so
maybe not.
- How do we make change if we keep doing things the same
way
- Platforms Break
Open
- The Search for Good Web
Conferencing
- Open Source Database Solutions, Part
I
- Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
(November)
- Linux, Ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn and
Me
- Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
(May)
- Time to find a fundraising solution that can\'t be
bought
- Spirituality and
Technology
And, just to be fair, the least favorite post is What do you expect
from a technology
provider? Two
whole pageviews. I find that fascinating. I wish all a holiday season
full of fun, quality time with family (chosen or otherwise), and joy.
Continue Reading
On 18 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Today seems to be Asterisk day. What is
Asterisk, you ask? Asterisk is the open source PBX application that
works by using VOIP. It rocks. I wrote a case
study about it in the NOSI primer - it can
allow for really great flexibility in building phone systems. And today,
I learned about two online tools written with Asterisk, which would have
been impossible a few years ago. Committee
Caller seems like an amazing tool. You
choose the House or Senate committee you want to call, type in your
phone number, and Committee Caller will sequentially dial each member of
the committee so that you can leave your comment. I haven\'t tried it
yet, but I will. Rondee is a new
free conference calling utility, also built on Asterisk, which has a
much nicer and easier to use scheduling interface than
Freeconference.com, and some very cool features - like if you register
your phone #, you never need to enter a pin, because the system is
smart enough to know what conference call you\'re supposed to be on -
you\'ll just get joined to it. It seems cool, and a great alternative to
freconference.com. And it\'s free, too. Asterisk made it possible for
the company to provide this service without huge infrastructure costs. I
look forward to seeing more of what kinds of new and interesting tools
can be powered by Asterisk under the hood. Oh, and did I mention - it
works really well as a generic PBX - something lots of nonprofits need.
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On 17 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 7
Comments
I seem to have lost my head. Really. I was all curmudgeonly until last
week, when I started tweeting and got into
Spock. You know why I started to
twitter.
Ages and ages ago, when Spock was still in private beta, I got an
invite, and used it. I was underwhelmed, and forgot about it. Then, last
week, I got a request from Beth
Kanter
and Deborah Finn to join
their \"trust networks.\" Well, I already trust them, so I joined them.
I then decided, why not - let\'s find out who else is on Spock. So I did
the usual, gave up my gmail password. Turns out, unlike Facebook, or
Myspace and such, the \"Spock Bot\" makes pages for people without their
knowing. So people who were in my gmail address book, and in Spock, got
a request for trust from me, not knowing where it came from. So,
although I can trust Beth and Deborah, it appears I can\'t trust Spock.
There have been
lots
of
blog
posts
about
Spock, mostly negative. I\'m hoping that Spock ends up in the dead
pool, but who knows. Then, for
the creepy part. I joined Spokeo. Spokeo
takes your gmail, aol, or yahoo address book and, looking at a wide
variety of web 2.0 communities, from LinkedIn to Flickr to ...
Amazon.com, keeps track of your contacts content. So when someone in
your addressbook posts a new photo to Picasa, or tweets, you\'ll know
about it. Creepy part: do I really want to know what\'s on my
ex-girlfriend\'s MySpace page? Or that a certain nonprofit Executive
Director Dugg a post about starting a video game company? (Although I do
have to admit its fun to know what a very old friend is listening to on
Pandora.) What have I learned in all of this? What my colleagues and
friends do has influence. I did set a pretty high
bar
a while back for the next social network I\'d join. And what did I do
with the influence of colleagues and friends? Walk right under it. This
is not at all to blame them, it\'s just to state a reality - what other
people (those I trust and follow) do matters, and I think it matters for
most people. What else have I learned? Privacy matters. I happen to be
someone who has had a relatively high online presence since before the
web (remember Usenet?) I\'m someone who has, since day one, tried my
damnedest (and succeeded 96% of the time) to only say by email, or put
up, what I would say in a room full of people. But for a long while, it
took a lot to gather all of that information. No longer. The tools are
getting better and better, and one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 - the
APIs, make it all the more simple to aggregate all of someone\'s online
content. I think I\'m going to wait at least a few weeks after getting
an invite to the next web 2.0 tool to jump in. Or perhaps maybe I won\'t
even. What a concept. Maybe it\'s time to go back to being a curmudgeon.
Continue
Reading
On 14 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I feel misunderstood. Earlier this week, I wrote a
post
on about the NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. I\'ve now seen two posts (one
from David
Gielhufe,
and one from Lobo of CiviCRM) suggesting
that I dismissed the extremely positive results for the open source CRM
tools (particularly CiviCRM) because the sample wasn\'t large, or
representative of the sector. The whole point of the post was to crow
about how positive the open source results were. But if I crowed
about those results, without making sure that people understood that the
sample was small, and not representative (which is impossible to
argue against) I would be irresponsible. No concrete conclusions can be
drawn about overall use of or satisfaction with CRM tools from this
survey. It wasn\'t scientific, and the sample was about .05% of the
nonprofits in the United States (the foundation center says that there
are about 1.4 million of them.) How could that be representative? NTEN
did a great job of beginning to approach this topic, and it was great
data. To my mind, it bodes well for the open source tools. That was my
point.
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Reading
On 13 Dec, 2007 By mpm
This is old news, sort of. A ways back, Six
Apart promised that it would open source
MovableType, their flagship software
product, and the software that underlies their
TypePad service. Yesterday, they finally
released it. This blog (and my personal
blog) were on TypePad for years, and I
rather like the MoveableType interface and feature set. Their new
version, MT4, looks pretty good, and it\'s a great thing that it\'s now
open source (released under the GPL v2, interestingly enough.) I\'m
liking Six Apart more and more these days. They are really putting their
money where their mouth is, in terms of working toward more openness.
They\'ve been supporting open standards for years. Had this happened 6
months ago, when I was ready to migrate my blogs, I would have just
migrated them to MT4, instead of WordPress.
But, that said, I like WordPress, too. I imagine that this is a bit of a
response to WordPress (others think so
too.)
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out - both are
incredibly strong applications. MovableType is written in Perl, which I
hadn\'t realized until I was doing research for this blog entry. But in
any case, it should work on all generic hosting environments, and it
looks easy to install. So here\'s another good option for organizations
that want powerful blogging software to use on a generic (read: cheap)
hosting environment. Hurray!
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On 12 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 3
Comments
I had a good look at NTEN\'s CRM Satisfaction
Survey
(yippee for data!), and although the sample sizes were small, and not
representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole, the people surveyed
seemed to like the open source tools available. There were 6 open source
(or sort of open source) tools that showed up on this survey. They
included CiviCRM,
SugarCRM, and
vTiger (which is actually a modification of
SugarCRM), all with vibrant developer and user ecosystems. The three
others are Democracy in Action,
which is a SaaS that is open source,
CitySoft says it\'s open source, but I
don\'t know whether it is through an
OSI approved license (since they
don\'t say. Taken at face value, CitySoft certainly doesn\'t violate the
letter of the law, since you can get the source code if you buy their
product, but their source code is unavailable otherwise, it sort of
violates the spirit of open source.) Finally, Organizer\'s
Database is open source, but written on
top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access). 201 out of 665 users
used these 6 open source tools. I don\'t think that\'s possibly
representative of the sector (especially since in the survey, the most
popular CRM was CiviCRM.) That said, for the most part, except for
CitySoft and vTiger, people seemed very satisfied with these tools.
CiviCRM was first in satisfaction, SugarCRM, Organizer\'s Database, and
Democracy in Action were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. That\'s pretty
impressive. Among those surveyed, 4 of the top 5 tools in terms of
satisfaction were open source (or sort of open source) tools. The only
other tool in the top 5 was Salesforce. Satisfaction with Convio,
Kintera and Blackbaud all trailed these top 4 tools. We really can\'t
draw any conclusions from this - the sample size was small, and, as I
mentioned, not representative of the sector. But it\'s a very good sign
that people seem satisfied with the open source tools available for one
of the core functions of nonprofit organizations.
Continue
Reading
On 10 Dec, 2007 By mpm
LinkedIn, the serious MBA wielding brother to the Facebook fratboy and
the MySpace rockergrrl, is really putting on the suit
now.
They\'ve included some new features like a new personal homepage with
things like \"Company Updates\" - news about your company, and other
business-friendly features. Also, they have a partnership with Business
Week - so you can see how you are connected to companies and indivuals
covered by clicking on links. It all sounds like LinkedIn wants to pull
all of those people who have been migrating to Facebook back into their
fold, with the idea that LinkedIn is serious about business. It\'s an
interesting strategy. So, how is this relevant to nonprofits? I expect
that this will enhance the appeal of LinkedIn for nonprofit executives,
staff, and consultants for our own networking needs. I think in some
ways, this might decrease LinkedIn\'s usefulness as a platform for
fundraising or constituent-building by nonprofits (it has always seemed
less viable for this than either Facebook or MySpace.) Hat tip to
Marshall Kirkpatrick who tweeted about his Read/Write web
post
(wow, twitter has already come in handy.)
Continue Reading
On 07 Dec, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Yes, it\'s hard to believe. I succumbed. I have said
many times
that I wouldn\'t Twitter. I\'ve critiqued
Twitter and
social networks in general. So what\'s the story? Michelle twittering?
There are a number of factors at work. There seemed (to me) to finally
enough interesting people and things to follow on twitter - it began to
seem like microblogging was more that just about what kind of tuna
sandwich someone was eating (although it sometimes still is that.) There
are substantive conversations that happen, and real information gets
shared. Since I already was a facebook status addict, once I learned
that I could basically make twitter my one-stop status shop (put it in
my blog, on facebook, wherever I wanted) that seemed to make sense to
me. But, the biggest reason that I\'m twittering is that as the
Coordinator of NOSI, I\'m experimenting with Web 2.0
in general, which includes Twitter, Facebook, and others - with the goal
of crafting a
strategy.
I think given the audience that NOSI is reaching, and wants to reach, a
concrete, well thought out Web 2.0 strategy that includes a whole host
of tools, including Twitter, is a darned good idea. So, if you want to
follow me on Twitter, please do.
Continue Reading
On 30 Nov, 2007 By mpm
I\'m at the Open
Translation
event, and we\'ve just had a great session on open content business
models. It was very useful, and interesting, and gave me lots of food
for thought. I\'ve been interested in issues of how we sustain open
content for a long
while. I was
the note-taker for the session, and I feel like there are a lot of great
ideas out there. In general, it seems like most models depend on some
sort of up-front funding, whether it be an investment or a grant, to
fund the initial writing of a large amount of content. The problem of
how do you fund the actual writing of content was not really addressed,
and I think that is one of the harder nuts to crack. There was one
interesting model was asking for pledges, and if the pledges got up to a
certain amount, the content would be produced. But ongoing
sustainability of already written open content seems to have been at
least conditionally solved by a variety of folks in a variety of ways:
- Training and consulting based on existing content
- Generating revenue by doing print on demand, with a markup
- Production of corollary items such as t-shirts
- Hybrid model - most content is free, some content is closed, and
paid for
- Advertising on a site with open content
- Corporate sponsorship
- \"Robin Hood\" models: asking larger Northern organizations to
subsidize the distribution of content for the developing world
This is very interesting fodder for my thinking about the puzzle that is
how to make NOSI a strong, sustainable organization. The thing we have
actually done the most of is write the
primer, and I\'ve got more ideas for
types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these
suggestions for business models are quite welcome.
Continue
Reading
On 30 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
It\'s been mostly fun so far at the Open
Translation event
here in Zagreb. I\'ll leave the complaining about Croatian food and
other things to my personal blog, when I get the time. The event itself
has been fab. As one of those monolingual American types, I\'m learning
a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different
languages. It is actually pretty mind-boggling. There are issues that
relate to encoding, fonts, and character sets, machine translation,
interfaces to facilitate human translation, issues of workflow,
volunteer and project management, and a whole host of other issues.
It\'s also really interesting to see how free and open source fits into
all of this. What are the tools like? How do we replace proprietary
tools? How does this all get paid for? My role has been to gather up the
use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That\'s been a
very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples
that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools
are present that can do what\'s needed, and what gaps exist. Check out
the
wiki.
Lots of food for thought for NOSI and the future.
Continue Reading
On 26 Nov, 2007 By mpm
I\'m going to Zagreb, Croatia to be at Aspiration\'s Open
Translation
event. I\'m really looking forward to it. It will be my first
international open source event, and it\'s an amazingly interesting
topic. So I am so excited to be going. I have been tasked to be \"use
case librarian\" which is very cool, since I am a real fan of use cases.
I\'ll be posting pics to flickr, for sure!
Continue Reading
On 26 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
As most people deeply imbedded in Web 2.0, I am an avid Wiki user. I
have become a complete devotee of
Dokuwiki, which I use
locally on my laptop, for my to do lists, notes, etc. I love it because
it\'s really easy to set up and back up (it\'s all files, not in a
database,) and it\'s has draft autosaves (yay!). I have two other wikis
(a public and private wiki) that are in
Mediawiki, on my web host. And I contribute to varied other wikis, which
are on varied other wiki platforms. And none of these have the same
syntax - they are similar, but slightly different. Different enough to
drive me crazy. A while ago, when I was still developing web
applications, I wrote a wiki plug-in for this behemothic open source
CMS/Web database system that I wrote, and has (mercifully) died a slow
death (there are still a few installations of it in use, hopefully soon
to be retired.) I didn\'t get so far into coding the markup, but I had
decided that I\'d follow MediaWiki\'s syntax, since it was the most
popular wiki software. I just wish that somehow, the gazillion
wikis out there could decide on syntax they
all would agree on. I doubt it, but it would be nice.
Continue Reading
On 26 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I think I might need a new blog category: why I won\'t be buying ...
First Leopard, now,
Kindle.
Kindle, at first blush, sounds pretty cool. I\'ve been waiting for
devices using the e-ink technology for a while
now. And, I\'m an avid reader, so the idea of being able to carry a
bunch of books with me in a small package (instead of the usual very
heavy pile I travel with) is quite appealing. And \$10 a book is great -
I love the idea of not using all of that paper. But ... Why am I
not buying a Kindle?
- No wifi - uses Sprint\'s EVDO network (for me, that makes the Kindle
basically a brick when I\'m at home.)
- Closed - can\'t upload open document formats
- Can only buy books from Amazon
- I\'m still not clear about what happens when you buy your 201st
book - do you have to throw out one?
- Can\'t share books - I like to loan out my books to people.
I want something like a Kindle that:
- Has wifi (EVDO would be a nice addition, but some of us live in
areas where the EVDO network does not go)
- Allows me to share books with people.
- Allows me to upload any open document format (.odt, rich text, pdf)
- Allows any vendor of books (like Lulu, for instance) or any
independent author to provide books for the device.
Sorry, Amazon. Kindle is a bust for me.
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On 21 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 2
Comments
Beth\'s wonderful
post
about a decision tree for whether or not an organization should get into
the social networking business had a link to a
comment
about OpenSocial. The salient quote:
Why not roll your own social network, include the OpenSocial API, and
have applications, groups, widgets and portals to your site in any
number of the "OpenSocial" platforms? Whether an existing member of
your organization chooses to participate in any social network or not
should not affect your decision to have a presence (group and/or
application) in the social-networking space.
Which lead me to think about the idea of open sourcing OpenSocial
apps. It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very
similar needs in terms of kinds of applications. Can we build a library
of OpenSocial applications that have open source licenses? Anyone
interested? Maybe this is the use for opensocialorg.org! :-)
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On 19 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 5
Comments
Today, it\'s my turn to host the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants. It was an open call,
so there are a wide variety of posts to talk about.
Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which
blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival
feed.
Continue
Reading
On 16 Nov, 2007 By mpm
Linux has proven itself as a server platform - no one really questions
it. A large chunk (the majority?) of nonprofits already use Linux
server-side - either in-house, or if not, their web host usually does.
But can it really be a desktop platform for nonprofit organizations?
Linux on the desktop has come quite far, in just a few years. And
recently, there is increasing evidence to suggest that it can, indeed in
large part, replace Windows on the desktop. Why should it? Linux is more
secure, more stable, and can be used on older hardware. Walmart was
selling \$200
PCs
running gOS (no, that doesn\'t stand for
googleOS, but greenOS, based on Ubuntu 7.10,) and they sold
out.
If you read the
reviews
(most of which were quite positive,) the people who liked it were
looking at the real functionality (it could edit their documents, it
could surf the web, read email, etc.) and those who didn\'t, seemed not
to like it mostly because it doesn\'t run Windows (although one could
install Windows on it - but it\'s going to be pokey - it\'s not a well
powered machine, but more than enough for Linux.) So, if students and
Grandma can use Linux, can nonprofits? There is a good
whitepaper
that was released this fall from Novell, which has a section which talks
about what to think about with enterprise migration to Linux on the
desktop. It basically echos what I would suggest when thinking about a
mass migration:
- Planning is key
- Do a software inventory - figure out:
- What has a version that runs on Linux
- What can be replaced by software that runs on Linux
- What can be run in an emulator such as VMWare
- Identifying types of users (by what they need to do)
- Choose a distribution that makes sense (I wrote up a
review
of Linux distros recently.)
- Figuring out a clear migration strategy that takes all of this into
consideration.
Continue Reading
On 13 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
It always takes me a bit to digest new Web 2.0 news, so I\'m just now
blogging about last week\'s news that Facebook launched a new ad
platform.
The platform contains two parts, which I\'ll talk about individually.
It\'s an interesting time, and there is a good question - is this
something nonprofits should jump on? The first part of the package is
Facebook Fan Pages. A company (or organization, or individual) can set
up a public page (so it does not require a Facebook account to see it).
Individuals can become \"fans\" of that product or organization. That
shows up in user\'s news feeds, and in their profile. That, of course,
can spread virally. If a friend of mine becomes a fan of an organization
or company I happen to like, I might then become fans of them as well.
One of the big beginning issues was that if a fan page was public, and
it can have URLs, then that must be great for
SEO,
right? Facebook pages have huge page rank. Well, no link
love
from Facebook - apparently, those links have the dreaded
\"rel=nofollow\" qualifier. But is it still worth it for nonprofits to
have a fan page? Many already have Causes set up. Jeremiah Owyang,
who\'s blog I read occasionally, has a good point: figure out what your
strategy is,
first!
The second part of Facebook\'s advertising platform is likely not going
to be used by nonprofits, for the most part, but is important to
consider if Facebook is a part of your constitiuent-building or
fundraising strategy. Social Ads are sponsored advertisements that are
linked to users profile data, social graph, and activities. Ads can be
targeted by profile data. Also, if a friend agrees, their activities
around a particular product (like, say, a movie rental) will show up on
their news feeds. Of course, there are huge privacy
issues,
here, and one law professor thinks the ads are
illegal.
What does this mean for nonprofits? Well, it depends. Will this
advertising platform alienate users? And, more importantly, will
nonprofit messages get lost in the stream of news feed posts about Joe
being a fan of Apple, and Jane renting a four star movie from
Blockbuster?
Continue Reading
On 08 Nov, 2007 By mpm
As the hype (which, I agree I have contributed
to)
around OpenSocial dies down, the reality behind OpenSocial becomes
clear. Tim O\'Reilly has a bang-on
post
about the fact that OpenSocial does not mean that users can have data
portability. Apparently, the data stays in the container (the social
network site) and probably can\'t move beyond it. Tim says:
If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications
more easily from one social network to another, that\'s a big win for
the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every
participating social network. But it provides little incremental value
to the user, the real target. We don\'t want to have the same
application on multiple social networks. We want applications that
can use data from multiple social networks.
TechCrunch
suggests the
issue is in the business model:
Unfortunately, the business models have not been worked out yet to
accommodate such mixing of data. If a social mashup starts making
money from ads, how would that be split up between the host site, the
app developer, and all the other applications or social networks from
which that mashup pulls data? O'Reilly doesn't really have an answer
for that one.
I don\'t really have an answer to that one either, but for our sector,
that\'s really where the power is going to lie. Sure, some very savvy
organizations will do well if they have to develop only two (or one) app
for social networks. But it\'s the remixing of data from many networks
that provides the real win for users and nonprofits.
Continue Reading
On 08 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
It seems like not so long ago that I helped an organization build a
Linux email and web server, that we plugged into a college internet
connection, so that they could begin to take advantage of the wonders of
the internet. It was, at the time, the only affordable way to do it -
there was no broadband, and a T1 was far outside of the realm of
affordability for nonprofits. I even remember writing a grant to some
federal agency that probably no longer exists to help create a local
infrastructure to get nonprofits online. When was that? 1995. It wasn\'t
so long after that that virtual hosting companies became ubiquitous, and
affordable for nonprofits. But it\'s only been in the last few years
that mega storage, and mega processing power were available to
organizations to power big web applications and the like. Amazon seems
to be leading in the next wave of evolution of hosting - pay only for
what you need, when you need it. They started out with their S3 -
simple storage
service.
And now, there is E2 - Elastic Compute
Cloud
- use only the storage, processing power and bandwidth you use. I did a
quick calculation of what my own usage might be, and actually, my
Dreamhost account is a better deal. But for
much larger/high-traffic sites, or sites that fluctuate a lot, it might
be a great idea, especially if you want dedicated hosting. The news
today, and why I\'m bothering to talk about this, is that Red Hat
announced
that it will offer RHEL - their enterprise distribution, on Amazon E2.
If a nonprofit organization has a server, it\'s actually not so unlikely
that it is running RHEL. A lot of organizations of all types want
support, and are willing to pay for it, and Red Hat is, at this point,
built the best business model around this than any other distro
(Canonical, with
Ubuntu, is sneaking up behind, but I\'m not
sure it has the \"enterprise\" style some people look for.) So running
RHEL on Amazon E2 is a potentially low-cost, low-pain way for nonprofits
(with appropriate levels of tech staff, of course) to dip their toes
into hosting complex applications on Linux, without having that noisy
box in the corner.
Continue
Reading
On 06 Nov, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been thinking a lot about giving online courses in the use of open
source software. That was one of the big reasons I had been looking for
good web
conferencing
a while back (I\'m still looking...) I\'m starting my foray into this
territory by giving a free course in the database management system,
PostgreSQL. It will be given under the
auspices of Linuxchix, an organization I\'ve
been a part of since 2000. The course is a 12 week course, starting on
November 19th (with time off for the holidaze.) Check out our Moodle
page for more
details (the outline, and information on how to participate is there.)
I\'ll be following this up with an Open Source 101, starting in early
2008, on my own Moodle site.
Continue Reading
On 05 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
As I\'ve mentioned before, there has been a lot of thought and interest
in the issue of opening up social networks, outside of what has been,
until last week, totally closed silos. I linked to a great thought piece
a while back on opening up the social
graph
(that is, your network of friends.) Jon
Stahl pointed me to a great
article, also about opening
up the social graph. There is a Google
group
(called Social Network Portability), that you should definitely join if
you are at all interested in these issues. Of course, OpenSocial has
blown the doors off of all of this, and what\'s come out of it is quite
interesting. Folks on that list are beginning to talk about how to
implement portability. There are an amazing number of new sites that
have launched over the weekend (I imagine people sitting in their home
offices with lots of caffeine and pizza.) Here are some I\'ve found so
far, that I\'ll be following:
- OpenSocial Zen - meant to
be a place for developers to share ideas. They haven\'t really
started yet, but hopefully it will be an interesting place to watch
- OpenSocial
Directory - a
directory of the apps that already exist to use OpenSocial (talk
about caffeine and pizza!)
- OpenSocializr - a Ning social
network on OpenSocial (I guess that\'s logical)
- OpenSocialBlog - an interesting
blog about OpenSocial
Why do I have the feeling that every domain with \"opensocial\" is taken
(opensocialblog.com, opensocialcats.com ...) So why is this important
for nonprofits? First off, it means that in the short term, it will be
possible to write just one application, and reach multiple social
networks, thus expanding reach. In the long term, if the whole web 2.0
cyber world becomes, instead of a bunch of walled gardens where data
moves in only very limited ways between them, a fully permeable space
where data flows freely, it will be possible for nonprofits to have much
greater reach and impact, whether it be for fundraising, advocacy or
constituency-building.
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On 05 Nov, 2007 By mpm
This isn\'t actually, nptech news, per se, but it\'s good news for
nonprofits: Google, along with other partners, such as T-Mobile,
Qualcomm, and others, have created an alliance called the Open Handset
Alliance, and a phone operating
system called
Android,
which will put open source software on mobile phones. This is big. This
means that anyone can hack their phones - and a raft of developers can
create really interesting kinds of software for phones. The SDK will be
available later this month. Of course, the bottom line is that this
makes it more likely that Google can get their ad platform onto phones.
But they seem to realize that the key to their success is being open,
and they are doing their best to move that into as many places as
possible. And just like OpenSocial was a great answer to Facebook, this
is a great answer to the iPhone. Why is this good news for nonprofits?
Katrin over at MobileActive.org weighs
in, and I agree:
So what does this mean for the \'mobile for good\' field? We hope that
this will spur development for more social applications and mashups as
well as better distribution of these applications worldwide. For
example, HiV Aids rapid information and testing services built on
mobiles, climate and poluution monitoring applications, mobile
information services that provide consumers with point-of-purchase
environmental or other information services about products, mobile
human rights monitoring applications, mobile social and organizing
networks for trafficking or domestic abuse victims - the list of
potential applications is as endless and varied as there are civil
society causes.
I\'ll be watching the Open Handset Alliance, and wondering when I can
replace my Blackberry with an open phone.
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Reading
On 01 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
As many of you know, Apple\'s newest version of the Mac OS,
10.5, shipped just a few days ago. I have
been an Apple user since 1980, and a Macintosh owner since 1987. I have
owned about a dozen Macintosh computers (or clones) over the course of
20 years. I still own a Mac mini, which I expect will be my last
Macintosh, and I won\'t be upgrading that Mac mini to Leopard. Those of
you who are loyal Mac users are gasping. I\'d gasp if I read this a
couple of years ago. The Macintosh operating system has without
question, the best, most intuitive user interface ever invented, built
on top of the best OS invented, UNIX. Things \"just work\" (for the most
part - apparently Leopard has been having
issues.)
And I\'ve been quite happy that the Mac OS is gaining market share over
Windows - it would be great to see that continue. There are a number of
reasons for my deciding to slowly leave the Macintosh platform:
- I want to focus more energy and time on free and open source
platforms - I might donate what I would have spent on Leopard to
some deserving projects.
- I\'m not liking Apple\'s increasingly closed and monopolistic
tendencies when it comes to the iPod and iPhone.
- I don\'t use my Mac much anymore - I migrated to Linux as my main
desktop, and will be sticking there. I do have a few things I need
to migrate, including time tracking (I\'m starting to use
GnoTime to do time tracking,) PIM
data (I haven\'t decided which avenue I\'ll be going, but I\'m
definitely migrating that data this month to Linux), and music
(which will be hard - I have quite a number of DRMed iTunes
Music Store albums I will have to painstakingly convert.) The only
thing that will be left is games.
- I like building my own systems - I need a new desktop, and I like
the idea that I can build my own easily, and get a fair bit of power
fairly cheaply.
It\'s been fun, these 20 years with Macintosh. It seems a fitting moment
to say goodbye to Apple.
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On 01 Nov, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
The buzz of the blogosphere is the announcement of Google\'s
OpenSocial. I thought that it
would be a good idea to describe what it is, and what it might mean for
the nonprofit sector. Marc Andreessen, who is, of late, connected to
Ning, has a great blog
entry with
details. OpenSocial is a set of APIs. It\'s aimed primarily at
developers. Google has a number of partners, including social network
sites like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ning, as well as Salesforce, which
does have very interesting implications given the increasing use of
Salesforce in the nonprofit sector. OpenSocial is a set of APIs that
handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who
your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.)
And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any
application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social
network - any OpenSocial \"container\". That means developers need only
write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved,
like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites
that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets. One of the
big issues about social network platforms was that once Facebook made
its platform available, and MySpace and LinkedIn followed, it looked
like developers would have to port their apps to each social network.
OpenSocial means, basically, they can port to a whole lot fewer of them.
Hopefully, eventually, they can write their apps just once. Facebook has
quite the motivation to keep people on Facebook, and keep the eyeballs
there, because of their revenue model, which is ad-based. This breaks
the whole thing open. I\'m not so clear about how this helps users. I
expect, that because the APIs allow connections to profile, social
graph, and activity data of users, that portability and permeability
between social networks is bound to happen. But the path to truly
portable (with adequate privacy controls) profile, social graph and
activity data is still not entirely clear. What does this mean for the
nonprofit sector? Allan, in his inimitable style, talks
about
how most nonprofit organizations will not be able to take advantage of
OpenSocial. No question about that. Most nonprofits haven\'t even begun
to take advantage of the Web 2.0 world in general, let alone the
bleeding edge of OpenSocial. And I\'m not entirely clear yet how many
should be jumping on this bandwagon to either do fundraising or
community-building. Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and LinkedIn have very
different demographic and geographic reaches. Ning, which is the social
network of social networks, could end up being a very important player
here. I think that the inclusion of Salesforce in the mix will be very
interesting for web-savvy nonprofits who are thinking about, or have
started writing apps for social networks. It will be very interesting to
see how this plays out - what kinds of integration will be possible
between social network data and CRM data? Anyway, OpenSocial is
something I\'ll be watching, playing with, and writing about as time
goes on, and considering what it means for those of us in this sector.
Update: MySpace, SixApart (LiveJournal, Typepad and the newish social
networking blog platform Vox), and Bebo have now all joined
OpenSocial.
This is getting really interesting!
Continue Reading
On 31 Oct, 2007 By mpm
Finally, I have real broadband. We moved last weekend to a town that has
actual real cable high speed internet. Unfortunately, it is the
apparently increasingly
dastardly
Comcast, but it is so way much better than satellite by
Hughesnet, that I can\'t really find it in
myself to complain. Traffic is flying at four plus times the speed, I
can actually do remote shell sessions that aren\'t painful. I can Skype
again (once I figure out how to use my USB headset on Linux.) I have to
admit to being a very happy camper.
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On 24 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 3
Comments
I\'ve gotten some nice kudos for my blog in the past few days, and it
feels nice to know that people read the blog, and get something out of
it. I want to make the blog better, and also, more findable. I\'m not
going to embark on the 31 days to a better blog
challenge,
it\'s a bit too much for me to plunge into, but I will be doing bits and
pieces of it over time, as well as delving deeply into search engine
optimization
(SEO), which is a topic that I have pretty much only watched from a
distance for far too long. I\'ll be blogging on that as I go through it,
for sure. As a first start, I have a new poll. I hope you\'ll take it!
[poll=2]
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On 21 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I read three books recently that I thought would be worth reviewing
here. They fall into that category of \"business\" books that I
basically never read. I came upon these three for different reasons, and
although I\'m not interested in adopting their primary points of view,
there were tidbits that were worth the read (or a skim, in one case) in
the end. The first book, called \"Made to Stick:Why Some Ideas Survive,
and Others
Die.\"
I picked it up by happenstance, I think because I had
NOSI on my mind, and I was thinking about how to talk
to people about open source and nonprofits. It\'s an interesting book,
with a basic premise. in order to get an idea to stick, the idea needs
to be Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, tug at Emotions, and tell
a Story (their acronym is SUCCES). They do a good job of using examples
for each of these things (like why Southwest Airlines is so successful,
and why the Kidney Heist urban legend sticks so well, among other
stories. It\'s worth a read, I think, if you have a message to get
across. The second book, called \"Elements of
Persuasion\"
is a book that was sent to me for free - someone thought that I might
want to review it on my blog. This was the book I skimmed, because,
honestly, I was bored after the first chapter. It basically only focuses
on the last \"S\" part of the first book: storytelling. It uses examples
and such, but it is not anywhere near as engaging and readable as \"Made
to Stick.\" There ae a few interesting and useful tips, but if you are
only going to buy one book about getting your message across, buy the
first one, not this one. Although in most cases, these books are
designed for people who want to get more business (the first book not so
much - they have some good nonprofit examples.) The third book is in a
bit of a different category - not about landing more business, per se,
but making more money. It\'s called \"Value Based
Fees.\"
It\'s written by this guy, Alan Weiss, who has written the \"Ultimate
Consulting\"
series, which seems to be focused primarily on making a lot of money in
consulting. I would never have bought this book if it didn\'t come
recommended by a colleague who I respected. I mean, the cover has all
these dollar bills on it! To explain a bit - he does big money
consulting with huge Fortune 500 companies, and does projects for
hundreds of thousands of dollars that result in the companies saving, or
making, millions. A very different context than I, or most people
reading this work in, for sure. All of that said, he had some very
interesting perspectives. One of which is something I would love to talk
with other consultants (and clients, too) about. He thinks that
time-based billing is bad. His reasons are interesting. On one hand, he
feels that consultants should base their fees on the value they bring to
the consulting relationship, not the time spent. He feels that there is
an inherent conflict of interest in working for time - it is in the
consultants interest to spend more time on the project, regardless of
the outcome. And he thinks that deliverables are also problematic. He
thinks that ultimately, all consulting relationships should boil down to
the ultimate results for the client. His examples are things like saving
millions by reducing employee turnover, increasing profits by
streamlining processes, etc. Not about how many hours you spent at the
client office, or how many reports you wrote. Really, what he thinks is
that these forms of billing reduce the fees you can charge. It\'s a
little odd, because mainly what he\'s interested in is making more
money. But some of his ideas are interesting, especially the notion of
setting the fees on the value you bring, rather than the time you spend.
I\'m not sure how to make the translation to nonprofit consuting, but I
do find it interesting how blanket his rejection of time-based fees are.
And I do, certainly see his point about conflict of interest - if we
charge by the hour, we have an interest in spending more time. My
favorite consulting book is still \"The Consultant\'s
Calling\"
which, in some ways is diametrically opposed to the values of this book.
But, there are some useful ideas to mull over.
Continue Reading
On 18 Oct, 2007 By mpm
The dust is settling. I looked over Allan Benamer\'s
post
on the Convio and Kintera initiatives, I looked harder at the Convio
Open and Kintera
Connect docs, and I also had a
chat with some Kintera folk. I have a few comments. Allan is right - the
Kintera API is more comprehensive, and provides for more flexibility
than the Convio API. Of course, the API was only one part of Convio\'s
initiative, so I do still think they come out ahead, a bit. But it may
well be that for more complex integrations, the Kintera API will provide
more power. REST vs SOAP: Kintera seems to have chosen the \"more power,
harder to code\" choice. I could argue it either way. Methinks vendors
in this space still just don\'t grok, really, what \"open\" means. While
I appreciate that one can, theoretically (I have yet to test it) easily
become a \"partner\" with either company - but that doesn\'t quite count
as open. Allan hit the nail on the head when he said:
Again, this is a lesson in Web 2.0 transparency both for the sector
and the vendors who serve it. Control? Let it go. I really mean that.
From both a business point of view and from the point of view of how
our sector should work to heighten transparency in society at large,
there's no reason to limit the ability of coders to learn about and
discuss the [API ]{.caps}at hand. And the big guys have already done
this work, check out the way Google and
Amazon distribute
their [API]{.caps}s. Those shine as industry-standard examples of how
open [API]{.caps}s need to be distributed.
He\'s right. Open it up, let anyone bang on test data to try things out,
and you never know what might happen. The drive toward open everything
is pretty inexorable, and the pressure is only going to get greater.
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Reading
On 18 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Ubuntu Linux has a new release, version 7.10,
called \"Gutsy
Gibbon.\" (Really
I don\'t know where these names come from!) There is a great review at
Wired
that gives a good overview of what you\'ll find. They say, among other
things:
Gutsy Gibbon is certainly easier to install and set up than Windows
Vista, and it\'s very close to matching Mac OS X when it comes to
making things \"just work\" out of the box. Wi-Fi, printing, my
digital camera and even my iPod all worked immediately after
installation -- no drivers or other software required.
I\'m in the middle of moving, otherwise, I\'d be checking it out
immediately. Once I get settled in a couple of weeks, I\'ll be giving it
a spin, for sure. It seems that with Ubuntu, Linux is getting closer and
closer to being a completely viable and usable desktop for everyone.
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On 15 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 5 Comments
If you are new to this site, you might want to read
more, and subscribe to my
feed. One of
the wonderful things that has happened since I wrote the Open API
whitepaper
way back in January, is that finally, vendors are realizing how
important openness really is, and are beginning to implement things in a
big way. Two new initiatives have come to light in the last couple of
days, one from Kintera, called
\"Connect\" ,
and the other from Convio, called
\"Open\". They are both worth having a look
at, especially if you are considering either implementing a web
application platform, or if you are a consultant type looking for ways
to integrate data for your clients. At first blush, although Kintera
officially got out the door first, announcing Connect weeks ago, and
delivering the APIs and docs on Friday, their play is a good start, but
Convio, announcing Open tomorrow, appears to be ahead in terms of
providing real openness. Here\'s a quick overview of both initiatives.
You make your own conclusions. Kintera\'s Connect has an API that can do
some very important things. It allows you to access 16 entities within
the Kintera application, including lots of data about contacts, plus
data about appointments and tasks. The API is SOAP. One of my favorite
quotes in the Connect documentation is this one: \"As long as you can
invoke the API over HTTP, your application can be Microsoft, HP, IBM,
Novell, Oracle, even Sun-based. (emphasis mine) \" ooooooh... During
the NTEN call on Connect, they had mentioned that they were only going
to publish sample code in C# and Java. It appears, from perusing the
documentation, that someone in Kintera saw the light, and included PHP
code. In any event, Kintera\'s API goes a long way to help organizations
be freed from yet another data silo, and they are free. Convio has,
seemingly, gotten some serious Web 2.0 religion. Open has 3 components,
APIs, Database Connectors, and Extensions. The geek in me thinks the
Convio APIs are wicked cool, since they allow you to do client
programming via AJAX, as well as more standard server-based programming.
They work by REST via POST, or JSON. Their code on the server-based
method examples only include PHP at this point (the client based method
code examples are in the expected HTML and Javascript.) Database
Connectors are specific tools to help people connect Convio and specific
apps, including Blackbaud\'s Raiser\'s edge, and ... Salesforce!
Extensions are ways to connect the Convio app to other Web 2.0 apps out
there. They\'ve got this great Facebook application - basically a
template that allows an organization to create their own Facebook app.
Extensions also include the pantheon of Web 2.0 gods: Flickr, RSS,
Google, etc. Convio\'s APIs and Extensions are free, but the Database
connectors have consulting costs associated with them, and that makes
sense to me. Bottom line: Kintera takes some important steps to open up
their application. Convio takes more, bigger steps that appear to
eclipse what Kintera has done. But I think time will tell. I have some
advice for both companies, though:
- Keep going - it\'s looking more and more like not only are
people expecting the ability to mash their data and other data more,
it\'s also looking like a pretty good business model. Create and
foster developer and user communities in the same way that
Salesforce and open source communities do. Speaking of communities
...
- Open up beyond your \"partners\" - Really getting involved in
writing apps for either platform requires that people become
official partners of the companies. You\'re going to get a much more
vibrant developer community involved in developing new stuff for
your platforms if you eliminate hurdles. What\'s to lose?
- Deliver, don\'t just hype - of course, marketing is important,
but when the rubber really has to meet the road, be there with more
than vaporware. Both companies are making strides, but people want
to look under the hood, fast! It would be nice if the announcement
and the delivery weren\'t so far apart (we waited a long time for
the Kintera docs after the NTEN call - they should have either
postponed the call, or gotten the docs done sooner.) Speaking of
Kintera ...
- Kintera: try to catch up - Of course, the big 800 pound gorilla
has become Salesforce - and their platform is becoming what people
are measuring against. The Kintera API looks, quite honestly,
seriously wimpy in comparison to either Convio or Salesforce. But
then again, they are better than Blackbaud, which still has no open
APIs (that is, ones that are free), let alone anything else.
(\"Johnnie, can you spell \'data silo\'?\" ... \"b ... l ... a
... c ...\")
Continue Reading
On 11 Oct, 2007 By mpm
One of the areas of technology I watch is the world of \"enterprise\"
IT. Think big companies, lots of bucks, lots of boxes. Some nonprofits
fit into this category, but most nonprofits that I work with don\'t. I
think sometimes, interesting things come out of that watching. For
instance, Gartner\'s top 10
technologies to watch in 2008.
There\'s some great stuff there, like virtualization, social software,
green IT, etc. The striking thing: open source software wasn\'t on their
list. It was on their list for a few years, and has now fallen off. And
that\'s because in the enterprise world, for the most part, open source
software is a given part of the mix. It\'s not a strategic technology to
watch, it\'s old news. It is nice to see that \"Green IT \" tops
Gartner\'s list. I really do hope that the CIOs of the world pay
attention.
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On 09 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I\'ve been working hard on one project in particular over the past few
months: the updating and expanding of the NOSI primer: \"Choosing and
Using Free and Open Source Software: A Primer for
Nonprofits\". It\'s taken a while, has
some nice new features, and, basically, I\'m pretty proud of it.
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On 09 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 2
Comments
If you are new to this site, you might want to read
more, and subscribe to my
feed.
(Photo by
rob_pym) I\'m hosting this
week\'s Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants! Sorry it\'s a day
late. The topic I chose was a tough one, too: I asked people to talk
about mistakes they make with clients, and how they deal with them.
There weren\'t many takers on this one, but there are some real troopers
out there in the nonprofit consultant blogosphere, so there\'s some
great stuff to talk about. And, since it\'s a tough topic, I\'ll not
take myself off the hook. The theme in all of the blog posts, and in my
own approach to this issue, is transparency: we do all make mistakes,
and what\'s important is being honest about them. Mark, of Sea Change
Strategies, talks about five
mistakes
he\'s made in working with clients, includes things such as ignoring
internal organizational dynamics, and getting too involved, or not
involved enough. He has some really good thoughts worth considering as
we work with clients over time. Michele Martin gets
naked,
that is, practices her transparency preaching, and talks about mistakes
she\'s made, and goes into detail on her approach to dealing with
mistakes. Michael Stein talks about three different kinds of
mistakes
that one can make in technology consulting, including some errors of
process, and the \"Hot Dog\" syndrome. A great read for anyone who does
development for clients. I\'ve made most of the mistakes outlined in all
three of these brave blog postings. I think it is easy to feel like
we\'re the \"experts\" so we shouldn\'t make mistakes. It\'s all to easy
(and I\'ve seen it often) to do anything we can to avoid being wrong
about something. Transparency, or, Michele Martin\'s phrase, \"getting
naked\" is key, I think. Being transparent with clients about our own
processes and weak points, and where we may falter, and, most
importantly, being transparent and honest when we make mistakes, is what
can make the difference between happy clients and ones that wish they\'d
picked someone else.
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On 04 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 3
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I\'ve been using activeCollab for a few
months now. It\'s designed as a basecamp
clone. It has some things missing, for sure, but it has been useful to
me. I had hoped to more actively use it once the new version came out.
However, that won\'t happen. activeCollab is going commercial. It seems
to me that they could learn from the other successful projects out there
- the really successful projects are supported by a wide variety of
methods, whether it be a support model, a nonprofit foundation model, a
hosted model, and others. In fact, pretty much every open source project
that has gone commercial, or had a change in license, caused a fork,
pretty much killing the original (like Mambo, or XFree86.) They have had
an active user community, many of which, I imagine, are going elsewhere.
Luckily, there is ProjectPier, which is a
fork of activeCollab, and will remain open source. I\'ll be moving from
activeCollab to ProjectPier soon.
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On 01 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 5
Comments
I was reading Deborah Finn\'s curmugeonly
post
about Facebook. I have been having curmudgeonly thoughts about social
networks in general. My curmugeonly thoughts fall into three basic
categories of sucks: time suck, content suck, privacy suck. Time suck:
Social networks are a time suck. Signing up for new ones, making
profiles, adding friends, adding applications, etc. etc. And, yet
another login and password. At least the content-focused social
networks, like del.icio.us, or flickr, or my personal favorite, our own
Social Source Commons, there is
some there there. I have reached social network burn-out, and I refuse
to join another one, unless there is something truly compelling, and
something I could not accomplish in any other way. Content suck: And why
do the for-profit social networks exist, when you really get down to it?
Nick Carr, one of my favorite smart dudes, calls it digital
sharecropping:
What\'s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the
economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other
businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of
production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of
the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the
distribution of production into the hands of the many and the
concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It\'s
a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy
because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in
making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their
individual contributions is trivial. It\'s only by aggregating those
contributions on a massive scale - on a web scale - that the business
becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers
operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate
happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does
not operate separately from the cash economy; it\'s simply a means of
creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.
It\'s a big chunk to digest, but it makes perfect sense. As I said in a
post a while back, I know that Facebook is getting far more from my time
spent on Facebook than I do. They own my profile, and whatever time I
spend adding content. It\'s not really mine, and I don\'t like that.
Privacy Suck: Not so long ago, there was a little hiccup in Web 2.0
goodiness. A new social networking site, called \"Quetchup\" spammed
(without permission) the
contacts
of people who signed up for the site. That\'s because a lot of the
social networking sites allow you to find other people on their site by
giving them your gmail username and password, or your email contact
list. There is no question that the social networking space is
evolving.
But I\'m not going to join another social network unless: 1) It is truly
compelling on a content level, and provides a way to do things with
content that is impossible otherwise, or, 2) It uses
OpenID, 3) It has an open social
graph,
and 4) I have ownership and control of my own profile data. When all of
those happen, I\'ll be the first to sign up.
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On 01 Oct, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been writing a surprising amount about nonprofit CRM tools lately.
It\'s such an interesting space, and there are some really intriguing
things happening with software in that space. NTEN is trying to get a
handle
on all of this, and find out what people use, and how much they like
what they use. I can\'t wait to get my grubby little fingers on the data
on CiviCRM and Salesforce. So, let your voice be heard! Fill out the
survey.
Continue Reading
On 01 Oct, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
A few things have come across my desk while I was on vacation, so I
thought I\'d collect them here:
- Of course, there are new Web 2.0 tools that come out every single
day. It\'s a bit staggering, sometimes. I am waiting for this bubble
to burst, too, but until then:
- Timebridge - this seems like a
pretty useful scheduling tool. The cool thing is that it
integrates with GoogleCalendar. I just did a trial meeting
scheduling - and it worked pretty well. One note, though - the
increasing number of new web applications that are interfacing
with google, meaning that there are companies out there with my
google password, is a bit troubling. I wish there was a way to
avoid that, and still get the integration.
- DonorChoose -
I am both fascinated and horrified by this site. Basically, the
cool thing is that you can choose which school projects to
fund - so if I\'d like kids to have more hands-on science
experiences, I can fund projects to buy things like microscopes
... wait, what?? Microscopes? What happened to our school
system that an organization is formed to provide a place for
thousands (yes, thousands) of projects for school kids? In
school. So they can learn. WTF? But, anyway, if you want a
good cause, this is one. And the concept is one that is
increasingly prevalent: donors get to choose exactly where there
money goes, and there is some competition between worthy
projects. I\'m still on the fence about this concept in general.
- Razoo - here\'s another
Change.org for you. (There is a post
forthcoming where I vent my social networking curmudgeonness.)
- Building open social
networks -
This is a great article on O\'Reilly Radar about opening up the
\"social graph\" - it\'s worth a look.
- My online identity
score is 9/10. That\'s
kinda cool.
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On 30 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 3
Comments
I had decided, a while back, not to buy an iPhone. Too expensive, for
one thing. I like my 60G iPod that I\'ve had for a while, and although I
tire of lugging around three electronic devices (cell phone, Palm,
iPod), and that my current phone is about to fall apart, the cost and
the fact that it was so new made me decide not to go for it, even though
AT&T is my carrier. But then, Apple dropped the price \$200, and it
made me ponder. But nope. No iPhone for me. Why? This is
why.
I will not be buying an iPhone until they sell an unlocked version that
doesn\'t need to be hacked to use third party applications. The move of
Apple to use software update to break hacked and unlocked phones is
somewhat ironic, given the attitude of Jobs toward
DRM, and the open source
basis for OS X. Jobs understands that DRM doesn\'t work, and doesn\'t
help sell music. He should understand that the same thing is true for
iPhones. The good news is that eventually, hackers always win. A few
years down the road, when successive updates of the iPhone get hacked,
they will give up, and open it up. And, maybe they\'ll even figure out
that open will likely make them more money than closed. But for all of
Steve Jobs smarts, sometimes he can be pretty dumb. So what am I going
to replace my current phone with? I don\'t know yet, but whatever it is,
it will be unlocked.
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On 25 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I\'m on vacation/fiction writing retreat this week. So, no blog posts
from me here until I get back to work on October 1st. But I might write
an entry or two on my personal blog,
if you\'re interested.
Continue Reading
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On 20 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 1
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You\'ve been told that
insert_cool_open_source_software_project_here might be the ticket
for a specific function or system you\'d like to implement in your
nonprofit organization. Or you\'re just curious about projects you\'ve
heard about. How do you go about finding out whether it\'s the right
software, and whether the project has a healthy community, since you
don\'t want to adopt a project that doesn\'t?
- Check out the website. Make sure that the features that it outlines
there match your requirements. See if they have good documentation.
- Check out the forums of email list archives of that project. How
busy is it? How easily or quickly does it seem that questions get
answered?
- Look at the \"download\" page (or \"releases\"). When was the last
release? How much time generally passes between major or minor
releases? (Minor releases are, for example, when a project goes from
2.2.3 to 2.2.4. Depending on project, going from x.2 to x.3 might
be a major or minor release. Going to a x.0 release - for example
from 2.x to 3.0 is always major.) Rule of thumb: projects that
haven\'t had minor releases in a year or more are definitely in
danger of becoming projects that are no longer under development.
- Look at ohloh.net - they have great info on most
projects - how many developers, lines of code, how active
development activity is.
- Send queries to nonprofit tech lists for experiences and
information, like
nosi-discussion,
nten-discuss,
riders-tech, and
others.
- Google it - you might find articles and reviews that might be
helpful
- Try it out. These are almost always free to download and try out -
this is easier for some projects than others. Luckily, most web
project have online demos, which will give you a feeling for the
software without having to spend too much time configuring a server
or webhost to use the software. Many standard virtual hosts have
\"one click install\" or \"fantastico\" - which makes it easy to try
out some kinds of web applications.
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On 17 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 10 Comments
There is an interesting
discussion
happening between Holly Ross, soon to be ED of
NTEN, and Allan
Benamer, about web statistics, and
whether or not nonprofits should be \"transparent\" and publish their
web statistics. Allan\'s argument is that because NTEN is in a
leadership position in the field, it should lead in showing transparency
by publishing its web stats. And, he thinks that NTEN should be
responsive to him, as a member, in asking to publish web stats.
Holly\'s
argument
is, basically that web stats don\'t equal accountability. The question I
want to ask is, what do web stats really mean, anyway? For
organizations, web stats are useful indicators of how many people are
being reached by their message, the geographical spread of the visitors
and whether or not a specific campaign was successful in driving traffic
or creating actions (like donations, or letters, etc.) It is an
internal assessment tool which helps organizations figure out what
parts of their online strategy are working, and what parts might need
tweaking. As some sort of measure of accountability, raw web statistics
(this site got x visits and y pageviews in t timeframe) mean zilch.
Nothing. Nada. Just because organization 1 gets 45,000 unique visits per
month, and organization 2 gets 3,000 means nothing in relationship to
the impact that organization has in the world, or in relationship to how
it uses its resources. Organization 1 could be spending all of its money
on its web presence, and none on its mission, organization 2 could be
doing just the opposite. And the mission of the organization matters
too. Even for NTEN, which is extremely web-heavy in its mission, raw
visit numbers will mean nothing related to how well it is doing its job.
The idea that web stats = some measure of nonprofit accountability is a
result of a mindset that suggests that web presence should be the
central part of a nonprofit\'s communications strategy, and that raw
numbers of visits has some relationship to how well a nonprofit works.
For some organizations with some limited kinds of missions, this may be
the case. But for the vast majority of nonprofits out there, web
strategy is a small part of their communications strategy, and the
numbers of people that visit their site bears little or no relationship
to how well they do their work, or what they do. And, I actually hope
that doesn\'t change. I don\'t think we want homeless shelters, food
pantries, mental health organizations, etc., to care a whole lot about
how many hits they got in comparison to similar (or different)
organizations. I don\'t want to start a race to the top of the Nonprofit
25 - where organizations start spending more time worrying about their
position on that list, and less time feeding people. Allan says:
Granted, web site stats will not tell me anything about how many
hungry people a nonprofit feeds. How odd is it then to teach Google
Analytics to nonprofit
techies
but then say that site statistics had nothing to do with a nonprofit's
mission? Why bother having a web site at all? Properly used, web sites
are more than just a payment solution for credit card bearing donors.
They can be used for a nonprofit's mission and that is why nonprofits
should exercise transparency on web site analytics.
How does giving resources to nonprofits to help them understand how to
use web stats to do internal assessment of web strategy inconsistent
with choosing not to publish raw web stats? Asking NTEN to show
leadership by publishing web stats is to suggest that NTEN would think
that publishing web stats is a useful measure of nonprofit
accountability. Holly doesn\'t think so, and I don\'t either.
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On 13 Sep, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been spending a lot of time with
OpenOffice.org lately. I\'ve been running
OOo, as it is often abbreviated, for many years now (I used StarOffice
before OpenOffice.org was created.) I have used it everyday, to do
everything (all of my spreadsheets, worksheets, articles, presentations,
I used it to write a novel, I used it in seminary for papers, etc.,
etc.,) for at least 4 years. I\'ve not owned MS Office in a very long
time. Lately, I\'ve been running the 2.3 Release Candidate to help with
QA, which has been fun (and 2.3 looks mighty good - especially with the
improvements to Base.) I wrote an article on
OpenOffice.org for
LASA\'s knowledgebase, and I wrote another one on Base specifically
(Base is the database component to OOo, new in 2.0, and pretty good, and
improving fast.) that will be published in Linux Identity
Magazine. I hope
to start doing OpenOffice.org training soon. I happen to think that
unless an organization has deeply invested in developing custom Access
databases, there aren\'t too many reasons left not to switch to
OpenOffice.org. Actually, even if they have, for word processing,
spreadsheets, and presentations, it\'s really great. It\'s stable,
feature rich, uses open standards, reads and writes MS files, and, did I
mention it\'s free? No administration fees, no license checking, no
running out of licenses for larger organizations, nothin\'. Download it
and put it on every desktop and get rid of that license manager thingy.
In talking with organizations that are using it - adoption issues for
staff seem to be fairly minimal (my partner, a non-techie writer, uses
it everyday, with no complaints.) Of course, like all open source
software, it is \"free as in kittens\" - but this particular kitten is
pretty grown up, and already spayed and litter trained. So, here\'s the
great news: Hot on the heels of Microsoft missing the ISO
boat,
IBM is lending their
weight
to the OpenOffice.org suite. They are having 35 (!) programmers work on
OOo. It\'s not only that they are going to be contributing to the
project - but remember the old adage \"no one ever got fired for buying
IBM\"? IBM\'s reputation is bound to help increase adoption of
OpenOffice.org. More adoption means more developers involved, more users
helping, more resources available. Outside of the US, OpenOffice.org
adoption is growing fast. I imagine that will begin to happen here as
well. (In the spirit of full disclosure: IBM has given grants to NOSI
in 2003 and 2007 for the NOSI Open Source Primer.)
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On 13 Sep, 2007 By mpm
An interesting
study
was released yesterday by an organization called the Computer and
Communications Industry Association (with heavyweight members like
Google and Microsoft) which shows that fair use exceptions to copyright
generate more economic benefit than copyrights themselves. Here\'s a
tidbit of a Infoworld
report
about the study:
[ By one measure -- \"value added,\" which the report defines as \"an
industry\'s gross output minus its purchased intermediate inputs\" --
the fair use economy is greater than the copyright
economy.]{#articleBody} Recent studies indicate that the value added
to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to \$1.3 trillion,
said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use
amounts to \$2.2 trillion. The fair use economy\'s \"value added\" is
thus almost 70% larger than that of the copyright industries. The
\$4.5 trillion in annual revenue attributable to fair use represents a
31% increase since 2002, according to the report, which claims that
fair use industries are responsible for 18% of U.S. economic growth
and almost 11 million American jobs.
[ So, if fair use adds more economic benefit than copyrights - what
would open source do? Well, we have some data from
Europe:]{#articleBody}
[]{#articleBody}
[FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment
that can result in increased profits or be more usefully spent in
further innovation.]{.artText}
ASAY: Importantly, these savings apply to everyone, not merely open
source companies/developers. Open source isn\'t biased in
distributing its benefits.
[ ...• Increased FLOSS use may provide a way for Europe to compensate
for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US. A growth and
innovation simulation model shows that increasing the FLOSS share of
software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in
annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself
-- i.e. over Euro 10 billion annually. ]{.artText} []{.artText}
[The evidence seems to be growing. At least on a large scale, open is
economically better than closed.]{#articleBody} Update: Nick Carr
thinks the fair use study is \"a crock.\" He has some good
points.
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On 10 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I have a few little tidbits, each don\'t make enough for its own post,
so here goes...
- Nicholas Carr (the Rough Type smart dude) tried out Adblock
Plus,
and has some very insightful comments about it. He even asks \"What
would Jesus do?\"
- O\'Rielly has a new online series about Women in
Technology, with
some really great articles. Worth a read!
- AgencyByte has a great
article
on how to prevent scope creep.
- Although the breaks I take during my work day don\'t look like this,
I liked this
cartoon.
- I\'ve been reading Matt Asay\'s blog on open source business models,
and he has an interesting post which suggests that writing
documentation is a good marketing
strategy!
- OK, no, I\'m still not convinced, but here\'s an interesting take
on Second
Life
from Frogloop. Also, they have a very interesting ROI
calculator
for social networks that is worth a look.
Continue Reading
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On 07 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 1
Comments
For those of you that pay attention to open standards, this is old(ish)
news. Earlier this week, ISO, the International Organization for
Standardization, rejected Microsoft\'s
bid
to fast-track OOXML (Office Open
XML) to standard status.
What this means is that MS will have to take all of the varied input
from the ISO bodies, and go through a second vote early next year.
Microsoft thinks that it will win
approval,
but that is far from clear. (If you read that link, which is basically a
copy of a press release from Microsoft, you\'d think they had it all
sewn up. In fact, that is far from the case.) Office Open XML is
Microsoft\'s XML-based file format which is now native in Office 2007.
Instead of adopting the already ISO approved Open
Document format, it
attempted to get through ISO a standard that, among other things,
depends too much on non-standard, non-publicly available legacy file
formats. Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of an open
standard. Microsoft is in an interesting place with their cash cow,
Office. They have increasing competition from OpenOffice.org, Google
Apps, and, on the Mac, iWork. A lot of governments are demanding that
document formats be open standards, so it is important for MS to be able
to get OOXML through ISO. I\'ll keep you posted.
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On 06 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 1
Comments
One of the cool things about free and open source software is that often
(not always, but often) they provide an open platform for add-ons. As a
full-time user of both Firefox and Thunderbird, I\'m really enjoying the
benefits of these open platforms, and the immense creativity of people
who create add-ons. And it\'s all free! A few Firefox extensions that I
can\'t live without include a new one I discovered recently, called
\"AdBlock Plus.\" This is the best thing
since sliced bread. It blocks banner ads, Google adsense ads, stupid
dancing aliens for mortgages, etc. I love it. I know a lot of people get
revenue from ads, and I sorta feel bad promoting AdBlock, but the truth
is, I never click on ads, so no one ever gets any revenue from my
actions anyway. It\'s nice to have clean, ad, free pages, and especially
without the distracting moving ads. Plus, pages load faster without ads.
The other Firefox extension that I use a lot is Google
Toolbar.
It\'s great to have easy Google tools at my fingertips. For Thunderbird,
the two I\'ve been trying out include
XNote, which
is kinda fun, it allows you to add sticky notes to email messages.
Lightning,
which is a Sunbird calendar plug in, that gives me a calendar integrated
with Thunderbird.
There are tons of other add-ons for all of
the Mozilla Suite applications. I\'m trying out some new themes soon.
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On 01 Sep, 2007 By mpm
With 2
Comments
You\'ve probably heard the news, and I\'m taking a break from my break
to write about it. Convio has registered to go
public. This
means that the \"big three\" nonprofit CRM/Fundraising/Advocacy vendors
will all be publicly traded companies, and thus completely beholden to
their shareholders to maximize profit. Unlike Salesforce (also publicly
traded, where nonprofit paid accounts are a tiny, tiny minority of their
earnings,) every single penny of money that these corporations earn come
from nonprofit organizations. Thus, every single penny of their income
comes from donations that nonprofit organizations raise to,
theoretically, fund the missions of their work. OK, so I\'m going to
sound like a broken
record.
But, hey, why not? How about some community-owned, community-driven free
and open source options? How about options where investment feeds back
and benefits everyone, instead of a few people? How about bigger bang
for the donation buck, where the money that nonprofits spend on
CRM/Fundraising apps goes to options that just get better and better - a
rising tide that truly lifts all boats? This is neither impractical
nor rocket science. All it takes is leadership, collaboration, and, most
importantly, will.
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On 30 Aug, 2007 By mpm
I\'m taking a brief 4 day weekend - not that it would be that noticeable
on this blog, since I don\'t always post consistently. That is actually
one of the things I\'m going to try and change - to set up to do a post
every weekday. We\'ll see how that goes. Before I took off, I wanted to
mention a few things that have been on my mind (and on my plate.) First,
some of you might know that the new version of the NOSI
primer has been in the works. It\'s
new and updated for the realities of the nonprofit technology and free
and open source worlds of 2007. The primer, which will show up in just
electronic form, also has a very cool implementation of a great open API
that we\'ll be crowing about soon (my lips are sealed right now.) I keep
discovering new and exciting free and open source web platforms. One of
which is called Elgg. Elgg is a very cool
community-building and e-learning tool - it\'s got the social networking
combined with features like forums, etc. And further, there is an
amazing integration of Elgg with Mediawiki.
I wish I had an excuse to install and test it - but it really requires a
purpose for bringing community together. I could think of several
interesting implementations in the nptech world that would be fun (like
it would make a great e-learning platform for, say, circuit riders, or
folks like that.) Laura Quinn has a great blog entry about software
\"satisficing\"
- that is that sometimes we want to maximize the features that a
particular software package has, instead of finding the one that works
for us. It\'s very zen, and a great read. I\'ve been doing a lot of
technical writing - I just put the finishing touches on my third of
three articles for LASA\'s ICT Hub
Knowledgebase, I\'m writing an
article on Open Office
Base for the next issue of
Linux Identity Magazine, and, of
course, I\'ve been busy writing the NOSI primer. I also have been doing
some interesting client projects. So I\'m very busy, and enjoying what
I\'m doing a whole lot! Oh, and my consulting practice has a new logo,
done by the fabulous ALR Design!
{width="314"
height="190"}
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On 30 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I have not at all been tempted by the 31 days to a better
blog
challenge. Not because I don\'t want my blog to be better, it\'s just
that I don\'t have the time right now. But, I have been following
Michele Martin\'s work on The Bamboo Project
Blog with some
interest. There are a few pieces to that challenge I might take up, on
occasion. One of them, I\'ll do now. A few days ago, Michele posted her
blog\'s mission
statement.
I figured it was a good time to think about and articulate mine. The tag
line for this blog is \"Conscious, mimalist, neo-luddite perspectives
on nonprofit technology.\" The mission of this blog is to help me, and
those who read the blog, think more deeply about how we use technology.
To get underneath the \"conventional wisdom\" of nonprofit technology,
and keep asking \"why\"? It\'s like that 3 year old, who just keeps
asking why, after each explanation. I want to get to the core, to really
make sure that our means and our ends are in sync. And, a secondary
mission is to educate people about technology that I think is
interesting and useful. My blog and my advising
practice don\'t quite have the same
mission. My advising practice is much more about educating and helping
people with concrete technology tools, and concrete projects. I hope
that in the process of doing projects for clients, I am able to ask
those deep questions, and help them ask \"why\" much more often. But my
role in that context is much more around helping to solve specific
problems, or educate in specific ways about technology options.
Continue Reading
On 24 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
One of the things I\'ve noticed recently is that my blog is getting the
attention of software vendors. I guess that\'s a good thing. Maybe it
means I have \"arrived\". Probably it just means that when the \"Social
Media Director\" or the \"Goddess of Communication\" arrived in their
office in the morning, they ran their standard set of google blog and
technorati searches, and voila, there I was. It was, a while ago, part
of my job to build technology solutions for people. It was also part of
my job to give advice where it was appropriate, but I have come to
realize, in my current position of being apart from building things,
that I had a bit of myopia, as all builders and vendors do. We like
what we build/sell (generally, I\'m sure there are exceptions.) We think
our particular products or service is the best around, or, at least,
provides our clients with some unique value. I had good intentions, like
virtually all software vendors do. Like many who work in this sector, I
cared more about the missions of my clients than I did about my own
income, although I also needed to put food on the table. But, I was
myopic anyway. It\'s the standard \"if I have a hammer, every problem
looks like a nail.\" I wanted to figure out how to make my product solve
every problem that my clients had - or, if I couldn\'t, I wanted to
figure out how to build/install/integrate something that could. Vendors,
no matter what their intentions and points of view do have a particular
way of speaking. \"Elluminate is a leading provider of live Web
conferencing and eLearning solutions for the real-time organization.\"
and \"... hundreds of NonProfits have already found that ReadyTalk is a
good fit for them both technologically AND financially.\" and \"We've
designed Yugma to work seamlessly between Mac, Windows and Linux.\" you
the picture. In fact, if you are a nonprofit, you\'ve spent time wading
through that crap (and believe me, I\'ve created my own healthy share of
vendorspeak.) A while ago, I blogged
about the
\"scarcity mentality\" - the idea that the pie is finite, and it has to
be split up. So, of course, everybody is fighting tooth and nail, bit
and byte, trackback and comment (and even dollar and cent), to get their
piece. There are some trends that make it seem that some vendors are
beginning to get the picture that we can all work together - open APIs
seem to be on the rise. That makes me happy. My one request is that
vendors who comment on this blog take a moment to step back a bit from
their myopia, and look at the ways in which they can contribute to a
vibrant, active ecology of choices, rather than fight for their own
little piece of the pie.
Continue Reading
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On 23 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 2
Comments
I remember in the late 90s, in the heady days of getting organizations
up to speed with technology, I would suggest to organizations that they
add in their budget replacing 1/4 to 1/3 of their computers each year
(instead of the much more common practice of replacing them all at once
every 5 or 10 years when a grant happened.) This was for all the good
reasons: computers are cheap, support is expensive, and it would cost
more time and money to diagnose and fix a computer than replace it - so
replacing computers on a regular schedule would actually decrease IT
costs. Well, all of that is true. But in this newer era, when we think
that cost is more than just dollars, but we also have to think about the
hidden cost of all of those toxic chemicals, fossil fuels, and
water
that goes into manufacturing computers, as well as the bulging landfills
all over the country. So I\'ve been thinking a lot about the role of
free and open source software in environmentally sustainable computing.
Some of the biggest reasons to replace computers is not as much the
hardware failure issues, but software bloat and cruft, and planned
obsolescence. You can\'t run Microsoft\'s Vista on a computer that is
more than a year or so old. Computers that now run Windows 2000 (there
are plenty of them in nonprofit offices, I\'m sure) probably can\'t even
run XP, let alone Vista. But computers of that vintage can pretty
happily run Ubuntu Feisty (the current Ubuntu version). And older
computers running Linux make very handy single (or even multiple)
purpose servers - file servers, backup servers, dhcp servers, routers
and firewalls, print servers, etc. The great thing is that converting to
Linux won\'t just help environmentally - Linux has lower IT costs -
lower support costs, and no software acquisition costs. If an office
converted from Windows to Linux, they could keep their hardware much
longer (five years easily), and have much lower IT costs, thus, in the
end, creating a more environmentally and economically sustainable
office. Of course, there are caviats. There are software options that
don\'t exist yet, there are hardware incompatibilities, but these
decrease every year. Sometime in September, NOSI will
be releasing the new version of the primer on open source software for
nonprofits. I\'ll be announcing it, for sure. There will be some much
more detailed information that will help make it easier to figure out if
it is right for you.
Continue
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On 21 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
One of the great things about the nonprofit technology community is that
the community, on the whole, has a great respect for women, in whatever
roles we play - whether it be geeky not. The exceptions to this in my
experience have been very, very few and far between. However, take one
little step outside of our warm and fuzzy community into the larger
technology community, and things change. Unfortunately, the open source
community seems to find ways to ridicule, degrade and and belittle women
quite often. Linux Journal ran the following
advertisement by a company
called \"QSOL\":
{width="238"
height="266"} And, it got 2100+
diggs, with the title
\"Best. Ad. Ever.\" It ran in 2000, with a lot of uproar, and they
promised never to run it again. Right. In addition, Linux Journal has a
column, called \"Tech Tips from Gnull and
Voyd\" with quotes like:
Howdy. My husband is Chester Gnull and I\'m Laverta Voyd, and I\'m
the lady to light a way for all you sweethearts out there who do fancy
stuff with Linux. Me and my husband\'s gonna be bringing you tech
tips just about every month now. ... I don\'t know nothing about
Linux. Chester, he\'s the smart one, but he\'s not much of a talker.
That\'s why I\'m here. ...
One wonders how many bad stereotypes they can fit in one column? Anyway,
if you read Linux Journal, please tell them how you
feel. I did.
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On 17 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 22
Comments
I decided, perhaps rashly, that one way of exposing people to, and
training people on, open source software, was by doing web conferencing.
I thought it would be a good endeavor to start with. One that could
include free webinars, as well as paid training. So, once I decided
that, I realized I needed to find the right tools. In my searches for
tools that would allow me to start this endeavor, I had several things I
wanted:
- Possibility of showing slides and sharing my Linux and Mac Desktop
- Audio conferencing (two way)
- Chat capabilities
- Clean, professional, bug-free interface
- Low (or no) infrastructure costs or setup
- Truly cross platform
- Inexpensive (but not necessarily free.)
I felt I needed all of these features to make this successful. However,
I have realized that it is presently impossible have all of this in one
package. I have evaluated a number of options, and every one of them
comes up short in one way or another.
- ReadyTalk - this had been the tool I
thought I\'d use. It is totally cross-platform, includes
audioconferencing, has chat, etc. Its only drawback is that it\'s
not inexpensive. It\'s \$.24 per person/minute for web conferencing,
plus \$.15 per person/minute for audio is very tough to swallow.
Even the unlimited plans (which start at \$50/month, or possibly
discounted) have pricing for audio, which I hadn\' t realized. It
was this audio pricing that drove a stake in the heart of my
ReadyTalk plan. Note: These rates are not for nonprofit
organizations - they are the standard rates. Nonprofits are charged
much lower rates (see comment below.) Unfortunately, I don\'t
qualify for those rates.
- Web Huddle - The only other one I can
find that at this time offers the possibility of sharing a Linux
desktop. It does, apparently, do audio via VOIP. In my tests it was
buggy (some parts of it just didn\'t work), and the interface was
still a bit crude. It is a free service right now, which is good,
and the software behind it is open source, which is even better.
- The others I assessed include DimDim,
Yugma, and Adobe
Connect. They all are
certainly interesting, and DimDim and Yugma are free. (I love that
DimDim is using Joomla as their site CMS). They are all
cross-platform for participants, but none of these can show Linux
desktops, and some (like Adobe in particular) can\'t even run the
presenter software on Linux.
- I also looked at a
system that
The Gilbert Center has been using. It\'s
quite interesting, and it deals with the audio over phone issue
(which is a major snag) by dispensing with two-way audio entirely,
and just using one-way audio. In looking more deeply at it, however,
I\'d have to do some major technology infrastructure implementation
to get it going, which I\'m not ready for.
So what\'s the answer? I don\'t know. Technologically, ReadyTalk is,
well, ready. My wallet, however, is not ready (even if discounted).
WebHuddle is not technologically ready, but it may (or may not) end up
being what I use for free webinars (either alone, or in combination with
freeconference.com.) It is the only one
of these options that is both free as in beer, and free as in libre,
which is important to me. But it\'s buggy, and it feels like exposing
people who aren\'t already totally sold on open source to open source
using a project that\'s not ready for primetime is, well, one step
forward and two steps back? (And, boy did I just fail the Richard
Stallman test!) Perhaps not, I\'m not clear. I might try using Yugma on
my Mac desktop (I actually haven\'t tried that yet - I don\'t know
whether it\'s supported,) because the interface on Yugma is clean and
nice, and it seems bug free. But this has also made me re-assess this
whole endeavor. Is this what I really want to do? Is there an audience
out there? I\'m stepping back and thinking a bit more about this.
Continue
Reading
On 16 Aug, 2007 By mpm
Nicholas Carr, who writes the blog Rough
Type, is a smart dude. Although he writes
about the technology field as a whole, and seems very tapped into the
for-profit world, he has lots of words of wisdom I think we can learn
from. He has a recent
article
in \"Director Magazine\" which is
a UK-based business magazine (no, I don\'t read it, I just got the link
from his blog,) entitled 10 tips for reducing burgeoning IT costs. Most
of the 10 are applicable to nonprofit organizations (I\'d skip the
\"Offshore work\" tip.) The one I love the best: Procrastinate. We all
don\'t need to be on the bleeding edge to get stuff done.
Continue
Reading
On 15 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I listened in on the
call
with Kintera folks about their new platform, called
Connect.
I was mostly curious about how open this platform will be, and what the
future holds for them. I have become fascinated by the ways the
CRM/Fundraising space is changing so rapidly. Basically, Kintera is
taking directly from Salesforce\'s
playbook. There are two initiatives that they have that I\'ll talk most
about, their \"Connect\" initiative, and their data warehousing
initiative. These are, for pretty obvious reasons, the most interesting
to me personally. They will also be doing some serious UI overhauls, and
upgrading their CMS. They also are opening a new data center, as well as
bringing Akamai technology into the mix. The
Connect platform is a set of APIs, starting with the contact and payment
sets of entities, that will allow access (via SOAP 1.1) to the data in
the Kintera platform. Basically, third parties will be able to build
applications which will allow two-way communication into the platform.
The APIs will be without cost. The data warehouse initiative is to allow
their customers access to large amounts of data for reporting and data
mining. It seems like it will start out with a local query system, then
will be opened up to allow third party development of data analysis
tools. That part looks very interesting. A couple of annoyances: the
documentation for the APIs aren\'t up yet, and the sample code they are
going to publish is in C# and Java! Now I\'m sure that there are a lot
of large Kintera customers that might be implementing other applications
that will be written in C# and Java, but it seems to me that this is,
in fact a pretty big red flag that they really don\'t have a feeling for
the technology that the sector is using. Code published in PHP and
Python would probably get a lot more people up to speed and interested
in building stuff that will integrate with the things that a lot of
nonprofits really use. I mean really, how many nonprofits have stuff
written in Java? Small minority, I\'d bet. (I guess the C# would be
useful for the Windows crowd.) On the whole, though, I applaud them for
seeing the light, and opening up their platform. It will be interesting
to see where this leads them.
Continue Reading
On 12 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
In the course of working with some clients, I have been in the process
of trying to find technology providers, specifically, server, desktop
and network support organizations, that support Linux. Several years
ago, they were very few and very far between - mostly individuals who
focused solely on Linux. Now, there are many more, and traditional
Windows shops are beginning to either add staff who know Linux, or learn
it themselves. But there still isn\'t a lot out there. At least in
Massachusetts, the majority of nonprofits work with network support
people who don\'t focus totally on nonprofit organizations (there are
some wonderful exceptions, however, of companies that focus on the
sector.) The good thing is that since the business world seems to be
moving ahead much more quickly on Linux and FOSS adoption, companies
that work in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors are gaining Linux
expertise - expertise that nonprofit organizations can benefit from. But
I think more is needed. One of the interesting dynamics of any
technology provider of any stripe is the way they choose the technology
they will focus on and support. I think this is something that many
nonprofits, especially those without in-house technology expertise
aren\'t that aware of. No technology vendor, even the largest ones, can
support everything. Most support only a subset (sometimes a very small
subset) of the available options. This is because all providers start
out with some personal experiences or biases, and most are too busy
taking care of clients to spend lots and lots of time gaining new
expertise in a broad range of topics - they need to focus. And even if
they hire expertise, there has to be enough overlap for synergy to
happen. Most of the time, for clients, this doesn\'t matter. Sometimes
it does matter, both to an organization that might use that vendor, and
to the vendor themselves in terms of viability of their business model.
I came across this
discussion of Linux
distributions and their strengths and weaknesses in terms of vendors who
might resell Linux. It was interesting not as much for its focus on the
presence or absence of \"channel programs\" but for the way it
characterized the qualities of the different distributions in terms of
the business model of reselling Linux. In a sense, of course, if you are
a technology provider and you install Linux on some servers or desktops
in an organization, you are \"reselling\" Linux. But since most Linux
distributions are free (as in beer), that\'s not really quite the way to
look at it. So I thought I would take from their model, and instead,
talk about distributions from the perspective of the needs of a small to
medium-sized technology support organization (for profit or nonprofit)
that serve nonprofits. I\'m really interested in helping technology
providers get up to speed, so that the amount of support available for
nonprofits using Linux (and open source in general) increases. If you
are a provider, please feel free to email me if you want more info or
help and support in moving forward. Ubuntu As this article states,
Ubuntu is a very popular distribution right now, and
Canonical is working hard to get Ubuntu in
as wide a range of hands as possible. The basic philosophy of Ubuntu
\"Linux for human beings\" is certainly one that makes sense for a lot
of nonprofits, and it also has made Ubuntu the easiest distribution to
set up and use, especially on the desktop. Ubuntu also has also focused
a lot of effort on building community, and has, hands down, the most
vibrant, helpful and deep community of any Linux distribution. They have
mentorship programs, they are building regional networks, they have
almost unparalleled bulletin board, email and IRC community support.
This community is one of Ubuntu\'s great strengths, in terms of the
ability to find helpful and sometimes instant support (via an incredibly
active set of IRC channels.) And, Canonical also provides professional
support. Canonical has a lot of connections in the nonprofit sector. In
my opinion, it\'s a good distribution to start with if you are just
beginning to learn Linux, and thinking about adding it to your business
because of the vibrant and deep community that is there to provide
support. But, as the article linked above says, they don\'t have an
official affiliate program, so it will take some shoe leather on your
part to build the business aspects. Red Hat Red
Hat is the old standby, and is in the server
rooms of many nonprofits all over the country. The old adage \"no one
ever got fired for buying IBM\" which, of course morphed into \"no one
ever got fired for buying Microsoft\" in the Linux world might be \"no
one ever got fired for implementing Red Hat.\" Red Hat has a well-built
business of providing enterprise level support for its distribution. It
was the first Linux distribution to make it big in the business world.
Its focus is on servers, and Fedora, it\'s
\"community version\" does certainly benefit from Red Hat\'s development
expertise and resources, but it doesn\'t have as vibrant a community as
Ubuntu, for instance. However, because it is so common, and there is
reasonable community support, and because of the strength of Red Hat, it
might be a good choice, especially if a technology support organization
works with larger organizations. Debian I\'m a real fan of
Debian, and have been using it on the
server-side for a very long time. It is a rock-solid distribution with
what is arguably the best package management system. (Ubuntu is based on
Debian). It has a vibrant user community. Debian is the favorite of most
serious Linux geeks. The Debian community is dogmatic in their approach
to licensing - nothing in
Debian depends on software that
is not truly free (as in \'libre\'.) Debian used to be one of the most
difficult distributions to install, but that is no longer the case, so
it is definitely a distribution that you could try as a Linux beginner
(although beware that the community isn\'t going to be as friendly to
newcomers as the Ubuntu community.) I think it\'s certainly a possible
choice, especially if you\'ve got a philosophical approach that\'s
resonant with Debian (a lot of activist technology organizations use
Debian) and have (or can find) the expertise needed. But it is a bit
less known and popular, especially with the presence of Ubuntu, which
has most of the strengths (in a technical sense,) and none of the
weaknesses (in a business sense) of Debian. CentOS I\'m only
including this in my review because I have come across a surprising
number of technology providers that have chosen to focus on
CentOS. I had not heard of it until then.
CentOS is a bit of an odd beast. It is Red Hat, with branding removed.
In their words: \"CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution
derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North
American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the
upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary
compatible.\" So they take RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and repackage
it. So it has everything RHEL has except ... Red Hat support. Which, of
course, is why most people buy Red Hat, instead of installing Fedora or
Debian, etc. I\'m not sure what I think of this. I guess it makes sense
at one level - here is a way for a vendor to provide basically Red Hat
without having to either provide a markup in reselling it, or charge a
nonprofit for it. What makes RHEL \"Enterprise\" is basically the
support. That\'s about it. Debian or Ubuntu are just as
\"Enterprise-class\" as RHEL without Red Hat behind it. So CentOS really
isn\'t any different a choice - unless as an organization you are very
familiar with Red Hat, and want to stick with it, but don\'t want to pay
(or have organizations pay) for it. If you are new to the Linux biz,
there isn\'t any reason I could see to adopt CentOS. Novell I
think the article says pretty much everything that needs to be said
about Novell, and SUSE
Linux. They
take directly from the Red Hat playbook, and have a community version
called openSUSE. It\'s
certainly a good option, although in the US, SUSE isn\'t very common.
Other Distros There are, of course five
bajillion Linux distributions of varied
popularities. Any of which could make a reasonable choice for you as
a technology provider (There is a good
review in Distrowatch
of the top ten distributions.) Only you really know what makes the most
sense, given what you want to do with Linux, and what expertise you have
on hand. And, luckily, once you\'ve learned some Linux, supporting other
distributions isn\'t such a big deal.
Continue
Reading
On 09 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
It\'s been 7
weeks of using
Ubuntu 7.04 (better known as Feisty Fawn) as my
primary desktop. I figured it was time to give my final assessment.
Well, it\'s not final, but I\'ve come to what I imagine will be a steady
state for a while. I\'m relatively happy, and, surprisingly enough, I
don\'t miss using the mac everyday. Here are the good things:
- Even macs get weird sometimes, especially if they\'ve been on for a
long time. The only time I shut down this laptop is when I\'m taking
it somewhere, which is relatively rarely. So I regularly have it on
for many days at a time, with no noticeable degradation in
performance.
- I love apt-get/aptitude. 90% of the software I want to install
I just install by saying \"apt-get install name_of_package\".
Anything that is a requirement gets installed along with it. It\'s
so incredibly easy. In general, installation and configuration of
software has become much easier.
- Open Office works better on Linux than on the mac, as does
thunderbird and firefox
- For a few things (mostly system/network tools) there are some
incredibly awesome options, amazingly good for free (as in beer)
software, and better than software you\'d pay for. For some things,
there are lots of relatively decent choices.
- I have no problem getting just about all of my work done using
Ubuntu.
- My printer setup (Brother laser printer) was easier on Linux than on
the mac
Here are the bad things:
- The games available on Linux leave much to be desired
- Getting proprietary codecs to play (MP3, WMA, etc.) can be a pain
- XWindows (x.org) can be annoying to configure if you go beyond the
most simple
- KDE is a memory hog (I switched to xfce, and am thinking about other
light window managers)
- There are some serious holes in available software
- Some things take a while to get set up - longer than on a mac.
- Getting some hardware configured can be painful.
Now the ugly:
- If you are used to integration between your email, calendar and
addressbook, there is only one option (Novell Evolution) and it is
not very good.
- If that integration, with the added integration of a PDA is very
important to you, don\'t even bother trying Linux on the desktop.
- Regressions are on the rise (regressions are things that used to
work, but break in new versions.)
So, overall, I like it, and I\'m sticking with it, with the exception of
my addressbook and calendar. It was quite a shame to have to give that
up, but it
was either that, or make due with either not using a Palm, or modifying
dramatically how I dealt with my PIM data. So I\'m stuck where I don\'t
want to be (where lots of nonprofits are) with a data integration
problem that I can\'t solve right now, and likely won\'t get solved for
years. Evolution, apparently, is not under active development because
Novell is focusing on
Groupwise. The Mozilla
Foundation supposedly has been working on an integrated
email/calendar/contacts system, but they are spinning off
Thunderbird, and
Sunbird (the
calendaring app) is coming along slowly. So an integrated app from
Mozilla is years away, if it will happen at all (nevermind the palm
part.) I\'m looking forward to Gutsy Gibbon, Ubuntu 7.10 coming out in
October. I\'m sure I\'ll
be upgrading. And, to answer the question posed above, the answer is,
for me, obviously, a definite yes. But it appears, from my experience
and others, that question actually has to be framed not as \"Is Linux
ready for the desktop?\", but \"Is Linux ready for your desktop?\"
And the answer to that question depends upon the unique combination of
the type of work, your software and hardware needs, and your willingness
to put up with certain things. (Although, one needs to be willing to put
up with some things no matter what OS one picks - it just depends on
what you want to put up with.)
Continue
Reading
On 07 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Katrin, the Executive Director of NTEN, announced
today
that I\'m joining the Board. (So now\'s my chance to blog about it!)
I\'ve been connected in one way or another to NTEN for quite a long
while. I joined back in the day when it had just taken over the
gathering that had been called the \"Circuit Rider Roundup\" and became
NTC. NTEN is, to my mind, a critically important
organization in the ecosystem that is the Nonprofit Technology field, as
the convener of the gathering that anchors the community, as well as a
unique and necessary multi-dimensional resource at the regional and
national levels for all sorts of constituents in the nptech world. I
feel incredibly honored to be on the board, and to be able to give to
the nptech community in this leadership role. Although I\'m sure that we
differ in our perspectives on some issues, I very much look forward to
working with the rest of the board to keep NTEN the vibrant organization
that it has developed into, and to continue to speak to, listen to, and
provide for its constituencies.
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On 07 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 6
Comments
I\'ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking
sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. (The content centered ones,
like flickr, del.icio.us and our own Social Source
Commons, are a different animal.)
I\'ve been playing with LinkedIn for probably a year, Facebook only for
a couple of months. It has been fun, in many ways, but I\'ve not figured
out the utility for me in terms of my work, although others have had a
better time of
it.
But, something has always been nagging me about them, especially
Facebook. In some comments in a post of
mine about
Facebook, someone mentioned the article \"Facebook is the new
AOL\" and I also
mentioned an article I\'d read asking how open is
Facebook,
really? Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling \"walled
gardens\". Even though it is true that anyone can join either network,
the data in them is limited only to those who join, and join networks
and have friends. I\'ve always been an advocate of open data and open
standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street. Wired
says:
Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you\'re
sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a
picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account,
they can\'t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is
stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
I\'ve been slowly but surely realizing that the time and energy I\'m
putting into Facebook is likely benefiting Facebook more than it is
benefiting me. Yeah, it\'s fun that there is a great mix of people that
I can keep track of (and they can keep track of me) - that\'s the part
of the equation that\'s hard to find elsewhere. So I\'ve decided to, for
now, keep my accounts, but dramatically curb my time with Facebook and
LinkedIn, and spend more time exploring the ways I can use truly open
technologies to do some of the same things. There are some great tips in
this Wired
article.
And I\'ll also be experimenting with the XHTML Friends
Network, which looks like an interesting
start on an open way to connect people.
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On 06 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 8
Comments
Blackbaud, which is one of the big gorillas
in the CRM/Fundraising space bought a littler
guy, eTapestry. This is not so far on the
heels of the acquisition of Get Active by
Convio. Blackbaud has done other acquisitions
in the past. And, I\'m sure there are more to come. There basically are
three types of software acquisitions that companies make. The first is
to acquire a company that does something that you do not. For example,
Yahoo bought del.icio.us -
it didn\'t have social bookmarking. In those situations, generally, the
product remains largely the same (with some branding changes over time.)
The second kind of acquisition is to acquire a company that does
something you do, but much better. Like Google
buying YouTube, or Yahoo buying
flickr. In that case, the acquiring company
eventually does away with its own product, and the acquired product
becomes that companies offering in that space (with changes.) The third
type of acquisition is when a company buys a competitor, which may or
may not have technologies that it has. In that situation, the acquired
company is basically engulfed by the acquiring company, and eventually
(or immediately, in some cases) completely disappears as an option. This
third type of acquisition has been the hallmark of the acquisitions in
the CRM/Fundraising space. GetActive is no longer an option to choose
from. Nor is Giftmaker
(bought by Blackbaud.) True, eTapestry had a platform that Blackbaud
does not - but don\'t mistake that as the first or second type.
eTapestry as a separate choice is bound to go away. And this is a bad
thing for the many small organizations that have been using eTapestry
for reasonable prices (or free). You have heard me rant and rail about
the fact that the vast majority of money (both from nonprofits
themselves, as well as by investors) goes into developing, maintaining
(and acquiring) CRM/Fundraising software. This is something that,
honestly, we as a sector are complicit in. And there are fewer and fewer
choices every single day. Fewer choices means less competition, which
means that prices will likely rise. And nonprofits often feel they have
no choice but to pay big bucks for fundraising/CRM packages. If
nonprofits want to have a good fundraising platform that they can know
won\'t be bought and swallowed and changed so that they\'ll have to
shell out more, it\'s time to invest money and effort in an open
source platform. One already exists
that needs support and development to make it ready to compete with the
big guys. Allan Benamer
says:
Obviously, Blackbaud is taking a page out of Oracle's playbook and
applying it to themselves. Rapidfire acquisition of smaller players so
that you can wrap it up into a system of systems seems to be their
strategy for now. They now control the vertical fundraising
environment for nonprofits from the base of the nonprofit market
(eTapestry) to its apex (Target Software).
Blackbaud is publicly traded. It is important to think about the fact
that dollars raised by nonprofit organizations are going to Blackbaud\'s
investors whose major interest in Blackbaud is the profit it can
produce. That is the driving force behind what Blackbaud is doing -
maximizing profit. It is unrealistic to expect that acquisition mania in
the CRM/Fundraising space is going to result in anything except fewer,
more expensive choices. (Remember that as good and open and free as
Salesforce is, it also can be acquired, and nothing is guaranteed.) We
don\'t have to submit to the \"Buyout Blues\"! We have power and options
in using open source solutions. Isn\'t it time we began to realize the
power of community-owned and driven software that no one can buy?
Continue
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On 06 Aug, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
As you might know, I
migrated from
using a MacBook Pro laptop as my primary desktop, to eating my own
dogfood, as it were, and using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop. And,
as you might recall, there were a few snags. My address book was a major
one. And, to top it off, I had to make things more complicated last
week, because I decided to get a Palm PDA again. (found a great, really
cheap E2 on Ebay.) So there was the saga of migrating my data from
Apple\'s proprietary address book to Evolution (and of course, dealing
with the beast that Evolution is.) And then, I wanted to sync my new
Palm. There were several snags:
- A bug in Ubuntu which prevented the \"visor\" driver from being
loaded at startup
- Gnome-pilot/evolution can\'t sync more than one calendar category or
one addressbook, or one to do list category, even though the palm
has multiple categories
- Another bug in Ubuntu which causes sync to crash if there are to do
items with no due date
- Jpilot, the alternative has a user interface reminiscent of, but
worse than that of the palm desktop
So, basically, there wasn\'t a way for me to get a nice, usable sync for
my data that was going to work for me. As I might have mentioned, it was
this very thing that stopped me last time (although, admittedly, it was
much worse last time - I had to recompile my kernel to get my palm to
sync, and I drew the line at that.) So, I\'m not giving up on using
Linux as my desktop, but I am giving up on using Linux to hold my
calendar, addressbook and to do lists. I\'m going back to using my mac
for that - and installing Spanning Sync
to sync google calendar with my mac calendar, so I have a calendar I can
use on my desktop. Since Evolution is such a bad mail client, I\'m going
back to Thunderbird. So I still don\'t have a good addressbook on Linux
- and I certainly don\'t have one that is in sync with my Mac. (Yes, I
know, I could install an LDAP server. Yeesh.) Sigh.
Continue Reading
On 27 Jul, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
(That\'s Brit/Canadian for odds and ends, if you were wondering.) I\'ve
been a bad blogger over the past couple of months, I know. I haven\'t
been posting near as much as I\'d like, mostly because I\'ve been rather
busy. It\'s not just consulting work, but other varied
happenings
in my life as well. I don\'t know what the next couple of months will
bring, but I\'ll try to generate some pithy blog posts for y\'all. I\'ve
been re-reading a book that I read early in the decision-making process
about becoming a consultant way back in 1996. It\'s called The
Consultant\'s
Calling,
and it\'s really a book about consulting as a calling, a vocation. One
of my favorite quotes about vocation is from Frederick Buechner, who
said that a vocation is where \"the worlds deep need and your deep
gladness meet.\" There is a new updated version of the book. It\'s
really worth a read. I\'m convinced that I have a sense of humor.
Really, I am. Except, well, I just don\'t get this LOL* pheonomena. I
have to admit I\'m a sucker for cute pictures of
kittens.
But I have to admit the bastardized language thing (\"hai, I iz doin
stuf\") just isn\'t funny to me. I am glad some people are enjoying
themselves. And LOLnptech seems to have
quite the following (just not me.) I\'ve been writing a series of
articles for LASA\'s ICT
Knowledgebase. The first
article, on Mac database
options, just got
published last week. One on Open Office, and FOSS on the Mac are
forthcoming. It\'s enjoyable writing them, and also writing them for a
non-US audience (although I\'m sure plenty of US folks take advantage of
their amazing resource.) This will be my last tech blog entry until at
least August 6th. I\'m taking time off to work on science fiction
writing!
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On 19 Jul, 2007 By mpm
With 2
Comments
In the process of reworking and updating the NOSI (Nonprofit Open
Source Initiative) primer that was first written in
2004, there are several things that have emerged that have dramatically
changed from then. First is the wholesale movement toward the three
major open source CMS platforms/frameworks,
Drupal, Joomla and
Plone. Second is that Linux servers seem to have
made very serious inroads into nonprofit organizations, such that they
are becoming almost commonplace. Third, almost everyone uses Firefox, or
at least knows about it. The fourth, and very interesting development,
is the relationships that have been developing between nonprofit-focused
technology providers of all stripes and open source developer
communities (at this point, primarily CMS projects.) There will be
detailed case studies in the new primer, but what\'s been striking to me
is how many examples of this there are out there. Technology providers
are beginning to really invest in free and open source platforms, and it
looks like everyone is benefiting - the organization, the clients, the
developer communities, and, by extension, then, other providers and
users of those projects. And so the feedback cycle keeps going. This may
be where the gift economy rubber meets the road. Providers seem to be
surviving (or thriving) with this model, free and open source software
projects are getting the support they need, and clients are getting the
software solutions they need. This is a model that is impossible with
proprietary software. It\'s a model I hope spreads beyond the CMS space,
into other areas. There are all sorts of worthy candidates!
Continue
Reading
On 17 Jul, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Michelle Martin has a great
post
this week on Facebook. It introduced me to a
new blog, called Read/WriteWeb, which
I\'m liking a lot. They have a roundup of what they are calling the 10
best Facebook apps for
work.
In the last few weeks of using Facebook, I\'d already realized how it\'s
fitting into my workflow in ways that no other social networking site
does. I haven\'t tried a number of these apps yet. I don\'t intend, for
instance, to start putting my calendar on Facebook, but it\'s
interesting to see how much is happening, and how fast. I\'ve also
noticed how most people in the nptech world who experiment with this
stuff have moved over to Facebook. One of my questions is whether or not
they dedicate any time to LinkedIn, or other networking sites anymore,
or has Facebook become the one they spend most time on. I never did
start a MySpace page, and I don\'t imagine I ever will. I was pretty
doubtful about the general usefulness of content-less social networking
sites (as distinct from those that are content-driven, like
flickr and del.icio.us)
but it seems that Facebook is becoming a platform, and has ceased to
become simply a social networking site. One of the great things about
the Facebook platform is the way that it can integrate online data.
I\'ve got my flickr photostream up there, my del.icio.us bookmarks, and
all of the varied data on the varied Facebook apps. But there isn\'t an
easy way, for instance for me to see other\'s data without actually
clicking through to their profile. But I\'m sure the interface will
improve over time. But, still, although Facebook has been fun to play
with, and many of my colleagues are using it, and it doesn\'t take away
from my workflow - it hasn\'t actually helped me do much work. That\'s
the next question - will my presence on Facebook help me find clients,
or help clients find me? Will it help my work with clients? These are
questions that are yet to be answered.
Continue Reading
On 15 Jul, 2007 By mpm
Part of the process I\'m going through of \"eating my own dogfood\" that
is, using free software (open source) tools whenever I can includes
taking myself off of proprietary platforms whenever possible. One such
platform was Typepad. Typepad is a paid
service based on Movable Type, a very
popular blogging platform, that is proprietary. They are going to
release an open source version later this year, which is wonderful, but
I also would have had to pony up another \$149 for a year of a Pro
account, and that seemed excessive, since I could just as easily set up
a Wordpress blog on the host I\'m already paying for. This migration,
unlike the Mac OS -> Ubuntu migration, has been completely painless. A
few tweaks (mentioned in the previous post,) and I was up and running
with all posts and comments intact. Add a few important plugins, and
I\'m back to where I was just a few days ago on Typepad. Two and a half
years ago when I moved off of the blogging platform I wrote, I wanted a
platform that would allow me to concentrate on writing, and not on tech.
Two years ago, there wasn\'t a platform that was really ready for that.
Now, there is. Actually, there are several. There is no question in my
mind that free software has won the CMS/Blogging race, hands down.
Continue Reading
On 15 Jul, 2007 By mpm
As you will have undoubtedly figured out - this blog moved! I\'ve moved
it off of Typepad, and onto Wordpress. I\'ve been rather impressed by
how easy Wordpress was to set up and use, and how easy the migration
process was. I\'d recommend it to anyone. To recap, I took the following
steps:
- Set up my blog on a different domain (in this case, it was
zenofnptech.com.)
- Choosing a theme
- Migrate the posts and comments (exporting it from typepad, importing
into wordpress - all web gui based, very easy.
- Modifying a few things (see this
link.)
There are a few changes. Wordpress now uses dashes instead of
underscores, so that\'s something you don\'t have to worry about.
All importing requires now is just going to the Wordpress import
tool and specifying the file. That\'s all. You don\'t have to worry
about using mod_rewrite at all.
- Getting the varied blogrolls and badges, etc. copied over.
- Letting people know
- Changing the DNS of the old site (and changing the site on
wordpress.)
- Done.
The feed should stay the same. If, for some reason, yours stops working,
try this
feed.
Continue Reading
On 13 Jul, 2007 By mpm
Michelle Murrain received her B.A. in Natural Science and Mathematics
from Bennington College, and her Ph.D. in Biology from Case Western
Reserve University. She first started to work with nonprofits and
technology in 1996, when she assisted a local women\'s health
organization with a Linux server that provided email and a website. That
was also her introduction to open source software, which she has used
consistently since that time. Michelle has been involved in developing
content and applications for the web, specifically for organizational,
research and educational purposes, since 1994. In 1996, Michelle started
a consulting practice that served the non-profit and educational
sectors, primarily in the areas of developing database-driven web-sites,
the implementation of Open Source software, and strategic technology
planning. She has worked with a wide variety of nonprofit organizations,
mostly in human services, women\'s health and education. From 2003 until
2005, she worked with Database Designs
Associates , based in Boston, MA. She was on the
board of Aspiration , an organization that fosters software development
in the nonprofit/NGO sector, and she presently is on the board of
NTEN, the Nonprofit Technology Network. In 2005,
Michelle took a sabbatical from nonprofit technology work to get her
Certificate in Theological Studies at Pacific School of Religion in
Berkeley, California. She is currently Coordinator of the Nonprofit Open
Source Initiative (NOSI), and she does some
strategic technology consulting as well.
She blogs on other issues in her personal blog,
Metacentricities.
Continue Reading
On 09 Jul, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
So I talk a lot about both open source software, and the preciousness of
one\'s own data. I rail against vendors who promote lock-in. I tout the
benefits of open source software. So, here is a real life example of
someone with a measly 195 records in her contacts database.\
As you might recall, I migrated from a Mac desktop to a Linux
desktop a
month and a half ago. There are still some, shall we say, hanging
chads. One big one was my address book. I used to have this great system
where I used the Mac Addressbook, which would nicely sync with my cell
phone. It also integrated well with Mail.app and iChat. It was great.
First problem: Linux address books ... suck. I hate to be so blunt, but
it is true, at least in comparison to the ones on the Mac. There are
basically three options. 1) Since I\'m using
Thunderbird as my email
client, I could use that as my addressbook. Except... it sucks. Really
it does. Not enough fields, not a good ui. Ick. 2)
KAddressBook. It\'s not as
bad as Thunderbird, except, of course, it doesn\'t integrate with
Thunderbird. It\'s just a bit more polished. More configuration, more
options, but still not good. 3)
Evolution.
It would mean switching my email. It might be worth it. But the last
time I tried Evolution, it was a horrible experience. But, that was 4
years ago. Open source projects do get better.
Actually there is a fourth option. I could dump all my addresses into
one big flat file, and use
grep. Right. Errr. NOT.
So my next task is to really try out evolution, and see how it works for
me. I\'ll keep you posted.
But, there is more...
In order to use one of these address book options, I have to get my data
out of Apple\'s addressbook. Turns out, there\'s no \"export\" menu
item. Yeah, talk about lock-in! There is, luckily, a handy-dandy
tool that will do
it for you. Otherwise, you have to either write your own, or, worse,
hand enter all those addresses again.
\<Insert sound of Michelle chewing on Purina Dog Chow.>
Continue Reading
On 06 Jul, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Deborah, is, as per usual, diplomatic in her
discussion
of the site \"Sustainable
Nonprofit\", which is a new(?)
website that is designed to: \"create a unified place for nonprofits and
experts to share their experience, pain, achievements, and
discoveries.\"
I love the idea, really, I do. The site is beautifully designed,
and engaging, with some good information and tools, as well. It\'s so
nicely done, I wish it could indeed become that unified place.
Except...
Everyone wants their site to be the unified place. Wishing,
unfortunately, won\'t make it so. \"If we build it they will come\" only
works in the movies.
In a conversation with a colleague over some wonderful Asian fusion
lunch, we both agreed that in fact, the problem that nonprofits faced in
the 90s, lack of good information, was, in a broad sense, mostly solved
(there are, for sure, areas where there are gaps, but overall, the
coverage is quite good.) In fact, we agreed we are getting toward
overload - too much information in too many places. OK, so here is yet
another website providing information that nonprofits need to be
sustainable.
I think the time has come to think differently. Let\'s stop for a while
throwing new websites at problems, and think more deeply about why those
problems exist. When it comes to nonprofit sustainability, my hunch is
that as wonderful as the intention is, a new website isn\'t going to
make a dent.
Continue Reading
On 29 Jun, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
My session on Free and Open
Source software and the US Social Forum went
great yesterday. Lots of people were there (I ran out of handouts - I
was surprised to see how many people showed up.) The presentation is
available on my wiki (it\'s at the
bottom.)
There were a very wide range of people there, from folks who didn\'t
know a whole lot about open source, to those who were developing open
source apps. Toward the end, a young man, who worked with urban kids of
color on media and music, commented that he didn\'t really know how to
get access to the kinds of things available, and he noticed how few
people of color were in the room. He wanted to know how to get his kids
access to tools that were affordable for them to create and edit media.
An older woman of color noted that a lot of the problems that open
source developers were solving weren\'t problems that communities faced.
Which, of course, has been an issue for me for a long time - lack of
open source alternatives in the \"vertical\" application spaces - case
management, etc. But it even goes further than just the vertical apps -
what \"itches\" predominantly white, privileged (and, I might add,
mostly young) men? And aren\'t those different that the issues other
groups of people face? This is not, of course, to suggest that there
have been no efforts to produce software that addresses social and human
needs - there have been a lot. But their number pale in comparison to,
say, the plethora of, say, network sniffing tools, for instance.
There was an interesting mini-conversation, which, in retrospect, I
really wish I\'d had a chance to explore more, about the supposed
\"egalitarian\" nature of free and open source software development. One
person had brought up the idea of open source as a model for egalitarian
participatory economics, and I made a brief comment that it wasn\'t all
that egalitarian, really. My experience, and the experiences of many
women who are involved in open source, make this clear.
Both of these things have lead me to think a lot about this topic. Of
course, as an African American woman, I am a pretty unusual spokesperson
for free and open source software. I most often find myself in a room
full of people who are not at all like me (at least in the realm of
identity - in actuality, they are a lot like me in inclination, but
that\'s a different conversation.) There were about 35 people in the
room for the session, and about 8 were women, and about 7 or 8 were
people of color (with overlap between the two - probably 25-28 out of 35
were white men.) This was the most diverse crowd I\'ve ever talked with
or been in for an open source conversation. That speaks volumes to me.
It is also true that it was far from a representative sample of people
here at the US Social Forum (which is way more female and of color than
that group.)
I don\'t really have any easy answers to this, but it makes me think
more about what I\'m seeing as a gap, at least here in the US. We have a
collectively-owned, freely available set of tools that are usable, and
useful, and can even be used on older hardware. And communities that
could make use of, expand, extend, and take ownership of these tools,
don\'t have access to them, for a wide variety of reasons that at some
point I should articulate, but have little to do with money directly.
This feels like a different part of the digital divide. It\'s not just
about access to resources in an economic sense.
Unfortunately, none of this is especially simple to address. But it
needs addressing.
Continue Reading
On 28 Jun, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been rather remiss in my blogging lately, mostly because I\'ve
been crazy busy, and blogging seems to be lower on the priority list
these days. Today, I\'m at the US Social
Forum, a huge gathering of activists from all
over the United States, who have come together in the same model as the
World Social Forum.
The slogan for the US Social Forum is \"Another World is Possible.
Another US is Necessary.\"
It\'s huge, there are 10,000+ people here, with hundreds and hundreds
of
sessions
on topics as varied as global worker\'s rights, feminist economics,
queer activism, and the rights of indigenous peoples.
The key thing for me about this conference is that the technical
infrastructure - from the server of the site itself (LAMP+Drupal) the
90+ computers that are setup for registration, the media center,
backbone routers, training labs, and email stations (Ubuntu), the entire
registration system (customized interface on top of Drupal) is entirely
running free and open source software. The operating systems are all
Debian (servers) or Ubuntu (desktops), all of the desktops have firefox,
open office and such.
There have been glitches, primarily on the user end. I had one person
ask me \"How do I get to \'My Comptuer\'\" (which, of course, you can,
but it looks different). I did question the decision to use Gnome on the
user dekstops instead of KDE - since KDE is much more \"Windows-like\"
in the places it puts things. I have to admit, though, in having to use
Gnome a bit to set things up, and get documentation written, I\'m
beginning to appreciate its more spare approach.
I spent two days in high-pressure mode on the tech team get some Linux
routers configured, DNS working, a fileserver for media set up and
working, and other odds and ends of stuff. It was a crazy couple of
days, but I had a fabulous time, and learned an incredible amount of
stuff over the course of those days. It makes me want to go home and
order up some PC parts and start working on a new Linux box - I\'ve got
lots of fun stuff to play with, now.
Continue Reading
On 18 Jun, 2007 By mpm
OK, so I finally drank the Facebook coolaid -
and although it took me a long time to get around to, I have now
realized how many people in the
nptech field have already been
on facebook for a while. I decided to try out facebook when I kept
hearing about the integration of other social networking sites into
facebook.
Relatively recently, I\'d finally, after tons of invitations, joined
invested time and energy into my LinkedIn
profile. I\'m still not convinced by any of these social network sites
not directly linked to content (unlike del.icio.us or flickr) - but
it\'s fun to play with, anyway. And, it is beginning to appear that
facebook will integrate better with my workflow than LinkedIn, because
of facebook applications.
So we\'ll see how it works. I\'ll keep you posted. And, if you\'re
already on facebook, add me as a friend.
Technorati Tags: nptech,
facebook,
web2.0
Continue Reading
On 15 Jun, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Intuit, the makers of Quickbooks, Quicken, and TurboTax, are jumping on
the Linux bandwagon. Well, OK, they aren\'t really jumping, but putting
their toe in the water in the Linux server realm.
They announced that their server product, Quickbooks
Enterprise, will be released
to work on Linux
Servers.
One of the biggest issues for nonprofits in terms of adoption of Linux
has been the lack of availability of ready-for-primetime applications
like accounting. Intuit, the 800 pound gorilla in that space, moving to
Linux is a great sign for the future. I certainly hope that a Linux
version for Quickbooks on the desktop will be a next step. It would be a
big step, but it would be a good step. Yes, it\'s proprietary, and I
certainly wish that someone would write an open source worthy competitor
for Quickbooks, but they haven\'t yet, so a good second choice is
Quickbooks itself running on Linux.
Continue Reading
On 11 Jun, 2007 By mpm
Way back when (last month - I\'ve been busy) Deborah Finn blogged
about
the \"New England School for Circuit Riders.\" That blog entry came
about because she and I had a long conversation about what kinds of
skills nonprofit technology providers needed, and what we felt was
missing.
Hot on the heels of that (OK, not so hot - about 3 weeks later) I had a
great conversation with my old colleague Marc
Osten about some work
Lasa is doing around providing support to
technology providers in their neck of the woods (that\'d be the UK.)
I realize that we\'ve been having this conversation ever since
NTC used to be called the \"Circuit Rider
Roundup.\" Its not that there is a lack of technology vendors and
support. It\'s that there is a lack of really good support -
responsive, empowering, educational, integrative, and knowledgeable
about, and invested in, the sector.
For those of us who\'d like to see organizations get better support -
how do we do that? I think part of the answer has to be to provide the
resources for people to become better providers - whether it be to help
budding accidental techies get off the ground to become great IT staff
or independent consultants, or helping individual and small consulting
firms learn what makes really good nonprofit support.
There are many challenges - how do you teach self-reflection and
self-evaluation? How do you teach the ins and outs of the nonprofit
sector? How do you get providers to invest time and energy in what is
really a marginally profitable business?
I don\'t have too many answers today, but living inside the questions
for a while is always a good start.
Continue Reading
On 01 Jun, 2007 By mpm
It\'s been a week of mostly not work, which is a nice rest. I finally
finished the first edited version of the scifi novel I wrote last
summer. That feels good. Next steps are get some feedback, and move
forward with it, somehow. I had a brief conversation by email with Cory
Doctorow, a science fiction author who is
also a copyleft activist, who releases everything he writes with a CC
license. He suggested, basically, find the publisher first, then talk
about the license second. That sounded like good advice, since it might
take me quite a while to get to step 1. (If, perchance, you might want
to read it, drop me an email.)
I\'m on week 3 of my Ubuntu laptop migration - things are smoothing out
- I\'ve got audio working, I can listen to mp3 and audio streams. Flash
(and, therefore, YouTube) is working, as is Java. I did a
webinar
for NTEN on it - ReadyTalk worked just fine. I still haven\'t figured
out how to get higher resolution on my laptop screen, but that\'s mostly
due to lack of time trying to get it to work. I also have a document
nightmare - I have documents on the desktop, documents on my laptop,
documents on external hard drives, aiii. I need to figure out a good
network configuration.
There\'s been some interesting activity in the realm of women in open
source. There is a
podcast
with a group of women developers that was recorded during
RailsConf. It\'s definitely
worth a listen. There is a part two coming, I understand.
Also, I\'ll be moving this blog soon - probably next week. I decided to
move both of my blogs off of typepad, and to other platforms. My main
blog is moving to WordPress, this blog is
moving over to the Metacentric.org Joomla CMS.
I\'ll keep you posted on URLs and feeds.
Continue Reading
On 22 May, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
Welll, it\'s not really week 2. I got the laptop a few days ago - but it
was last week. I figured this was a good time to post an update, and
complai... explain where I\'ve gotten to so far.
I\'m using it full time now, as my basic desktop. I\'m reading email,
posting blog entries, searching the web, working on
presentations,
etc. I have definitely hit some points of pain in migration.
What\'s fine:
- The web was painless. I\'ve been using Firefox for a long time
anyway, and all I had to do was install a few extensions (and google
sync, which rocks) and I was up and running exactly as I had been
before. And since so much of my workflow is in Web2.0 apps, it all
works great.
- I had converted to IMAP a while back in preparation for this change,
so all of my old mail and folders are now sitting on a server.
Thunderbird is a bit different than Apple Mail.app, so it\'s taking
me a bit of time to get used to it.
- Skype seems to work fine (I haven\'t tried to make a phone call, but
I usually use it for chat anyway, and it works fine for that.)
- There are a lot of open source apps that I\'ve already been using
(XChat for IRC, Open Office, GIMP, Scribus) that work just the same,
and can read and write all of the same docs I\'ve been using.
- I found some good screenshot software.
What\'s been problematic:
- Wireless networking - it took a bit of work to initially get it
going, as I\'d mentioned in my last post. Now, it seems to work
fine - I\'ve used it with two different open access points. I have
yet to try it with a closed access point - I\'ve heard that WPA can
be problematic.
- Video - the video resolution that the generic driver has is lower
than the resolution that my laptop can use. I had to install new
drivers, and, I have not yet gotten a configuration to work yet. I
posted this
plea
to the techtalk list on Linuxchix. Hopefully I can find a solution.
- For some really odd reason, Konqueror, the web browser that comes
with Kubuntu, can\'t see any external web sites. Every other program
does fine (GAIM seems to flake out at times.) I haven\'t solved it,
and I hate Konqueror anyway, so it doesn\'t really matter. But it\'s
quite odd.
- Proprietary media doesn\'t play by
default. I
totally get why this is true, and it\'s not Ubuntu\'s fault - it\'s
the fault of those who license the proprietary media. I wish
everyone would just switch to Ogg Vorbis - it would make life
easier. But, fat chance. So I\'m having to download and install all
sorts of strange stuff in order to play MP3s, Quicktime, etc.
Installing Flash was kind of a pain, and I had to resort to the
command line.
What\'s unclear:
- I haven\'t done much with sound yet.
- I don\'t know what I\'m going to do for an address book, and I
don\'t know how I\'m going to get that to sync with my cell phone.
- There are several key pieces of software that I use every day that I
don\'t know how I\'m going to replace. They include the blog client,
ecto - there really aren\'t any good
solutions for Linux.
There are also Journler and
Scrivener - two
great apps for which there are no Linux equivalents (actually,
there are no Windows equivalents for these either.) There are also a
whole host of tools and games I\'ve gotten used to that there are
likely no good replacements for at this time.
The bottom line - pretty much, if I were the type of person that did
mostly email, the web and word processing, and the occasional
spreadsheet or presentation, I\'d be off and running, and doing just
fine. And, actually, I am off and running, and doing just fine. But if
I hadn\'t been so familiar with Linux, some of the stuff (like wireless)
would have stymied me, if I couldn\'t resort to the command line (Ubuntu
doesn\'t come out of the box with a decent wireless network application
- if I were them, priority #1 for the next version would be seamless
wireless, at least as good as is present in Mac and Windows.) I can\'t
blame them for the driver problem for my laptop, really.
But since I\'m a power user, and have gotten used to Mac tools, which
are great and user-friendly, it\'s going to be a bit painful at times, I
think. But I\'ll be getting my work done, for sure.
Continue Reading
On 21 May, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been a part of the Nonprofit Open Source
Initiative for a long time, and I\'ve been advocating
for the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector for years.
More lately, I\'ve been working to focusing my advising practice on
helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in
their organizations, providing advice and training. I\'ve installed more
versions of varied Linux flavors than I could even think about
remembering (going all the way back to the first or second versions of
Slackware in the mid-90s). I\'ve been responsible for administering many
Linux servers over the years, some Red Hat, some Debian.
And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. I
had a (very) brief flirtation with Windows (2000) as my primary desktop,
but ever since 1987, when I bought my first computer (a Mac SE) I\'ve
owned at least one Macintosh. I\'m not about to change that.
I\'ve tried making Linux my primary desktop many times (5 at last
count.) It was always something that got in my way of migration. In the
beginning, it was lack of software (I first tried this back in 1999), or
printer drivers. More recently (last time I tried this was back in 2004)
it was not being able to sync with the palm treo I had at the time.
But, Linux has changed, and I have changed. And, in some ways, NOSI has
changed - we\'re thinking more and more about talking about Linux on the
desktop, which we thought was not ready for nonprofit primetime for a
long time. I think it\'s ready now. I certainly will see. This is the
6th, and last time I will do this. Why last? Because I\'ve decided that
no matter what, I\'m not going back. Because I want to understand, in
the most personal possible way, what the pains (if any) of migration to
an all free and open source platform will be.
So, I did some research, and realized that the best choice for me was to
get a Thinkpad - most everything works right out of the box. I have
been, unfortunately, a bit hampered by the fact that my satellite modem
died last week - so we\'ve been on dial up at home (and broadband at the
\"local\" cafe). But here\'s Ubuntu week 1, not edited or smoothed out.
I\'ll understand points of pain, for sure.
Week 1
I should have taken pictures - unboxing a new laptop is a lot of fun. I
got a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m. Good specs, cheap price. My first step was
to make sure the laptop booted. It booted fine. I stopped at the license
agreement. I popped in my Fiesty Fawn (Kubuntu 7.04) CD that I\'d burned
from a downloaded ISO, and rebooted. Once Ubuntu finished booting, I
clicked the wonderful \"install\" icon at the top. Because the recovery
media for this laptop was on the hard drive, and I also wanted to create
a separate /home partition, I did a manual partition, deleting both
partitions on the hard drive, and creating three partitions: /, /home,
and swap. (I might regret hosing the recovery media w/o getting them on
CD later, but I hope not - I was in a purist mood - I would have had to
have agreed to the license agreement for
Vista
and activated the product in order to burn the media, and I wasn\'t
about to do that.)
A few minutes later, I had a Ubuntu install with KDE - but it was bare
bones. The next step was to get online. That\'s the first snag. Ubuntu
doesn\'t come default with an easy GUI way to connect to a wireless
access point. I had to go command line in order to get online. I imagine
if I was wired, it would automagically work (that\'s been my experience
in the past.) So I had to dig out of my memory (and do some online
looking) about iwconfig. I also ran into a weird problem with a daemon
called \"avahi-daemon\" which is basically the Linux implementation of
\"Bonjour\". I\'m glad it\'s there, but it mucked with my network, and
it seemed strange that it was on by default.
So, I got on my wireless network, finally, and got online (I had to use
a CLI tool called dhclient to get an IP address. That was annoying.)
So, so far, the major pain has been the wireless stuff. We\'ll see how
that works once I am able to download some of the good wireless GUI
tools out there (like NetworkManager, which I hear is good.)
Next up, let\'s see how the details of migration (web, mail, address
book, etc. work.)
Technorati Tags: linux,
nptech,
opensource,
windows,
ubuntu
Continue Reading
On 18 May, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I hear, in my head, the famed quote from Rodney King: \"why can\'t we
all just get along?\" Microsoft this week has started
saber-rattling
against Linux and other open source projects, by suggesting that they
infringe on 235 patents that they hold. Of course, we all know that many
of these patents were dubious to begin with - UI and business process
patents that had no business being granted to anyone in the first place.
It\'s \"Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt\" all over again.
Of course, the 800 pound gorilla doesn\'t actually have to sue anyone.
Just threatening to sue, threatening to get license fees (which, for
some open source projects would be a major problem) is enough to make
people doubt the future of open source.
It\'s all about fear, really. Microsoft is a powerful company, with a
lot of money in the bank, and a near ubiquitous market penetration in
some quarters. Why can\'t they just focus on making good software? The
software will speak for itself (or it won\'t.) It is amazing to me how
much of what happens in business and within organizations is around
fear. Fear that a company will lose market share, fear that they will
stop growing as fast so that the stock price will fall, fear of
competition. And, then, of course, helping to make other people afraid -
afraid that an open source project or company will fold because someone
sues them. Afraid that they might indeed have infringed on patents.
It makes me think a lot about how much we are governed by fear - even in
the realm of things that seem only technological. But, of course,
underneath, and around all of those bits and bytes are just human
beings, after all.
Technorati Tags:
intellectualproperty,
opensource
Continue Reading
On 15 May, 2007 By mpm
This carnival is a day late, unfortunately. Getting construction work
done on your house will make life difficult sometimes. But, finally,
here it is...
A couple of the posts this week are things that I\'m thinking some
about. For instance, I\'m reading the book, Made to
Stick, and this week\'s
post
by Jeff at Donor Power talks about taglines that organizations use - how
they make internal sense, but don\'t make sense to people outside. He
provides exactly the kind of advice that will help organizations connect
with their donors.
I\'ve been thinking a lot about different kinds of electronic
communications, and what their advantages and disadvantages are.
Solidariti has a great discussion and
graph of Web 2.0
tools, and the characteristics of them, and how best to leverage one\'s
effort to the best effect. It\'s a wonderful way of looking at these
tools.
Some other great tidbits:
- Also in the Web 2.0 realm - Cause Related Marketing has an
interesting
discussion
about a new Instant Messenger campaign.
- Don\'t Tell the Donor talks about a
dustup
between Greenpeace and the Salvation Army.
- Kivi, of Nonprofit Communications tells us why organizations should
pay
attention
to how we want to be listed. It makes sense that can make a
difference in how people respond to appeals.
- Nancy Schwartz, of Getting Attention tells
us
how best to get people to fill out surveys.
Technorati Tags: npcarnival,
nptech
Continue Reading
On 10 May, 2007 By mpm
In talking with some organizations, I\'ve come to realize that they
don\'t have a handy list of things they should be asking of their
network/desktop technology providers. (I think this might be applicable
to all technology providers, but this is what is on the front of my
brain at the moment.) Organizations without dedicated tech staff (and, I
imagine, even some with) may feel at the mercy of providers, since they
often don\'t have the technical know how to determine whether or not a
suggestion, advice, or a fix that a provider might do would be helpful.
And, if the provider speaks only tech talk, the organization staff feel
stymied in figuring out what to do. Real life example:
Outlook on a couple of Organization A\'s computers is very slow to load,
and slow to get email (others are fine). Very small network (\<6 users),
using simple POP email. Technology Provider X suggests, without actually
looking at Organization A\'s computers that they should \"Move the POP
mail from an external server to host on Exchange on the onsite windows
server.\" (This is not the actual words of they used, but this is the
actual content and type of language used.)
To most staff, in most small nonprofit organizations without dedicated
tech staff, this is completely greek. (And, for those of you that are
geeks, also completely wrong.) What is Organization A to do? How are
they to figure out 1) what this means 2) whether it\'s right?
So off the cuff, here are some things I think a nonprofit should ask
their network providers:
1) To document ongoing maintenance that will be done on the network and
on desktops, and how often (including virus updates, defragmentation of
hard drives, drive imaging, backups, etc.) (and the org should follow
up, to make sure these happen.)\
2) To explain, when changes are suggested, what the changes are in plain
english, why they think it will help, what they went through to figure
that out, and what the ongoing ramifications of the change will be (like
a change to hosting email internally on exchange will increase
maintenance costs.)\
3) To document system changes.
If we really care about nonprofits being able to accomplish their
missions, we should care about what they know about technology, and how
they approach it. We should desire to increase the internal expertise of
the organizations, so they are better empowered to make good technology
choices. And nonprofits should demand this of their providers.
Really, it\'s win-win. Nonprofits get better able to use
technology to further their mission, and providers get clients that are
active, engaged, and, likely, a lot less annoyed and less likely to find
someone else.
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On 10 May, 2007 By mpm
I\'m hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants next week. It\'s an
open call - so just send in your best posts for the week!
Send submissions to: npc.carnival@yahoo.com. I\'ll accept them until
Sunday Midnight.
I look forward to seeing your posts!
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On 05 May, 2007 By mpm
Every time I start using the phrase \"free software\" instead of \"open
source\" software in the context of people who are not familiar with
what either of those terms mean, I invariably get questions about free
(as in beer) software. \"Where can I get free software to do x-and-such
- we don\'t have a technology budget.\" \"How can I find free software
to do y-and-z?\"
Yes, it is up to me to make sure people understand what \"free\" means
(like as in \"kittens\") - but it is these kinds of responses that send
me back, invariably, to using the phrase \"open source.\"
I do think, on a philosophical level, using the term \"free software\"
is to be preferred. But I wonder how much education we\'ll have to do
before people understand what that term \"free software\" really means,
and why the word \"free\" is so much deeper, and so much more important,
than something that doesn\'t cost any money.
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On 01 May, 2007 By mpm
Jon Stahl
quotes
a comment by Ethan
Zuckerman about
\"shiny\" - the over attention to cool and groovy web 2.0 functionality.
The punch line:
... there's a good chance that underneath the shiny is something that
isn't very interesting. (Not always, but often.) And that some of
what's deeply, truly, long-term transformative isn't shiny at all.
Yes!
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On 24 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I\'ve been thinking a lot about technology support lately. Really a
lot. Part of it is being prompted by my own technology support
experiences with my satellite \"broadband\" provider (which have been
largely frustrating). A lot of it has been because I have lately been
exposed to situations where I have felt organizations haven\'t gotten
the support they need, which, in our world, I think is all too common.
As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation,
planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I
wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to
practice when I\'ve been in a place of providing technology support.
All technology providers have to deal at some level with support.
Whether they implement a system, or build it, they will inevitably have
the job of supporting that technology. Providers have many different
ways of handling that challenge. Unfortunately, the most recent trend,
which I have experienced all too much (and I\'m sure you all have too),
is to simply follow a script with the person who needs support. It
drives me simply nuts that every single time I call my satellite
provider about a problem with the service, and I\'m saying \"I\'m seeing
80% packet loss, and doing a traceroute suggests that it\'s about 2 hops
after your modem\" and they respond with \"OK, first, we\'re going to
clear out your browser cache. Go to preferences ...\" It has been a
challenge to resist uttering strings of obscenities.
But also, the question is - is providing technology support simply just
an end in itself, or is it also a means to another end - that is, can it
be a means to empower clients in appropriate technology use to further
their mission?
I realized, in thinking about all of this, that the model of technology
support that makes the most sense to me is to think of it similarly as a
teacher-student relationship. I know, I\'m a born educator, and I\'m
sure someone out there is saying \"if you have a hammer, every problem
looks like a nail...\" But I do think there is some validity to this
approach. Certainly, if you are a technology provider that values
empowerment of your clients, this is probably a good model to consider.
So what is it about a teacher-student relationship that we can learn
from to provide really good technical support? From my perspective,
there are four elements to a technology support process with this as a
model:
- Assessment - where is the client - both in terms of technology
knowledge, as well as in terms of what they need at the moment?
- Empowerment - as you help them with a problem, teach them about the
problem, and ways to troubleshoot (or possibly solve) the problem
themselves in the future.
- Relationship - an ongoing relationship with the client
- Solution - providing the solution to their problem
First, Assessment. Where is this client, now? First, there is the
question of what they know. If you have a relationship with them (see
#3) you\'ll already be familiar with their technical expertise - so
you\'ll know where to start. But there is more than that to assessment.
What is going on for them? Is this a problem that is critical to their
work, or a \"pebble in the shoe\" kind of problem - annoying, but not
urgent? Are they trying to get a grant out, and they are scared they
won\'t meet the deadline because of a technical issue? Are they angry?
All of these are important to know and understand, so it\'s possible to
meet them where they are. That\'s one of the hallmarks of a good
educator - meeting a student where they are, tailoring the education to
meet the needs of the student. It\'s also, I think, a hallmark of a good
provider of technology support.
Second, Empowerment. One of the most common problems that someone who
has built websites has, is the client calls up, and says \"the website
is down\". And you hurriedly go to your browser, and, voila, the website
isn\'t down. So now you take them through all of the steps to figure out
why it was they can\'t see their own website. You can choose to take
them through this problem so that they figure out at the moment what\'s
up, and who to call, or you can take them through it so that next time
it happens, they won\'t need to call you, because they\'ve figured out
the problem really belongs to
\"insert_some_other_technology_provider_here.\" Or, they\'ll call
you because the website really is down. Teaching them about the
technology behind the problem they are having, and helping them to
understand what\'s involved in it, not only empowers them to deal with
problems more on their own, but it also empowers them to solve other
technology problems, and be more engaged in technology planning in the
future.
Third, Relationship. All of this works within whatever relationship
you have with a client. As mentioned above, if you\'ve worked
consistently with a client, you know what their level of expertise is -
this makes assessment easier. Also, you remember how much work you got
done when a substitute teacher came to class? Not a lot of learning, but
certainly a lot of spitballs. Consistency in relationship is as
important to students as it is to people who get support from a
technology provider. Usually, of course, with the huge technology
providers, that sort of thing isn\'t possible. But with smaller
providers it certainly is. Sometimes, even with larger providers, they
manage to get around this by having detailed logs of conversations with
you. I\'ve found that quite helpful in the past - it has surprised me
when someone has said something like \"I see you called a couple of
months ago with a problem regarding x. How has that worked for you since
then?\" It was nice to feel like someone actually bothered to write it
down, and for the person talking with me bothered to read it. In the
past, for me, my ongoing support relationships with clients have been
the way that I have learned the most about their organizations. It has
allowed me to be proactive in working with them on technology, and
incredibly informative in helping future planning. The relationship is a
two-way street: just as they let us know about challenges they face with
their technology problems - it\'s important for us to tell them about
the challenges that we run into in working to support them. There is a
level of trust that\'s important to this relationship. Honestly, it is
the relationship I cherish most highly (even more highly than whatever
they pay me).
Fourth, Solution. This is where the provider-client relationship
differs most from the teacher-student relationship. Of course, in the
end, the client needs their technology problem solved, as quickly and
efficiently as possible. But I\'d argue that good assessment of where
the client is, and where the problem fits in their work and
organizational lives, empowerment of them to troubleshoot problems on
their own, and an ongoing, stable relationship, will make the eventual
solution of the problem a lot easier, more economical and less stressful
for both the client and the provider than it might be otherwise.
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On 23 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Deborah Finn pointed out
this good
post
in a blog I have never read: ALA Tech
Source. I haven\'t read that blog
(yet) because I\'m not a librarian, although, I\'ve always thought what
Deborah said on the ISF
list:
\"I have long thought that nonprofit techies should make a point of
learning from and making common cause with tech-savvy librarians.\"
She\'s ahead of me since she actually reads librarian blogs.
Anyway, there is a (soon to be classic) line: \"...all of these
technologies are \'free\' as in \'free kittens,\' not free as in \'free
beer.\'\"
I do think that is something that we have a hard time getting across to
folks. I just had a great conversation with a IT manager at a
medium-sized nonprofit that had implemented
Asterisk for their call center. The bottom
line, from his perspective, was flexibility. They saved some in cost
from a proprietary PBX system - but then they had to spend more on
support and the like - it was a wash cost wise. But what they gained,
and it sounds like he\'s not willing to give it up - is flexibility. It
takes more, because you own your own system. But then, you own it - you
can do much more.
Open source software, like kittens, take care and management. Some
software, like Firefox, is like that kitten that is easy - it learns to
be litter trained once, and just sits on your lap (or in its little bed)
in a ball and sleeps, and plays only when you want it to. Other projects
take more care and feeding, and you might have to take it to the vet.
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On 23 Apr, 2007 By mpm
Back in December, I had planned to talk first about document format
standards before I plunged into XDI. But, a couple of things intervened.
First, I decided to write a full blown whitepaper on document standards.
So it will be a bit before it comes out. I think people (especially in
the nonprofit sector) take document formats far too much for granted,
and I think they deserve more treatment than just a blog entry.
I also had a chat with Andy Dale, of ooTao, and
it provided lots of great fodder for an informational blog entry. So,
here it is. I won\'t go nearly into as much detail as he went with me -
at some point I\'ll write something much more substantial. But this is a
good start.
What is XDI, anyway? XDI stands for
XRI Data Interchange. It\'s all about standards for sharing data over
the net via XML and XRIs (eXtensible Resource
Identifiers - URIs on steroids.)
If you look at the basic problem - how does data source \"A\" talk with
data source \"B\"? We\'ve done a lot of that via APIs - but that\'s a
set of idiosyncratic solutions to individual problems (solving the
Convio \<-> GoogleMaps problem is different than solving the Joomla
\<-> Salesforce problem, for instance - lots easier than it used to be,
but still atomized.) How can this be standardized?
It\'s important to understand that this problem has many layers. The
first is the identifier layer. Who are you, anyway? Then -
authentication - how do I know that you are who you say you are? Then
there is authorization/trust - what are you allowed to do, what data can
you see? And, finally, there comes the data sharing layer. That\'s where
this is all leading, of course, but what if when you finally get down to
that layer, I say \"tomayto\" and you say \"tomaato\"?
Each of the technologies implemented at these layers have to be
optimized for different things - you wouldn\'t want your data sharing
layer to have strong crypto, and be optimized for figuring out who you
are, would you? That would be inefficient. So these layers are separate,
and, in most situations, pluggable. For instance, you could plug OpenID
into the authentication layer for internet transactions, and use
Kerberos for internal organizational purposes.
So, to the bottom layer of XDI is optimized for figuring out how the
data should be shared. For example - think of a lexicon for all the ways
that \"First Name\" exists out there (\"given name\", \"First\",
\"nombre\", etc.) - so it would be possible to share that data. Also,
one idea that is a part of XDI is that some data is persistent, and some
data is simply a link to persistent data - so the data doesn\'t hold my
address, for instance, but it does hold exactly where (the XRI) to get
my current address.
Andy and I talked a bit about his work in the nonprofit sector. He sees
the sector as a great place to try these ideas out - because, for the
most part, there is a much more open and flexible ethos around data
sharing. I think that probably is mostly true, but as I pointed out to
him, the sector is often years behind the for-profit sector in terms of
technology. There is a pilot project with Kintera to expose a subset of
one nonprofit\'s data to an XDI interface. There are others lined up to
try it, and the hope is it will spread. I certainly hope it does, and I
will be keeping track of this effort, for sure.
I think the idea of this kind of standard - moving data sharing beyond
what we (barely) have now, which are these very atomized sets of
solutions (even though they are solutions we badly need.) If every
data-centric application (ooh, that\'s redundant) that a nonprofit
implemented had a standard interface for data sharing - think about the
possibilities there. Right now, it\'s still basically impossible to look
at big pictures across a wide range of data domains. This kind of
standard would make those kinds of analyses a lot easier.
So this is the next jump beyond open APIs: imagine SQL-like queries on
any data, anywhere you were trusted, and across those sources. And I
thought open APIs were the holy grail!
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On 18 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 5 Comments
A blog reader introduced me to a new blog by a guy named Phil Jones.
Among other great things, he has this amazing
post
about Microsoft, and their future. Basically, he argues that in the era
of Web 2.0, the only really compelling platform they have is Excel. Read
this post, it\'s dead on.
I\'ve always loved Excel (and, since I don\'t own a copy, I hobble along
with Open
Office\'s
pale, pale substitute.) I\'ve thought that it was truly one of the best
pieces of software ever written. Really. And it\'s amazing how much
it can do, and how much an organization can do with it. There are plenty
of very small organizations (and not so small) that run on Excel. Many
shouldn\'t, but, some, arguably, certainly can. And if the ideas he
suggests for bringing Excel fully into the new age were actually done by
Microsoft (fat chance) that would make it even better.
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On 16 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
David
says
of the Netsquared Innovation Fund process:
Advocacy is appropriate and good. Mobilizing your network to help you
win by making your network part of the process is also appropriate and
good.\
\
Mobilizing your network to game a voting process suggests a weak
understanding of how communities and social networks create real
change (as oppose to raising a buck).
I thought about blogging about the projects I voted for, with details on
why I voted for the projects I voted for. But then the flood of \"vote
for this\" and \"vote for that\" started in the blogosphere and by
email, and I decided that I didn\'t really want to enter into that
space.
There are a very large number of very good and totally deserving
projects on that list. I was hesitant, frankly, about the whole idea
about a semi-public balloting process. I like the idea of having the
widest range of people vote on projects, but I found myself tempted by
the \"oh, she works on that, I should vote for it\" voice, which I
tried to temper as much as possible, and focus on whether or not a
project fit the criteria. I think I mostly failed at objectivity.
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On 15 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
At NTC, there was a lot of talk about the
\"big three\" open source CMS packages that most people these days in
our sector are using: Drupal,
Plone, and Joomla. I\'ve
had a fair bit of experience with Drupal - nosi.net
is run on Drupal, and I\'d done a Drupal install once, and helped with
some now and again. I hadn\'t had experience with either Plone or
Joomla, but in talking to folks both at NTC and Penguin Day about
Joomla, I got intrigued.
I have a new endeavor (see the last
post) that
needs a new website, and I figured, why not? I hear Joomla is dead easy
to install, and I need dead easy right now, so let\'s try it. Well,
guess what? Installing Joomla is dead easy. I could do it with my
eyes closed. I set up a mysql database in my standard generic virtual
hosting setup, copied the downloaded and unzipped Joomla folder into my
webspace by FTP, and fired up my browser. Four or five clicks later,
tada! A website.
Um, sorta. I guess that\'s where it gets interesting when you work with
a CMS, right? What are all those content types, and where do they
appear, and how do you get things to look exactly like you want them?
It\'s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. CMSs do share that
pretty serious learning curve - but I\'m getting over it, slowly.
So I like Joomla. Do I like it better than Drupal? I\'m not yet sure. It
definitely focuses a lot on the eye candy, which is nice, actually - I
like that the admin interface is pretty. I know, that\'s silly, but
it\'s true. In some respects, it\'s easier to use, although in others,
Drupal can be a bit easier. It\'s a tossup, so far. They both seem to
pretty much have very similar feature sets. We\'ll see how I feel as I
progress with it, and see how far I can go. I hear that all of the
\"cool chix\" use Drupal, though (Linuxchix
is about to launch it\'s new Drupal-based website.) There is, I think, a
bit of a geeky bias toward Drupal. So, maybe since I\'m becoming a bit
less of a geek, Joomla\'s a good pick? But Joomla is pretty darned
geeky. Like what is a mambot, anyway?
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On 15 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks
ago, saying I
was done with technology consulting. In one sense, I spoke too soon,
although in another, I was right on. And, to some extent, this post is a
bit self-indulgent, so if you\'re looking for some concrete technology
talk, you might want to wait for the next post on Joomla. :-)
I first started doing technology consulting for nonprofit organizations
in 1996, with a project for a local public television station (WGBY in
Springfield, MA), to design a technology center
for teachers to learn about
technology and the internet, so they could apply that in their
classrooms. It was a great project, and a success, since that technology
center is still in operation today. Understandably, it has come to be
somewhat different than I designed it back then, but it still feels good
that something that I worked hard on is still serving people. And it was
the sheer enjoyment of that project - of talking to many different
people about needs and desires, thinking about how to appropriately use
technology to those ends, that got me out of academia, and into the
nonprofit and educational technology world.
I did a lot of planning, evaluation and training in the beginning - some
on my own, some with Summit
Collaborative. it was what I
enjoyed most, and it was what I thought I was best at. But, somewhere
along the line, I started to do more and more implementation, because,
honestly, that was what my clients needed most at the time. I put in a
few networks in the late \'90s (ugh, really, I pulled cable.) I started
to do databases for organizations, and then, in 1999, I flew headlong
into web application development, which became my specialty and mainstay
until I took a break to go to seminary in 2005. At first, I liked it a
lot. I liked being able to create things that I thought my clients
wanted (and they thought they wanted.) I stumbled a fair bit along the
way. I had a hard time being a successful business owner with employees
(I pretty much suck at it, so I hitched my wagon to Database Designs
Associates from 2003 until this year.) And I
struggled mightily with my own capacity to build really good
applications mostly without other developers to help out. It was really
hard to try and write new applications building on a framework I\'d
written a while ago, while simultaneously improving that framework, and
keeping up with new things such as Ajax and RSS, mostly by myself. It
just wasn\'t happening very well.
And as time wore on, I lost touch with people and organizations. I sat
for hours (or days) at a time in front of my screen without contact with
the folks I was doing the work for. And, if there was contact, it was
most often on the level of \"can you fix this?\" \"can you add this
feature?\" I don\'t blame them - they needed the fixes, and the
features. But that was a pale shadow of the kind of work and contact I
wanted with my clients. And I also struggled with the consulting
business model. In the early days, as a business owner, I needed to
think a lot about sustaining business (I had employees, and I wanted
them to eat.) And later, even though it wasn\'t a large part of my job
description, it still was something that I had a hard time with - like
getting yanked out of my flow to answer RFPs.
For one long time client (I had this client for just about all of the
span of my consulting career - they were my second client), I had a much
fuller, richer role, even though much of the work I did for them was
database and web application development, we\'d built a great rapport
over time, and it felt wonderful when I got the chance to talk with them
about bigger picture issues. But that was not so often, and, as staff in
that organization left over time, that relationship changed.
When I came back from seminary, I was very clear that I couldn\'t do
technology consulting in the way that I had come to do it. I couldn\'t
bring myself to code or design databases, or write connections to APIs,
or do any of those things that had become my bread and butter over the
past 6 years. I wanted to work directly with organizations and people.
So, it seemed to me that I needed simply to leave technology consulting
behind, and move into doing things in a more spiritual vein, perhaps.
But then, I had something of an epiphany. And that epiphany was in my
post about \"Technology Consulting
2.0.\" And the
more I thought about it, the more it made sense to me, and the more I
liked it. And the more I talked with other people about it, the more it
made sense for me to do it. I will hold off for a while yet in my life
working with people directly on spiritual issues, and work now with what
could certainly be called the spirituality of nonprofit technology -
finding balance and looking at the bigger picture. I\'m creating a
new practice, called MetaCentric Techology
Advising. It will include visioning and
planning, evaluation and training. All of the stuff that I liked the
most about nonprofit technology, and, honestly, what I\'m probably best
at. And it\'s nice to know that all of the last 8 years or so as a
\"technology vendor\" as it were, will be there as good experience and
guidance as I work with clients.
I won\'t talk much about it in this blog again, but I thought it might
be something people would want to hear about.
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On 15 Apr, 2007 By mpm
I\'d taken a long break from Yochai Benkler\'s The Wealth of Networks -
I had a lot going on, and, well, it\'s a really, really meaty read. But
I picked it up again, and was in the middle of it around the same time
as the discussions around the Journal of Information Technology in
Social Change happened. And as I finished reading the chapter, it came
clear to me that the chapter might well be Yochai\'s two cents on our
conversation (not that I\'ve asked him, but some things seem kinda clear
from this chapter.)
The chapter is titled: Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information and
Law. Basically, it talks about the kinds of ways that individuals live,
and the kinds of things that increase autonomy, and things that decrease
it. He starts out laying the framework: the networked information
economy puts materials in people\'s hands for action, it provides
non-proprietary sources of communications, and it decreases the extent
that people can be manipulated by those they depend on for
communication. He then goes into detail into each of these ways that the
network information economy increases autonomy.
There\'s a lot in this chapter, and I can\'t possibly do it justice - go
read it. But what I want to highlight is his section on autonomy,
property and commons. First, because it bears most closely on issues of
open content in the nonprofit sector. Second, because it\'s a set of
concepts that are pretty new to me, and I found interesting, and the
arguments compelling.
First, both markets/property and commons have something in common - the
ability of people to have some amount of certainty that there is
available to them a set of resources so they can, as Benkler says
\"execute plans over time.\" I\'d just say, live our lives, or in the
case of nonprofits, accomplish their missions. But markets and commons
create these certainties in different ways, as you can imagine. Markets
are dependent on the willingness and ability of people to pay for goods
and services, and are constrained in certain ways. Commons are also
constrained in certain ways. He says:
Whether having a particular type of resource subject to a commons,
rather than a property-based market enhances freedom of action and
security, or harms them, is a context-specific question.
Basically, we have to take things on a case-by-case basis. There may be
times (I\'d say home ownership is a good one,) where a property-based
market would enhance security and flexibility, and a commons-based
resource might not. And there will be examples (see below) where the
opposite is true. It is his opinion, and based on his arguments I agree,
that a mixture of proprietary (market-based) and commons provides people
with the most flexible set of resources leading to the greatest
autonomy:
Given the diversity of resources and contexts, and the impossibility
of a purely \"anything goes\" absence of rules for either system, some
mix of the two different institutional frameworks is likely to provide
the greatest diversity of freedom to act in a material context.
He goes on to say:
As to information, then, we can say with a high degree of confidence
that a more expansive commons improves individual autonomy, while
enclosure of the public domain undermines it. This is less determinate
with communications systems. Because computers and network connections
are rival goods, there is less certainty that a commons will deliver
the required resources. Under present conditions, a mixture of
commons-based and proprietary communications systems is likely to
improve autonomy.
He thinks that if conditions change, including increasing peer-to-peer
networks, and wireless mesh networks, a commons-based communications
policy would increase autonomy.
Later in the chapter, when he talks about mass communications, he uses a
great metaphor of storytellers. I won\'t detail it here, because this is
already getting pretty long. But it\'s worth reading - it has to do with
how free we are to tell our own stories, and to hear the stories of as
wide a range of people as possible.
I think that his contribution to our discussion about open content in
the nonprofit sector, would be that, since it is information (a nonrival
good), and since information is both output (I write a whitepaper that
people read) and an input (someone takes the information from that
whitepaper, and updates it, or uses a piece of information about one of
the specific aspects of that paper in another paper with a different
focus) a commons-based approach is the approach that will provide the
greatest security and flexibility. In other words, an approach that will
allow nonprofits to best fulfill their missions, or in Benkler-ese
\"execute their plans.\"
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On 12 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Beth Kanter, as always, has a great, informative
summary
of the Penguin Day activities last
Saturday in DC. She\'s got some great video blogging, including a short
one on \"open source
feminism.\"
Although women were only 25% of the Penguin Day attendees, that\'s
actually pretty darned good for open source related events.
We\'d love to get more women involved in nonprofit open source - women
from the nptech world who might not be thinking a lot about open source,
and women from the open source community who might not be thinking a lot
about nonprofit organizations. Let\'s get together!
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 10 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I\'ve been reviewing my blogging plans, and I have realized that I have
been quite remiss in continuing the varied overlapping series that I
started over the past few months. So, over the next couple of weeks,
I\'ll be digging back into some interesting territory. I\'ll be blogging
a new chapter of Yochai Benkler\'s The Wealth of
Networks
(which, by the way, is about information and personal autonomy - it
dovetails perfectly with the conversation about open content in the
nonprofit sector.) I\'ll be talking more about open standards, including
the open document standards war, and XDI and identity. And I\'ll keep
talking about my thoughts on technology consulting, and open content.
Also, Deborah Finn gave
me the blogging assignment to apply just war
theory to my approach to
technology. It\'s an interesting assignment, one I\'m gamely choosing to
accept. I\'m really looking forward to the next batch of blogging coming
up, and I hope it turns out to be useful and engaging.
Continue Reading
On 09 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
This conversation is very interesting, and very useful.
Both Michael and Laura bring up some important points that I want to
talk more about - the cost of providing good content, and ways to
provide that good content in a way that is sustainable. There is no
question that providing good content costs money - I have no illusions
about that. And I do, very personally know that raising money in a
traditional sense (from foundations, etc.) for producing content is
difficult, and takes a lot of time. And I don\'t think that we have all
of the answers yet to solve this problem - but it\'s a problem worth
solving, a problem worth struggling with, and not just going down the
path of least resistance.
I got on Michael\'s case about this primarily because his journal is
about technology and social change - and, as he had said, he\'s made
passionate arguments about the open content in the past. But ultimately,
yes, I do think that all content that we provide to the nonprofit sector
should be freely available, and under Creative
Commons (or similar) licensing. That\'s
the only way to provide important information to nonprofits that need it
- some have a hard time affording even nominal fees for that sort of
thing.
There are all sorts of interesting models for providing this content in
this way, while still providing sustainability. Providing the online
version as free and open, and charging for a print version (obviously,
above and beyond just the cost of printing it,) is one idea. The open
source community has all sorts of good models to learn from. Ways to
leverage open content to get folks to pay for more premium services - in
this realm it could be for training, or webinars, or those sorts of
things. I think revenue sharing is possible - asking nonprofits who have
resources to contribute to allow the content to be freely available to
all, for instance. Michael\'s open bounty is a great idea, and I\'d love
to help in any way I could to make that happen. There are collaborative
content generation models - spreading the work out among more people. I
also had heard of the publishing model that Peter brought up - allowing
the authors to provide open access.
Believe me, between working with NOSI to provide good
content, as well as thinking about what I am going to do with that
science fiction novel I wrote over last summer that I\'d like to publish
at some point (I realized that once I started this conversation, I
forever closed off the option to publish it traditionally) I feel this
issue very keenly, and very, very personally.
I do want to address Laura\'s concern about expectations. She says:
But I'll put an unpopular suggestion out there: I think we as a
community also need to consider possible negative impacts of
advocating that all content ought to be open. It's already very
difficult to pay for the effort of creating great content; if in
addition we promote in people's mind the idea that all content ought
to be free, it's hard to escape promoting the idea that no content is
worth paying for. Which puts us in danger of tipping an environment in
which it's very difficult to support good content into one in which
it's downright impossible.
It\'s an interesting comment, and I think that it doesn\'t take into
consideration the way that gift economies work. A system where all
content were freely available and under a Creative Commons license is a
gift economy - in the same way as open source software, or wikipedia
works in a gift economy. And there are great examples of sustainable
gift economies out there, and ways that the \"real\" economy feeds gift
economies. I think that it\'s always important to make clear in
people\'s mind the difference between free \"as in beer\" and free as in
\"information wants to be free.\" There is an educational component to
providing free and open content. And I think we have to think about the
negative impacts of providing content only to those who can pay for it -
increasing an already evident digital divide between nonprofits that
have the resources to pay for these kinds of content, and those that do
not.
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On 08 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 5 Comments
As I write this, I\'m hurtling through small towns and big cities on the
train home. We\'ve passed through Baltimore - which reminds me of a
project I did once, way back when, to work with a group of mostly small
and medium-sized organizations on technology planning. In those days,
the buzzwords were \"internet connectivity,\" \"networks,\"
\"websites,\" and \"email.\" This was in the solidly web 1.0 world where
many organizations still weren\'t even networked, still used dial-up
internet connections, and had websites written in the earliest version
of Front Page, or were done by the CFO\'s nephew.
I\'ve emerged from this week\'s frenzy of buzzwords like \"blogging,\"
\"open API,\" \"e-advocacy,\" \"municipal wireless\" and \"social
networking\" not surprised at how much things have changed, really, but
how much they have stayed exactly the same. From the stories I\'ve heard
this week, nonprofits of the size that I\'m most familiar with (small to
medium-sized) still don\'t have in-house technology expertise to make
evaluations about what directions to go in. They sometimes deal with
vendors and developers that don\'t really understand their mission,
don\'t speak their language, and don\'t tell them the truth (whether
intentionally, or by a lack of self-examination.) They struggle mightily
with software, no matter whether it\'s free/open source or proprietary,
shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which
they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. The
buzzwords have changed and the technology has gotten more sophisticated
- but the problems many nonprofits are facing are exactly the same. So I
hate to throw cold water on the whole enterprise - but if the core
issues that most nonprofits are facing haven\'t changed, and the
situation isn\'t getting better, how is it that have we helped?
I also saw the conference with some different, post-seminary eyes. I was
looking for the deeper purposes behind the implementation of technology.
I was looking for the discriminating approach to adopt technology
appropriately. I was looking for the big conversation - why are we doing
this anyway? Is it still just in the pursuit of \"efficiency\"? Is it
all just TCO arguments? And I also looked at this with
post-implementation eyes. I spent 8 years implementing technology
\"solutions\" for nonprofit organizations. I wrote thousands of lines of
code and designed more databases than I can count. I think I truly did
some good, and I know I made mistakes along the way. Mistakes I hope to
learn from, now that I won\'t be doing implementation anymore.
Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I\'m
riding on - inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit
while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that
we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to
pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up. And while they watch
really large organizations zip by them in bigger, better vehicles,
looking exactly like they know where they are going. But no one seems to
be asking \"why are we on this track in the first place?\" \"Is being on
this track going to really help me save the whales/feed
people/organize/save the planet?\"
And it\'s making me think a lot about what I\'m going to start calling
\"Nonprofit Technology Consulting 2.0\" (and yes, I\'m subverting the
dominant paradigm.) I don\'t know yet whether I\'ll actually start
practicing it, but I\'d like to think about it more. What would it be
like if we could help nonprofits with the following:
- Asking whether technology implementations in their organization in
the past have really facilitated their mission? In what ways have
they not?
- Asking whether technology played a beneficiary, damaging or neutral
role in internal organizational dynamics and staff morale?
- Asking, before implementing a new technology - what problem is
really attempting to be solved? is it a problem that can be solved
in any other ways?
- How does increasing use of networking technology, on-line presence,
and internet communications facilitate or hinder work that is done
face to face?
- Making choices about technology not just based on cost/TCO or
feature set - but to bring in issues of the effects on staff,
organizational dynamics, and the role of factors such as
organizational determination of data destiny, source and ownership
of software, and environmental impact.
- Being mediators between vendors and nonprofits - to look at issues
that are technological, and issues that are about personality,
behavior and organizational structure and dynamics (on both sides)
- Looking at the bigger picture - how does what an organization does
with technology affect the larger community, and the planet?
I\'m looking for ways that it might be possible to practice nonprofit
technology consulting with head and heart, with a view to the bigger
picture of our society and our planet, and the precarious place we are
in as human beings at this time, and with a view that reflects my
emerging belief that increasing human touch and human contact will do
more, in the end, than many of our attempts to increase efficiency by
using technology.
When I re-started this blog 6 months ago, I named it Zen and the Art of
Nonprofit Technology for a good reason. I want us to pay attention. I
want us to pay attention to what we are doing, and how we are doing
it. I\'m very clear that there are technology implementations that are
completely appropriate, mission-facilitating, and even good for the
greater community, and good for the planet. I want to make sure that
every single technology implementation is like that. My bet is that we
might do a lot fewer of them if that were so.
As I keep thinking more about this, I\'ll be blogging about it. I
welcome any feedback and conversation, either by
email, or on comments and trackbacks
on this blog.
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On 07 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 6 Comments
I had heard about this new journal a while ago, and it was sitting in
some small corner of my brain, waiting for me to pay attention. I ran
into an old colleague at NTC, and it came up,
because he had been thinking of contributing to the journal, but decided
that he probably won\'t, for reasons I will talk about.
The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social
Change, is, I think, a needed
part of our landscape of resources for the sector. And the editors, both
of whom I respect highly, are impeccable in their credentials to pull
this sort of thing off, and make it successful.
But then I looked deeper. The journal is, basically, business as usual.
It\'s peer reviewed (good), but it\'s got a rather restrictive license,
and the content is not freely available. The licenses are as follows:
Personal License:
If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a personal
license, this means that it is for your personal use. You may make
copies for backup purposes or to allow you to personally use this report
on more than one computer. You may also print copies, but not for
circulation of any kind [emphasis mine].
Corporate License:
For most of you, we recommend a corporate license. If you have purchased
a copy/subscription to the Journal with a corporate license, this means
that it is for use by people within your organization. You may make
paper copies for internal circulation. You may post it to your intranet,
so long as access to that intranet is restricted to those who work for
your organization [emphasis mine].
In other words, don\'t make a copies for a workshop, or for a
colleague who isn\'t inside your organization, and definitely don\'t
make a copy for your mother to read.
But it\'s a journal about technology and social change! This goes back
to my constant refrain - the means are the ends. How can we talk
about technology in social change, while, at the same time, publishing
in a format that limits the availability of this knowledge to people
privileged enough to pay for it? How can we talk about promoting change
when we\'re not pushing this content into the commons?
The Public Library of Science is a wonderful
example of a reputable, respected peer-reviewed journal where articles
are freely available to the public. They say:
Published research results and ideas are the foundation for future
progress in science and medicine. Open Access publishing therefore
leads to wider dissemination of information and increased efficiency
in science ...
Which is, actually, a very practical down to earth argument. Benkler
goes
further,
and I go with him:
Information, knowledge, and information-rich goods and tools play a
significant role in economic opportunity and human development. While
the networked information economy cannot solve global hunger and
disease, its emergence does open reasonably well-defined new avenues
for addressing and constructing some of the basic requirements of
justice and human development ... More importantly, the availability
of free information resources makes participating in the economy less
dependent on surmounting access barriers to financing and
social-transactional networks that made working out of poverty
difficult in industrial economies. These resources and tools thus
improve equality of opportunity. [emphasis mine]
I think it is incumbent upon knowledgeable leaders to provide models for
how to do things differently - provide tools that foster social change
in ways that foster social change, not in ways that help to sustain the
status quo.
I invited Michael Gilbert to a dialogue
about this, which he readily agreed to. Below is his response. We\'ll be
continuing this on each of our blogs, with cross-linking. Please feel
free to join the dialogue, either in comments, or on your own blog.
I\'ll respond to Michael\'s response in another post.
[Thank you so much for wanting to start a dialogue on this issue.\
\
I would like to respond in three parts. First, I want to say a few words
about my enthusiastic support for the critique of closed licensing
offered by Michelle by reflecting a bit on my past actions in this
regard. Second, I want to lay out as clearly as possible the
circumstance that led to a decision to use a traditional closed license.
Third, I want to invite people to participate in a conversation about
how this could be done differently.\
\
As anyone who has followed my advocacy work over the last ten years will
know, I am a fervent supporter of open licensing models as a profound
public good. I started promoting the Public Library of Science to the
readers of Nonprofit Online News as far back as December of 2002. I\'ve
praised the innovation of the Creative Commons licenses on more than one
occasion, along with Lawrence Lessig\'s other work and ideas. (I have in
fact offered a great deal of content under Creative Commons licenses in
the past and will no doubt do so again.) I have been a champion of
openness of all sorts, including such things as open licenses and the
destructiveness of DRM, in panel after panel in the nonprofit tech
community for a decade. I have more than once written challenges of
others similar to Michelle\'s challenge of me and I must say that I can
only hope that I\'ve been half as courteous as she has been.\
\
Before I explain the circumstances that led to our licensing decision, I
want to make one thing very clear. Although the Journal was prepared in
partnership with NTEN, I take full and personal responsibility for the
decision to use a closed license. Katrin Verclas (the Executive Director
of NTEN, for those who don\'t know) was eager to know if there was any
way to make it open and pushed hard for it. I am the one who, with the
interests of the sustainability of my own small organization in mind,
refused.\
\
The question of licensing is a terrible dilemma for authors, readers,
reviewers and publishers right now and I happen to be all of the above.
I\'m in an absurd position, personally. I want our efforts to reach the
broadest possible audience and at yet on a gut level, I loathe the
restrictive nature of the journal industry. At the same time, I have a
small organization with an established based of customers that will pay
for high quality information. (In other words, I have paying subscribers
who have been waiting for this journal for months.) Most importantly, I
have staff to pay. Thus, the journal has a fee, although we\'ve done our
best to make the personal rate much lower than the organizational one
and in no case are we anywhere near some of the stratospheric prices of
many mainstream journals.\
\
I\'ve watched open journals fumble along and when they publish at all
it\'s the result of great sacrifice on the part of the people publishing
it. Some, that have a home in the extra time that some academics can
spend on such things in their jobs, are almost sustainable. Others
aren\'t at all. I\'m really not sure what the answer is. The overhead of
finding sponsors for a small publication is enormous. We experimented
with it briefly two years ago when we first decided to publish a
journal, but we couldn\'t make it happen. Is there a business model that
will make this work? I\'m really not sure.\
\
Quite frankly, nothing would please me more than to find a way to
finance the expense of the journal without fees for licensed copies. The
licensing is a pain for everyone. It\'s friction in the system designed
only to create some financial accountability for the work involved in
nurturing the relationships involved and husbanding the papers into the
best form we can manage. Maybe the answer is to abandon that and just
use the Internet for direct publishing by authors, but I don\'t think
we\'re far enough along yet in developing network centric models that do
what competitive selection, peer review, and editing will do. Maybe the
answer is for a single donor to step forward and fund the next half
dozen issues. Maybe the answer is some kind of quarterly bounty which,
as soon as financial pledges reach a certain amount, the publication
goes to open license (or maybe that\'s when the next issue is
commenced). I really don\'t know. If you want to help figure it out, I
would be very grateful.\
\
To wrap up, I just want to say thank you to Michelle for jumping on this
right away. (I only wish you had been at the panel for the Journal on
Friday where we talked about our larger goals. The licensing issue would
have been a good piece of that discussion.) The sector benefits from
this sort of criticism and we\'ll all be better off for
it.]{style="color:#1f2c46;"}
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On 06 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
There has been a little bit of blogging and the like at NTC - although
it was certainly hindered yesterday, when the internet was down for most
of the day. And I think most of the bloggers are too busy giving, or
going to sessions to blog much. But there are a few tidbits that I\'ve
enjoyed:
- There is a great Flickr stream building up of photos tagged with
\"07NTC\"
including one of
me.
- Michael Gilbert has a
review
of things happening on the varied NTC backchannels, with some wry
commentary.
- Michael also has a really interesting
map of the
nonprofit technology space.
- Yet Another Anonymous Nonprofit IT Staffer (hmmm, does it say
something that with some regularity we discover blogs by folks who
feel the need to be anonymous?) has great
commentary
about getting staff buy-in to technology projects: it\'s the
mission, stupid!
- Charlie Brown, of Askoka\'s Changemakers,
says
\"It\'s not about technology - its about appropriate technology...
Its about human behavior... What do people actually need?\" Yay,
there are people who get it. I\'m sorry I missed that session!
After it\'s all said and done, I\'ll post my overall review. But the
next step is Penguin Day!
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On 04 Apr, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I had a great Day of Service with the
Advocacy Project, which is a great
organization that sends interns out into the field, to work with local
partner organizations on issues such as human rights, women\'s health,
peace, and many other issues. We talked about appropriate use of Web 2.0
tools for their interns, for themselves - for advocacy, fundraising, and
information dissemination.
It was fun and engaging. They are an interesting and eclectic group, and
our conversation ranged all over the map. But it felt useful, and I
learned a lot from them. It made me think about what is important to me
about consulting - why I got into doing consulting in the first place. I
like talking with people. I like learning from them, I like working to
give them concrete information they can use, as well as
thought-provoking questions for them to ponder as time goes on.
And it reminded me of what I had been missing for all of this time in
working to implement technology. It was the human contact, the human
touch, the connection about more than just \"can you fix this bug?\" or
\"can you build this?\" That\'s what I\'ve been missing.
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On 02 Apr, 2007 By mpm
Well, my bags are just about packed, I\'ve prepared just about
everything I can prepare. I\'m involved in two sessions at
NTC: the Linux Geekout on Thursday at 3:30,
and the Case Studies in Open Source Software at 10:30 on Friday morning.
I\'m also facilitating two breakouts at Pengiun Day
DC,
one on Desktop Linux, and a second on starting open source projects.
It\'s going to be an interesting NTC for me. This will be my first in
three years (I missed the last two.) I\'m going entirely with my
NOSI hat on, and with a different perspective, since
I\'m not doing technology consulting. I\'ll be thinking about open
source, and about technology writing. I\'ll get to see some old friends,
and meet some new ones. Email me if you want to make sure we catch up.
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On 29 Mar, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been really happy to be involved with
Aspiration and
PICNet in organizing Penguin
Day DC, right after
NTC. Please do come - it will be great. There
are some amazing breakout sessions planned, and there will be wonderful
energy. Here\'s the official blurb:
[Please join us for Penguin Day in DC, right after the Nonprofit
Technology Conference (NTC)! We\'ll explore the potential and the role
of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in nonprofit organizations, in
sessions designed to answer your questions and curiosities!\
\
Recent agenda additions include leaders of the Joomla Team discussing
FOSS communities, a passionate Plone practitioner from NetCorps sharing
skills, and Beth Kanter, who will lead a discussion on Open Content.\
\
Penguin Day DC is taking place Saturday, April 7th, from 9am to 5pm at:\
\
Josephine Butler Parks Center\
2437 Fifteenth Street, NW\
Washington, DC 20009\
Map Link: ]{style="color:#434343;"}http://tinyurl.com/2tj5a3[\
\
Register now at ]{style="color:#434343;"}http://www.penguinday.org[!\
\
The Parks Center is about 1/2 mile from the NTC at the Omni Hotel, and a
shuttle will be available from the NTC hotel to the Penguin Day venue.\
\
See the latest Penguin Day DC Agenda at
]{style="color:#434343;"}http://penguinday.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Penguin_Day_Agenda[.
Feel free to add your session ideas!\
\
If you are going to the NTC, come to Penguin Day!\
\
Penguin Day DC is organized by Aspiration, PICnet and NOSI.\
\
What is Penguin Day?\
\
Are you passionate or curious about the reality, the potential and the
role of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in nonprofit organizations?
Do you want to learn about latest free and open web publishing tools and
technologies? Would you like to meet other like-minded and passionate
participants, including developers, activists, and nonprofit
\"techies\"?\
\
Penguin Day DC will bring together nonprofit technology staff with free
and open source software (FOSS) developers for a day of learning and
conversation.\
\
We\'ll explore and explain open source for nonprofits, frankly address
the challenges of developing open source tools for nonprofits, and
celebrate strengths and successes of open source in the nonprofit
sector. Leading open source innovators in the nonprofit sector will
share their stories and knowledge, and focus on answering your
questions!\
\
If you are curious about open source software for your nonprofit
organization, Penguin Days are for you!\
\
Register at ]{style="color:#434343;"}http://www.penguinday.org [\
]{style="color:#434343;"}
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On 29 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Just today, I received in the mail some Sony Vaio Picturebook laptops,
courtesy of Gavin\'s regular potlatch
program. My goal was to bring them to the Linux geek out at
NTC, and have people play with Linux installs
on them. But, I realized that I had somewhat of a challenge on my hands.
Linux is supposed to be easy to install and use. And, in most
situations, it is. And, if I had a USB CD-ROM drive, it would be, since
it seems from the BIOS of the Vaio\'s that they can boot from USB
external devices. But, the computers are networked, so it would seem -
there must be some easy way, right?
Debian comes to the rescue. They have a site,
with the URL:
http://goodbye-microsoft.com, which is
a link to a windows .exe file, which is a simple, sweet Debian
installer. It works pretty well (at this moment, I\'m now downloading
and installing the base system.) The one snag I hit (not unusual) is
that originally, I was using the wireless cards for networking, but the
basic Debian system didn\'t recognize them. So I switched to the very
standard ethernet PC cards that Gavin so thoughtfully included, and
bingo - everything works.
My next step, after installing the basic Debian system, is to switch the
install to Ubuntu. That\'s easier than it
sounds. Changing one file (/etc/apt/sources.list) and running a few
commands, should do the trick. We\'ll see...
Anyway, if you\'ll be at NTC, come by and see where I got to. The
geekout will be on Thursday at 3:30.
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On 26 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I continue to be fascinated with Twitter, and
one of the primary drivers of the phenomenon known as Web 2.0: social
networking. There have been some rather searing commentaries on Twitter
lately from Nicholas
Carr,
and Kathy
Sierra,
among others. I\'m not going to rehash their interesting and cogent
arguments, but I\'m going to ask some more fundamental questions about
all of this.
In general, I have to admit that I have found very little usefulness in
Web 2.0 social networking tools. Yes, I have an account on del.icio.us,
digg, ma.gnolia and LinkedIn. I even had an orkut account years ago.
There have been some interesting useful tidbits (I talked with an Apple
recruiter, helping her figure out the best way to find people likely to
be a good Genius for the new Holyoke Apple store, I\'ve found a few
links now and again,) but for the most part, I have gotten back way, way
less than I invested in signing up, linking, etc. I\'m sure this
experience is different for different people, but I wonder whether
people really feel like they\'ve gotten useful concrete benefit from the
effort they\'ve put in. I\'ve gotten much more benefit from tools that
are heavy on content, and light on networking (like
H2Oplaylist,
which actually isn\'t a social networking tool, per se, although it has
some interesting functionalities in that regard.)
In all of this, I\'m reminded of Barbara Ehrenriech\'s new
book,
which I\'m going to read soon. It\'s called Dancing in the Streets, a
History of Collective Joy. Her premise, as I understand it, is that
modern culture has slowly but surely decreased our collective activities
that connect us, and allow us to express and share joy. I also can\'t
help but think about that oft criticized, but interesting book,
\"Bowling alone\" about
the reduction in social capital. It is pretty clear that we as a society
we\'ve become more and more compartmentalized - each of us in our own
little world, with our own little TV and internet connection - and we
feel the need to connect with other people.
Back to nonprofit technology - a colleague and I wondered aloud together
about the sheer boredom that nonprofit technology can be sometimes - and
do new things like Twitter, or Second Life, or what have you, relieve
some of that boredom? The boredom of databases, and networks, and
accounting and ... But certainly, one could argue that connecting with
other people around a particular social issue is useful for nonprofits.
Finding ways to tap into, for instance, the vast network that is
MySpace could be an avenue to find
constituents, donors and volunteers. So I don\'t want to write off
social networking, but it\'s also true that \"old-fashioned\" social
networking via email lists is still going strong, and there seems to be
no substitute for a real, live face-to-face
gathering.
But also a push-back to nonprofit technology - if social networking
tools like Twitter seem to be band-aids to help heal the wound of a
disconnected society - what about the wound itself?
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On 19 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Beth Kanter interviewed
me for Blogher recently, and one of the
questions included \"... you work as an independent consultant ...\"
Well, those days are numbered. I decided several weeks ago, for a
variety of reasons, to retire my independent consultant hat. I\'ve been
doing this work for more than 10 years now, full time for about seven of
those years. It\'s been an important part of my life for all of this
time. I had decided to leave it two years ago to go to seminary, then,
when I left seminary, I picked it up again briefly. I have now realized
I need to set it down for good.
I\'m not leaving nonprofit technology, though, just this particular role
- I expect to stay involved, keep connected, keep prodding and poking,
and keep learning. I expect, in one way or the other, to be putting on a
nonprofit hat. For right now, I\'m the part-time coordinator of
NOSI. Whatever emerges next, you\'ll hear about it,
for sure. (In other words, no I don\'t exactly know what I am doing
next, yet.)
Being an independent consultant was, for me, a way to feel like I was
using my skills for the greater good. I got to be a geek, and feel like
I was really making a difference in the workings of organizations, and,
hopefully, in people\'s lives. And, I think I did that. And I also spent
lots of time wrestling with the demons of consultancy and
for-profit-hood (or \"for-little-profit-hood\" as one consultant once
put it.) If I had it to do over again, I would have started a nonprofit
technology organization 10 years ago. Although it certainly could be
argued that would have just involved different demons. Perhaps I\'m now
more ready to wrestle those.
In any event, I have a lot of other skills and knowledge besides
databases and coding: skills and knowledge in teaching, in writing, in
working with organizations, in facilitation, in religion and spiritual
practices, and in working with people, that I want to use now. I want to
more directly work with people and organizations, primarily focused
around faith and spirituality. I want to see people\'s real faces, and
hear their real voices. I want to smell the sweat of working for change
in our society, from the inside out.
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On 19 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I know most of you aren\'t surprised, but I\'m not the Richard
Stallman of the
nonprofit technology community. And it\'s not just because I\'m female.
I\'ve never been dogmatic. I\'ve always known that when it comes to
implementing free and open source software in the sector, pragmatics are
important. (And, no, don\'t even think about comparing me to Eric
Raymond!)
Lately, I\'ve been thinking a lot about Web 2.0 - and how that changes
the equation for nonprofits. There are now three choices for many
applications: proprietary, open source, and web-hosted. The web-hosted
applications aren\'t software, they are a service. One could argue that
whether or not they are open source is about as relevant as whether or
not Google is open source.
Of course, there are all sorts of other reasons for people to choose
open source software over hosted software. Data privacy and security is
one really important one. (Some organizations with some kinds of
sensitive data, like reproductive rights organizations, should always
host their own data.)
But is open data a good substitute for open source? If a proprietary
web-hosted service (most are) has lots of open APIs, providing free and
easy access to data for an organization, is that OK? Is that enough?
I\'m tempted to say \"absolutely.\" Of course, the best web-hosted
alternative is one that is both open source and open data - these
exist, but are few and far between.
This is, of course, from one single organization\'s point of view. From
the sector\'s point of view, open source is better. One single
organization certainly isn\'t going to be in the position to do anything
if, for instance, if Salesforce.com open-sourced their code. But, a
group of nonprofits who do particular kinds of work could potentially
modify a codebase like that to create something that worked really well
for them.
So, I\'m pragmatic. I want the best quality, most open (data and
source), and least expensive solutions for nonprofits. I\'ve come to
realize that can come in different kinds of packages.
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On 19 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Kudos to Michele Martin who brings up a sticky issue: the scarcity
mentality.
Her perspective is that the scarcity mentality of nonprofits (the idea
that there is only one pie, and we only get our small slice) helps keep
nonprofits from taking full advantage of social media (i.e. Web 2.0).
I\'d argue that it also keeps nonprofits from collaborating together to
produce amazingly good open source software projects (or, even
closed-source, for that matter) that will help solve their issues and
keep them from being captive to either predatory vendors, or vendors
whose products, whether it be because of bad design, or not enough
resources, promote data lock-in.
If ten similar nonprofit organizations came together to build a system
that would work for them, they each would get 10 times the software that
they could afford individually. But they are so busy living in that
mentality of scarcity and competition, that they can\'t do that kind of
collaboration. So it doesn\'t happen. Web 2.0, collaboratively developed
software, and, really, collaborations of all sorts are limited by this
mentality.
This reminds me of a true story. A long time ago (in web years) I was
working with a certain CEO of a certain chapter of a certain
very-big-nonprofit (whose role in life is to fund other nonprofits -
this kinda gives it away, but it\'s necessary for the story.) We were
talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo
resources, should help facilitate web development for their client
organizations. They had realized that if they did that, the client
organizations could begin to raise money themselves, instead of
depending so heavily on this certain nonprofit. So, guess what? No web
development help. I was, of course, surprised (that\'s mild, I was
frankly horrified - wasn\'t it the mission of this certain nonprofit to
help the client nonprofits raise money? Wouldn\'t helping them raise
money themselves fulfill their mission?) But that\'s scarcity thinking
for you. Even though this very-big-nonprofit was rolling in money, they
thought the pie was finite, and that if the money didn\'t go through
them, they\'d get less. So the scarcity mentality isn\'t just for small,
struggling nonprofits. It\'s very widespread.
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On 13 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 9 Comments
I promised updates on Satellite internet, and here are my impressions so
far. In general it works well. We\'ve been getting download speeds from
1.5 Mbps (the advertised) to 300-400 Kbps during peak moments. The
latency isn\'t too much of an issue for email or the web. It makes shell
sessions basically impossible for all but the simplest stuff. FTP seems
to work fine, as do streaming video and audio. I haven\'t bought
anything from the ITunes store, yet, or tried skype for a voice call yet
either.
The one caviat to all of this is what is called
\"FAP\" or \"Fair Access Policy.\"
In this regard, satellite broadband is fundamentally broken for
any of the data heavy applications that many people want out of
broadband. Basically, FAP is a threshold, and once you reach the
threshold, your bandwidth is throttled down to what they say is dial-up
speeds, but in fact, is much worse. If you recall my last
post on this -
what I had experienced was FAP. On my plan (the highest plan), if I try
to download more than 400 MB of anything \"at one stretch\" (this is the
term I was given by a tech support person) I\'ll get throttled. On the
\"home\" plans, the threshold is a measly 175 MB.
Here\'s my (minorly edited) transcript of my chat with tech support:
[Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:13:34 PM): Michelle, I have been through your usage
data.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:14:38 PM): I have learnt that, you are subject to
FAP, because you have downloaded 71MB,122MB and 211MB of data at a
stretch.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:15:30 PM): The sum results to 404MB, which is
greater that 400MB.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:15:56 PM): that\'s over 3 hours ...\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:16:35 PM): is there a way that you can exclude
necessary software updates?\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:17:02 PM): I thought it was 400 over 1-2 hours\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:17:14 PM): I am sorry. There is no way that we have
that option for excluding the software updates.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:17:39 PM): I am sorry. You should be able to browse
after 8-12 hours.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:17:44 PM): So over how much time do I have to
space the dowlnloads then?\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:18:07 PM): 404 over 3 hours is too much. What
about 404 over 4 or 5 hours\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:18:20 PM): Your download should not exceed above
400MB at a stretch.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:18:42 PM): at any one stretch? How long is a
stretch?\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:19:22 PM): If you try to download any data which is
above 400MB at one go, you will be subject to FAP.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:19:55 PM): so if I wait, say, 20 minutes between
downloads I should be fine?\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:20:07 PM): but then doesn\'t regular web browsing
add into that?\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:20:50 PM): like if I download a 50 M file, then
browse, then another 50 M file, an hour later, I might still be in
trouble?\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:20:49 PM): I am sorry. If you try to download any
data which is above 400MB at one go, you will be subject to FAP.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:21:35 PM): If you stop downloading data before it
hits the Download Threshold, you will not be subject to FAP,
irrespective of the time taken to download.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:21:46 PM): but if I am using the net constantly,
that\'s one go, isn\'t it?\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:22:22 PM): no matter whether I\'m downloading
files or doing email or browsing the web?\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:23:28 PM): After your account has been restricted by
FAP, you need to wait 8-12 hours for the FAP to be lifted.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:23:43 PM): Logging off of the HughesNet satellite
network does not remove the FAP from your account, it should cause it to
be lifted sooner.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:23:49 PM): I do totally understand why this policy
exists, but the truth is, there has to be some way to distinguish
between people who are downloading music and games and such, and people
who are downloading necessary software updatees, which, unfortunatley,
get bgger and bigger every year.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:24:57 PM): I understand your concern over this
issue. I will try my best to forward this concern to the concerned.\
Taylor(Mar 6 2007 4:25:30 PM): You should be able to download the 211MB
update once you have been uplifted from FAP.\
Michelle(Mar 6 2007 4:26:22 PM): yeah, but then once I download the
update, I have to pretty much stop everything for a while. Sigh. OK,
thank you very much for your time.]{style="font-family:monospace;"}[\
]{style="font-family:monospace;"}
Notice, 400 MB is smaller than a Linux ISO. It\'s smaller than any
movie, and is about as big as one TV show video at decent resolution.
It\'s smaller than the sum of the Apple software updates I had to do. I
have to plan my downloads carefully, and downloading an ISO requires a
download manager I can pause and resume.
Am I happier with satellite? Sure. Because nobody these days designs
websites for dial-up. 20% of websites didn\'t load at all. Another 40%
were so slow I could go make tea and come back. It just wasn\'t going to
be viable in the long term. Someone who also lives out here said that
with dial-up, the internet feels broken. That\'s certainly true. But,
satellite isn\'t really broadband. I hear it\'s improving, but it will
never really be the broadband everyone else has.
Technorati Tags: broadband,
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On 13 Mar, 2007 By mpm
I read Beth\'s recent blog
entry
on Twitter, and of course, the neo-luddite in
me said \"waste of time!\" But then I had to think about it. What is it
about Twitter that seems so, well, besides the point? Why aren\'t I
Twittering away, like
so many of my nptech colleagues?
One of the potential uses of Twitter is as a \"back channel\" for events
and the like. So a conversation is happening, in a session, or in a
plenary, and people are talking about that on another channel. IRC has
always seemed to me to be one of the best ways to do that, but IRC is,
well, passé these days, it seems. But why not add another channel to the
back channel happenings, for instance, at
NTC? Sounds like a reasonable idea.
But why don\'t I sign up for a Twitter account, and, well, Twitter?
First off, it doesn\'t fit into my workflow. My workflow does involve
the web, for sure, but I can only keep up with so many social networking
sites of varied uses (social bookmarking, social networking like Linked
in, community blogs etc. etc.) before I\'m spread far to thin, and
Firefox starts piling the tabs into a menu. Then there is the overhead
of signing up for an account, and then inviting people, and linking, and
blah blah, just so I can tell people what I am doing at the moment. Huh?
And then there is data. We all talk about information overload. Give me
tools, like Yahoo Pipes, or other kinds
of things, that help me to whittle down the information I\'m taking in -
make it more useful, help me find things faster and easier. I love my
friends and colleagues. Really, I do. But, for the most part, I really
don\'t want to know what they are doing right now. I need less, and
better data, not more.
And there is more: it might keep me at my computer longer. It will
use up server resources at some server farm which uses electricity
(which means, probably burning dirty coal, or natural gas). Using
servers that took a huge amount of energy and water to manufacture.
All this so a bunch of people can tell each other what they are
doing. And, I\'m sorry, but \"Insert_web.20_new_thing to change
the world!\" just doesn\'t cut it for me.
Wanna know what I\'m doing? Check my Skype status. Or IM me. Those
windows are already open, and I use them everyday. But sorry, I\'m not
Twittering.
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On 12 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
As you know, nonprofit data management has been a really important issue
for me for a long time. So I thought it would be a great subject for the
Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
hosted here today.
There are some great posts for today:
- First, Katya\'s Nonprofit Marketing
Blog has a great post with
an article from Cheryl
Gibson
about implementing a CRM system in a nonprofit. It\'s chock-full of
information about what you need to start, different strategies, and
potential pitfalls. My favorite quote: \"A mutual understanding
between the nonprofit organization and the database implementer that
converting a database involves organizational change, and this can
be stressful and threatening for employees. Both the database
implementer and the nonprofit organization will need to establish in
the project plan the metrics and deliverables that comprise
success.\" I wish all nonprofits understood this!
- IDI\'s Blogger Relations has some
good ideas and
resources
on data management - they suggest, and I agree that it is critical
to managing fundraising strategy.
- Michelle
Martin, over
at The Bamboo Project Blog, talks about two cool web 2.0
tools,
i-Lighter and Google Notebooks for managing online notes and such.
I\'m a fan of Google Notebook
myself, but I\'ve never heard of
i-Lighter - I\'ll have to check it out.
- Kivi at Nonprofit Communications,
talks about how to keep track of the kind of data that writers need
to keep track of - editorial
calendars.
I want to do more and more writing, and doing this sort of thing
might be pretty helpful for me.
- Beth has some advice for
dealing with too much data - write it
down
(er, on a wiki that is.)
- Finally, if data management stresses you out, here are some
tips!
Keep track of the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants, no matter which
blog is hosting, by subscribing to the Carnival
feed.
Technorati Tags: carnival,
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On 07 Mar, 2007 By mpm
Next Monday, I\'m hosting the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants.
The topic is \"Nonprofit Data Management: from slips of paper to CRM\"
As you all know, I\'ve been thinking about data management issues for
years, and it would be great for people to share their ideas and
knowledge.
So, submit those posts by Sunday
evening!
Technorati Tags: data
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On 05 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Dial up just wasn\'t going to cut it. As someone I talked with today
said, \"with dial up, the internet feels broken.\" Someone else said
that it would be good for designers to be forced to live with dial up
for a while.
Anyway, it just got to be too much. I spent lots of time reading the
reviews (many of which were BAD), but we decided to plunk down the dough
(lots of it) and go for it. I figured I\'d start a chronicle of it. We
got Hughesnet. They did have some really
bad reviews on dslreports.com, but the
other folks, WildBlue, weren\'t installing
anything in our area.
Day 1 started out good. The install was very smooth, except the guy had
to chip off a bunch of ice off of the roof. At first, he thought he\'d
have to come back in spring when the ground had thawed, to put in a
pole. But the roof works fine. He connected the modem, which I happily
connected to my Airport Extreme - and we\'re off and running.\
{width="446"
height="100"}\
It didn\'t start out bad. The advertised speeds are 1.5 down, and 256K
up. As you can see, the download speed is fine, the upload speed is
positively zippy compared to what they say it\'s supposed to be.
Pandora works dandy.
YouTube ain\'t bad. It even snowed a bit -
and everything seems fine. Shell sessions are basically not doable,
unless I am amazingly patient - the 4 second latency is definitely a
problem in that case.
But it didn\'t stay good. About 5:00, the bandwidth hit the floor. It
bounced back up a couple of times. Now, it\'s at:
{width="439"
height="100"}
That sucks. At least I\'ll be able to upload this blog entry.
More on this saga soon.
Technorati Tags: broadband,
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On 02 Mar, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I\'m folllowing
Kivi
on the NPBlogtipping bandwagon. I think it\'s a great idea, although
I\'m one day late. I promise in April I\'ll be right on time (oooohh,
that could be fun, April Blogtipping on April fools day ...) By the
way, I think blogtipping is a great idea for our sector, and it\'s a
great way for me to think more about all of the blogs that I read.
I have one note: I feel a little strange giving tips - a lot of the
blogs I really like are way better than mine. But anyway ...
1) Ed Batista\'s blog.
What I like: I like reading Ed\'s perspectives on organizations, how
they work, and the kinds of strategies and approaches that are around to
work within organizations. I like the wide variety of resources he
brings to bear - he\'s introduced me to a lot of great writers and
thinkers in varied areas. I like the design of Ed\'s blog as well.
My tip (more of a request): I\'d love to hear more about your
perspectives on how technology can help (or hinder) organizational
management, dynamics, and change.
2) Jonathan Piezer\'s Philantherapy
blog.
What I like: As a longtime fan of JP\'s, it\'s great to hear his
perspective on the nonprofit sector. He\'s down to earth, ruthlessly
honest, and gets right down to the heart of things. I like JP\'s take on
the development side of nonprofit issues.
My tip: JP, write more! And tag your posts so more people can find
them - they are gold.
3) Deborah Finn\'s Technology for the Nonprofit and Philanthropic
Sector.
A note: Deborah is an old college friend of mine.
What I like: I hear about a lot of new things from Deborah, and she
explores a lot of new tools, and asks good questions. She uses her
experiences to talk about technology issues. Her posts are thoughtful
and accessible for non-techies. I like that she includes graphics in
most of her posts. She has a fabulous, and up to date blogroll/link
list.
My tip: Allow non-registered users to comment - I imagine you\'d get
more comments that way. Also, a minor technological thing - the RSS feed
is a bit wonky sometimes (strange formatting, and it\'s not always clear
when there are new items.)
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On 20 Feb, 2007 By mpm
With 2 Comments
My laptop is in the shop. I\'ll spare you the details. It\'s truly a
practice in patience to live without a computer. Work doesn\'t get done.
Blog entries don\'t get written. Emails don\'t get returned.
It\'s a lucky thing my partner has a laptop I can beg and borrow
(stealing might cause issues.)
My practice in patience only goes so far. The Mac Mini I\'d been
planning to get for a while just got ordered, next day shipping. It
might even arrive before the laptop gets out of the shop. But even if it
doesn\'t, at least the next time a computer dies, I\'ll have a backup.
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On 06 Feb, 2007 By mpm
With 6 Comments
Relatively close on the heels of my post on Spirituality, I read a post
on a blog I\'ve never read before, A View From
Home. She is
surprised
that NTC is happening over Passover and Good
Friday (April 4-6), and is having to make a tough choice and not attend
NTC this year. She says:
What's done is done. Like I said, I love NTEN and I know that if they
could turn back time and make a different decision they probably
would. I'll have to catch the next east coast conference and hope that
it's at a better time. But I can't help but wonder how the faith-based
organizations that are NTEN members feel about this? Are all the
vendors who come from the west coast who happen to be Jewish skipping
their seders to travel?
She is surprised that no one else has talked about this time conflict
before. Well, I was going to, but she beat me to it.
I\'m going to NTC this year. I\'m not celebrating Good Friday, etc. in
any real observable way. It is too bad that I\'ll likely miss my chance
to go to a seder, which I would have liked to do. But I\'m not really
blogging about this for personal reasons. What I find most interesting
is that when a survey was done of people who
would go to NTC, many more people wanted cheaper hotel rates rather than
to not conflict with holidays. I do know that in general, faith-based
organizations are not well represented in NTEN - which makes sense -
most faith-based organizations aren\'t large enough to pay tech staff,
and don\'t have enough infrastructure to benefit from an organization
like NTEN. The truth is the nonprofit technology field is overwhelmingly
secular. I don\'t think this is a problem - it\'s just reality, an
interesting reality.
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On 06 Feb, 2007 By mpm
I listened in on the conference
call about the merger
of Get Active and Convio, because I was curious, and I wanted to find
out what the lessons are in terms of both open source options, as well
as openness of data. I was pleasantly surprised about how much was
talked about in both of these realms. If this had happened a couple of
years ago, I doubt much would have been said.
On the call: Gene Austin: Convio, Sheeraz Haji: Get Active, Tom
Crackeler: Get Active, Dave Crooke: Convio
They talked about being excited by the openness of the Get Active
architecture with Get Active Extensions - they expect to accelerate the
openness of the Convio architecture. Sheeraz talked about having both
development teams working on opening up the Convio and Get Active
systems and APIs
They seem quite committed to provide openings and hooks into their
applications that allow clients to get at their data. There was quite a
lot of talk about APIs, and integrating the applications with other
applications, including Google. They will use the need to move data from
Get Active to Convio as a way to create ways to create external
transactions and the like that will be opened up completely. Convio uses
Salesforce for their customer relations
management. They are a big Salesforce user, but they haven\'t had many
requests for integration with Salesforce.
A question was asked about open source - whether they were moving in
that direction. David Crooke talked about how they think that open
source is a great model for developing software. Both companies use a
lot of open source components in their development. They think open
source has a lot to offer to the nonprofit sector. They don\'t envision
opensourcing their codebase. The value isn\'t the software, it\'s the
service.
And in terms of integration with open source CMS systems such as Plone
or Drupal, as they develop integration between CRM and CMS we\'ll also
put that in. Talked about Get Active hooks with Plone. They envision
doing more like that. It will never be as tightly integrated as the Get
Active CMS - but they want to make it possible to have their customers
work with whatever CMS they want.
All in all, it was an interesting call. I\'m glad I listened in. It
provokes the thought of a post on \"openness vs. open source\" that I\'m
marinating in my head.
Technorati Tags: crm,
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On 01 Feb, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
One of the things I\'ve always enjoyed about
NTC (the Circuit Rider Roundup as it was
called before that) was the Day of
Service. It was a great opportunity to
work with organizations I wouldn\'t get to work with normally, and,
sometimes, to stretch myself a bit. It\'s a chance also, for a local
group of organizations to benefit from the influx of nonprofit
technology types coming into their locale.
So, once I had decided to go to NTC, I automatically signed up for the
Day of Service. I was looking forward to it.
Then, the day came when the list of projects that one could get involved
with came out - and each and every one of them involved a Microsoft
product - whether it was a Windows network, training in Excel or the
like. The one non-Windows project was MS Office training for the
Mac!
No generic technology planning, no database planning, no open source, no
internet or web anything (1.0 or 2.0). And, since I don\'t do
Windows, and haven\'t used MS Office for the Mac in a while (and don\'t
have it installed on my machine - so I couldn\'t even do a brush up,) I
don\'t get to be involved in Day of Service. I know this isn\'t even
representative of what nonprofits are dealing with right now. Sure, most
of them depend on Windows and MS Office, but they have other wide
ranging needs, like database planning, web sites, etc.
This post, perhaps fits in the \"gripe\" category, although I hope that
no one will take this personally. This is especially not meant as a jab
at Beth Kanter, the wonderful
nptech blogger and all around guru, who\'s been running Day of Service
forever, and does a great job with managing it, and herding the cats
known as nptech folk. I know that she and a lot of people would want a
more broad set of projects available. Perhaps next year?
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On 30 Jan, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'m facing a reality that many people live with every day (like my
parents.) And I thought I could live with it. I thought it would be
fine. I thought ...
What is it? No broadband.
Where I\'ll be living quite soon is in, as some have called it, \"the
land time
forgot\"
- Shutesbury, Massachusetts. It\'s a great
rural town, with not a lot of people (population 1900). But the people
are spread out far enough that neither the cable company, nor the phone
company finds it worth it to install the infrastructure for broadband.
And, cell phones don\'t work there either, so any cell-based broadband
is out, too.
My options seem to be:
- Live with dial-up and wait for the powers that be (Verizon, Comcast,
someone else) to finally offer broadband
- get really sucky satellite
internet at
astronomical prices with long contracts, and very extreme download
limits (possibly too low to even bother with)
- become my own ISP by getting a T1 and sharing it by WiFi or some
other method (if that will even work, given how far our neighbors
are from us.)
So, all I can say is that this seems to be a great opportunity for
thinking deeply about what\'s important to me. There are things I take
so completely for granted, like Skype, downloading big Linux ISOs,
bittorrenting video files, etc. that I won\'t be able to do anymore,
unless I pretty much go with option 3. Options 1 and 2 will limit what I
can do fairly dramatically. Is all of that worth it enough for me? I can
pretty much do any work I need to do with dial up (in fact, satellite
will make things like doing SSH sessions impossible - so that\'s another
mark against it.) I could rent an office in town. I can go to
Rao\'s, or the Book
Mill a few times a week. I could be
patient - waiting for technology to catch up.
As a Buddhist teacher might say: it\'s all fodder for practice. In this
case, practicing patience, and getting used to going to get tea while
websites load.
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On 19 Jan, 2007 By mpm
As part of the Nonprofit Blog
Exchange event
#5,
I\'m blogging about the blog called \"the
fundit\" (I love that name,) which is a
fundraising blog for Canadian nonprofits. Being a real fan of Canada,
this is a great opportunity to learn more about the how that all works
up north.
Her blog is full of concrete tips and resources for people who do
fundraising in Canada. She also has some great links to more broad
topics, which I was glad to read about:
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On 19 Jan, 2007 By mpm
I\'ve been meaning to blog about this for a while, but have gotten
sidetracked.
A while ago, a group of folks got together to create the \"Integration
Proclamation.\" They say:
Technology integration, also called \"interoperability,\" means
getting one program to seamlessly share data with another program --
ie, getting programs to \"talk\" to each other. If you\'re a
progressive, you should care, because \"dis-integration\" is killing
us.\
\
There are a lot of great tools out there for progressives -- email
systems, volunteer databases, donation engines, social networking
tools, the list goes on and on. But because these tools can\'t talk to
each other, we can\'t use them effectively. Ask organizers about their
tech tools, and you\'ll hear the same story over and over: too many
overlapping databases, systems that don\'t work together, hours wasted
importing and exporting and de-duplicating lists. In a recent study
about progressive technology, lack of data integration was cited as
the #1 universal complaint.
I\'m encouraging everyone to sign the proclamation, and, if you are a
vendor or consultant, tell your clients you\'ve signed it, and are
working to make integration between applications a reality.
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On 19 Jan, 2007 By mpm
With 4 Comments
A number of people have written me, and said that they appreciate that
there is a blog with a spiritual take on technology. I initially
intended to do a lot more about that, but got kinda caught up in the
geeky stuff. (I can\'t help it.) But I do want to spend more time
thinking about this issue.
One of the things that I have tried to do with this blog, and will
continue to, is to get underneath the surface issues. Like getting
underneath the surface issues of the recent CRM vendor mergers, or
getting underneath issues relating to open source software. And, like
the tradition that the name of this blog comes from, I want to look at
technology without attachment or aversion - with an openness to
different ways of thinking about, or doing technology in the nonprofit
sector. I don\'t think I live up to that quite as well as I\'d like,
given my preference for open source solutions. (Which reminds me of
what was said by the 3rd Zen
Patriarch - \"The
Great Way is not difficult for those with no preferences\")
But it is all pretty unformed - how do I bring my deep commitment to
spirituality (and, in fact, a commitment that is at the core of my life)
to this work? How do I talk about these issues in a way that people from
all perspectives and traditions can appreciate, from completely
athiestic, to deeply religious? How do I help people to dig deeper into
the core of issues when we usually spend a lot of time on the surface?
These are the questions on my mind, and as I think more, and learn more,
I\'ll write more here. Feel free to comment on things you\'d like to see
me explore, or the kinds of things you\'ve explored yourself.
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On 19 Jan, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I was reading about the GetActive/Convio merger, and I have some
thoughts about it...
It is clear that the CRM/Fundraising space is getting interesting, first
with the entry of Salesforce,
and, now, the mergers of GetActive and
Convio,
and Blackbaud and
Target.
Consolidation among vendors means that some customers will be dealing
with different (and larger, potentially less friendly) entities. It also
means fewer options. On the other hand, perhaps it means that these new,
larger entities can provide services and resources that the smaller ones
could not.
It doesn\'t really change anything. Nonprofits still have decisions to
make about what software to use. And, it\'s still clear that
CRM/Fundraising software is where the money and resources are going in
nonprofit software development. And it doesn\'t change any equations
about whether or not to choose open source solutions - they are still
open, free, useful, but can\'t really compete yet in terms of usability
and functionality in comparison to many of the commercial solutions, and
that will remain so for as long as nonprofits choose to spend money on
commercial solutions instead of pooling resources to collectively create
and/or sustain and improve open source options.
In the final analysis, in the days, weeks, months and years following
these, and other mergers, no fewer people will be homeless, no fewer
women will be battered, no fewer children will be hungry, no less
environmental damage will be done, no more people who need it will get
mental health services. But a few more people will have a lot more money
in their bank accounts. And this, I think, is one really important thing
to think hard about. Are the means that progressive organizations use to
reach their ends truly in line with their mission?
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On 12 Jan, 2007 By mpm
I know you\'ve been waiting for this. Here is, finally, chapter 4. This
book is really good, but it\'s also very slow going. It will take me a
while to finish it, I think. I\'m hoping to really read a lot of it in
the next couple of weeks.
A note, for those of you that don\'t read my personal
blog: I\'m moving on Tuesday, from
California back to Massachusetts - a very long meandering trip that will
take about a month (it\'s a long story - read the
blog).
So I\'ll probably be doing more blogging on my personal blog than on
this blog, just because I won\'t have lots of online time, and I\'ll be
more in a travel mode, than a thinking-about-technology mode. But I do
have a bunch of things on tap, like continuing with Benkler, finishing
my Open Standards series, and continuing the open source databases. I
also have been doing a bit more thinking about what is, in some ways,
the undercurrent of this blog: spirituality and technology. There have
been some interesting ideas marinating, that I\'ll share soon. OK, on to
Benkler...
Chapter 4 is called \"The Economics of Social Production.\" In this
chapter, Benkler is laying out an important argument: people engage with
social production for a variety of motivations, and that it is possible
to generate economically significant amounts of effort with motivations
that are not economic. In addition, the increasing involvement of social
production in market-based business will change the way that business is
organized. His basic argument is summarized as :
\"It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture
through social, rather than market or proprietary relations - through
cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action - that
creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical
culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and
perhaps, a more equitable global community.\"
I think that\'s something we can likely all agree is a good thing.
First, he asks \"why do people participate\" - he talks about the simple
economic models of human motivation - which assume that there are
\"things people want, and things they want to avoid\" and those can be
translated into money - a universal medium of exchange. He explains,
with some great examples, of why these are wrong. \"If you leave a
fifty-dollar check on the table at the end of a dinner party at a
friend\'s house, you do not increase the probability that you will be
invited again.\" He then talks about the importance of social capital
over money: \"If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the
United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm\'s hiring
partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of
cash.\" People would rather participate in some things for social
standing and recognition, rather than money.
He then talks about feasibility and efficiency of peer-based production
vs. market-based production, and comes up with this stunning statement:
\"A society whose institutional ecology permitted social production to
thrive would be more productive under these conditions than a society
that optimized its institutional environment solely for market- and
firm- based production, ignoring its detrimental effects to social
production.\"
His arguments are compelling, and interesting. He then talks about how
social production has emerged in the digitally networked environment,
and the ways in which it has interfaced with market-based production -
using examples such as Red Hat and IBM. And he talks about how the
relationship between users and businesses changes:
\"Active users require and value new and different things than passive
consumers did. The industrial information economy specialized in
producing finished goods, like movies or music, to be consumed
passively, and well behaved appliances, like televisions, whose use was
fully specified at the factory door. ... Personal computers, camera
phones, audio and video editing software and similar utilities are
examples of tools whose value increases for users as they are enabled to
explore new ways to be creative and productively engaged with others.\"
The nonprofit take-away came to mind for me was to think about the model
of nonprofits as passive consumers of software, vs. nonprofits actively
engaged in collaboration in a peer-production environment - they are
more able to define clearly what that software looks like, and how it
works for them.
On to chapter 5...
Technorati Tags: books,
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On 06 Jan, 2007 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Beth
started a cross-blog discussion about tagging and folksonomies, and I
thought I\'d weigh in. Gavin started this all off by posting a good and
interesting set of
questions about
the efficiency of folksonomies.
I\'ll agree with Gavin, that folksonomies sure are less efficient, and a
lot more messy than taxonomies. But is efficiency the most important
thing? And, there is one really big thing that using taxonomies miss,
that folksonomies get: who is doing the categorizing? Taxonomies are
developed by specific people for specific purposes, and as such, are
limited by worldview and perspective. Gavin says: \"I\'d recommend the
wisdom of a few experts within that crowd.\" Good point, except - who
are those experts? What is their worldview, and how does that effect the
taxonomy that they come up with - and how does that determine the effect
of a taxonomy on people who are not the experts?
I think that it is certainly possible to disseminate some guidelines
(that some people will pay attention to) for the use of the nptech tag
that could increase the signal/noise ratio. But I think the larger
question about folksonomies is important: is efficiency all there is,
and in what ways are folksonomies a way for the \"folks\" (rather than
\"experts\") to have access to the process of categorizing their own
content, and content they care about?
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 01 Jan, 2007 By mpm
With 3 Comments
I\'m throwing up my hands. Y\'all will just have to live with
overlapping series. I have too many ideas be sequential. I promise (!)
more on Open Standards and Benkler (actually, Benkler is up next - I\'ve
got two chapters to review).
I\'ve been using databases since I was a grad student in the 80s, and
I\'ve been designing and developing database-driven applications for the
web since 1995. I\'ve been using varied Unix-based databases since then
(as well as others including Access and Filemaker Pro), and most have
been open source.
Although I\'ve been using databases for a while, I\'ve decided that I\'m
going to focus specifically on open source databases for the next while,
and, in particular, the different kinds of open source solutions that
are possible for desktop database systems, or systems that might be
server-based, but need a desktop front end. I\'m particularly interested
in the open source technologies that are coming down the pike that might
bump Access from it\'s perch as general-purpose nonprofit desktop
database king, and that can provide nonprofits with flexible, robust
data management solutions.
So here is my current survey of the landscape. I\'ll be working a lot
with Open Office, and hope to design some screencasts using Open Office
Base sometime in the next few months. I\'m starting this series off with
just a list of the server-based DBMS. I\'ll be talking next about
desktop DB options (which mostly use these as backends,) and then last
about ways to put this all together in an all open-source landscape.
Server-based DBMS (DataBase Management Systems)
- MySQL - MySQL is, I think, the most popular,
and best known open source DBMS. It is cross-platform. It is the
most popular because historically, it has been the fastest of the
open source DBMS, but it has always lagged behind in terms of
ACID compliance and other
features. You can access a MySQL database via many many different
drivers that people have written for just about any programming
language. It is also possible to access MySQL databases via
ODBC (Open DataBase
Connectivity) or JDBC (Java
DataBase Connectivity)
- PostgreSQL - PostgreSQL has always been
my favorite. I\'ve been using it since it was called Postgres95 -
before version 6. (Wikipedia has a great
entry on PostgreSQL,
including some history). PostgreSQL has always been ahead of MySQL
in terms of ACID compliance and robustness, and still is. It lagged
behind MySQL for years because of speed issues (it was much slower,)
but that has changed with the newest versions, such that in fact
PostgreSQL is faster and more
scalable
than MySQL. PostgreSQL is also cross-platform, with binaries
available for Linux and Win32 from
Postgresql.org, and Mac OS via Darwin
Ports. A PostgreSQL
database can, like MySQL, be accessed via APIs written for just
about all programming languages, JDBC, and ODBC (which I have quite
a bit of experience with.)
- Firebird - this is a newer kid on the
block, sort of. It has a very long history, though, since it is
based on Borland\'s
InterBase codebase. It\'s
doesn\'t have nearly the user base, or the amount of available tools
as the others, but InterBase is a pretty interesting product, with
some good features (like a small footprint, server performance
tuning, and a great rollback and recovery system.) It is also cross
platform.
- Apache Derby - a DBMS written entirely
in Java. This project has a small footprint, and is designed to be
easily embedded in other Java projects. It comes with a scripting
language and interpreter, called \'ij\' which is how you can
interact with Derby on the command line. Also, of course, you can
use JDBC is a way to access Derby. I\'ll be doing a fair bit of
experimentation with Derby (\'cause I\'m curious.)
- SQLite - a small footprint C library that
implements an ACID compliant DB engine. It has a command-line tool,
and it is possible to use C/C++ and
Tcl for database access. Unlike
the others, that are released under varied open source licenses, the
code for SQLite is public domain.
- There are a few others (see list
here,)
but they are either research-focused (like
Ingres,) developed very
little, or have small user bases, and seem not relevant to nonprofit
technology.
[Nonprofit technology take home
lesson]{style="text-decoration:underline;"}: MySQL is certainly the
leader - it\'s most commonly thought of as the \"M\" in LAMP (Linux,
Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python), which is a nptech web mainstay. I\'d
argue that PostgreSQL is a better choice, but for most nptech
applications, it doesn\'t matter - what matters is what your
tech/consultant knows, and that\'s much more likely to be MySQL. The
others are most likely of interest to pretty small niche groups, for
specific kinds of projects.
Technorati Tags: databases,
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On 23 Dec, 2006 By mpm
This will be my last post of the year - I\'m off to do some writing in a
totally different genre.
I wish all happy holidays, and a happy new year. When I get back, I\'ll
complete my
series on the
Wealth of Networks, continue the series on open
standards, and
probably start a series on specific open source tools that I use on a
regular basis. (I promise I\'ll try to complete these two before I start
on the next one!) There will also, of course, be more neo-luddite,
curmudgeonly posts on Web 2.0, software development in the sector,
intellectual property, and other thorns in my side.
Angela of Grassroots.org tagged
me, so it\'s my turn to tell 5
things most people don\'t know about me:
- I\'m learning to play the bass guitar
- I\'m learning spanish, because my partner is fluent
- My upcoming goal is to bake all of our bread (I just this afternoon
finished a wonderful Rosemary
Foccacia,
next on my list is challah for next Friday.)
- I am a fan of Pandora
- One of my favorite writers is Sherri
Tepper
So, I\'m tagging Allen Benamer,
Michael Stein (East
Coast), Marnie
Webb, Michelle
Martin, and Jen-Mei
Wu. Have fun!
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On 22 Dec, 2006 By mpm
Here are a few links to round out the year:
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On 22 Dec, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
\<rant>\
Many of you know that I have a real desire to ease nonprofit pain in two
particular areas: vertical apps, and data integration. This simply comes
from my years of working with nonprofits who are struggling with their
data issues, and need good solutions to them.
I just finished reading Allen\'s recent
posts
about the new wave of widgitized donation functionalities that some big
(and not so big) players in the nonprofit
technology web services space are pushing out. Yes, it\'s a good thing
that there are lots of competitors in the field of CRM/fundraising in
general, and a lot of them are doing some really interesting
on-the-cutting-edge stuff, which is great.
What ticks me off is that by far, the richest (and I mean that in many
possible senses) area of software development in the nonprofit sector is
... fundraising. I understand how important fundraising is (especially
now as the coordinator of an organization that needs
money,) but why aren\'t there 5 big companies jockeying for space to
provide nonprofits with reasonably priced, say, client management
packages? Or one of the thirty-five other mission critical tasks that
nonprofits need to do to make the world a better place?
I know, I know, fundraising is one of the functions that almost all
nonprofits share, and it is where the money is, and software developers
have to make a living (er, well, Kintera is making more than a living -
they are maximizing shareholder
profit,) but if just a fraction of
the time, energy and money spent on building CRM and fundraising
software/services (how many gazillion of them are there?) went into
other software and data needs of organizations, I daresay they might not
be in as much of a pickle as they are in terms of making choices about
vertical apps.\
\</rant>
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On 21 Dec, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
This week, I think I learned something about the social networking
aspects of Web 2.0. It came from two different sources -
Ma.gnolia and Linked
In. They both have very different purposes -
I happen to use Ma.gnolia primarily to store my own bookmarks for easy
access, and only secondarily do I use it to share them. Lately, I\'ve
made a couple of interesting connections with people because of my
links.
Linked In is something that I resisted using for years, until it became
clear that a lot of people in the nonprofit technology field are in
Linked In, so it made sense to join that particular bandwagon. We\'ll
see how far it goes, but it has been fun reconnecting with people, and
looking into who knows who.
So I\'m learning, and experimenting. I\'m not sure I\'m convinced of it
all yet, but it\'s interesting. And you can look me up at my Ma.gnolia
bookmarks, and my
Linked In profile.
Technorati Tags:
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On 18 Dec, 2006 By mpm
It\'s the end of the year, and it seems a good idea to post about
what\'s on my agenda for the next year, and what kinds of things I\'ll
be working on, thinking about, and writing about in 2007.
First off, for those of you that don\'t know, I am the new coordinator
of NOSI - the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. I\'ll
be working half-time for NOSI, to start the ball rolling on some
interesting projects on its own, and in collaboration with other
organizations in the sector, including NTEN and
Aspiration, among others, and to raise
money to help make NOSI a sustainable organization going forward.
I\'m also still doing technology implementation work with Database
Designs, and that work will be mostly maintaining
and improving code that I generated before I went on \"sabbatical\", and
increasingly doing more work at a meta level - project management,
training and the like. I\'ll likely have more info on that stuff
soonish.
I also am very interested in doing a lot more writing - the API
whitepaper for NTEN should be out soon, and there
are other things I\'ve got up my sleeve in terms of more concrete
writing - some for NOSI, some just for the greater good. I will be
focusing on open source tools for the most part.
I think it will be an interesting, and exciting year.
I will be blogging a bit more this week, but then I\'ll be offline for
the Christmas week, doing other kinds of
writing.
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On 18 Dec, 2006 By mpm
With 3 Comments
Allen, one of my favorite bloggers (who I only recently started to read,
which is my loss), has a great curmudgeonly post on Web
2.0.
(I consider Allen a fellow neo-luddite, whether or not he agrees with
that characterization.) He then follows it up with a
pointer
to an interesting post on the power consumption of avatars for Second
Life, which should absolutely give everyone pause. I didn\'t even think
about that aspect of it when I wrote my curmudgeonly post about
SL quite a
while ago now.
Holly seems to agree with
him,
although she\'s more of a cheerleader for Web 2.0 than Allen is, for
sure.
What I\'d like to do is unpack Web 2.0, and give nonprofits pointers and
resources around the specific Web 2.0 tools that will actually matter to
them (which, to my mind, is Open APIs and RSS, basically, and maybe some
collaboration tools like wikis, or blogging for some organizations for
whom standing on a soapbox is an important mission-connected activity),
and stop holding it up as a package that is not, as Holly says, going to
be the sector\'s savior.
Let\'s give nonprofits the tools they are really going to use to make
their lives easier, and serve more people. We geeks get to play in the
sandboxes of Web 2.0, or whatever is coming down the pike. And that is
certainly fun.
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 14 Dec, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
As someone who has developed web database applications for clients, I
always hate when they get errors. Things like this make me feel so much
better. Even the big guys, with big budgets, mess up sometimes... It
also means at least these guys are running windows.
{width="136"
height="250"}
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On 12 Dec, 2006 By mpm
One of the things that can make (or break) an open source tool is the
community around it. Just like evaluating a company that releases as
specific application that you are interested in, understanding and
evaluating the community around an open source project can be quite
important.
Seth Gottlieb (a fellow Western Mass person) has a great post on his
blog
about how to go about looking at the communities around open source
projects. It\'s definitely worth a read.
Technorati Tags: community,
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On 08 Dec, 2006 By mpm
So first a note. I\'m again doing this horrible practice of overlapping
series. I know that I haven\'t finished my series on the Wealth of
Networks - but
I hit a snag in reading: my last papers to write for seminary, and
transitions.
So, once the papers are done, and things settle back down, I\'ll plunge
back into Benkler, and keep going.
In the meantime, something that\'s been on my mind for years is the
concept of Open Standards, and their potential value in the nonprofit
sector. I think it\'s a really good topic for a series, because it\'s
meaty, there\'s lots to talk about, and there is some news in that
arena, around Microsoft\'s Open XML standard, which was just approved
by a standards
body,
and Open Document Format, supported by Open Office, and others. I\'ll
talk more about that in part II.
So first, what is an open standard? Wikipedia defines it
best:
Open Standards are publicly available and implementable standards. By
allowing anyone to obtain and implement the standard, they can
increase compatibility between various hardware and software
components, since anyone with the necessary technical know-how and
resources can build products that work together with those of the
other vendors that base their designs on the standard (although patent
holders may impose \"reasonable and non-discriminatory\" royalty fees
and other licensing terms on implementers of the standard).
So what this means is that if a standard is open, it\'s documented, and
anyone can use it to create things. A great example of a standard is
HTML. Any web browser anyone puts
together can render HTML, anyone can write a file in HTML, anyone can
write an HTML editor, and then someone can move that HTML from program
to program. You can write an HTML document in Dreamweaver, then open it
up to edit it in Mozilla, then open it up to edit it in a text editor,
then ...
An open standard (in the software realm) gives developers the freedom to
develop applications that use that standard, and users the freedom to
take their data wherever they want, or move their data from one
application to another freely, because the applications speak the same
language.
So what\'s on my plate for this series? In the next post, I\'ll talk
about the document format war. After that, I\'ll talk about identity
standards (like XDI). I\'ll talk next about microformats, then I\'ll
wrap it up talking about some possibilities for nonprofit focused open
standards (like the seems to be deceased
OPX.)
Technorati Tags: microsoft,
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On 08 Dec, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
{width="200"
height="80"}
I\'ve become somewhat of a Wiki fanatic. Well, maybe not that far - but
I love Wikis. I know I
complained
about the lack of Web 2.0 (including wikis) interoperability lately. But
I have been using Wikis a lot these days, and I\'ll fill you in a little
as to why I think they are grand.
I started using wikis about 4 years ago - when I went to a conference,
and there was a conference wiki, for people to collaboratively take
notes, add their bio and information about their projects, etc. That was
the beginning of my love affair. In fact, I loved wikis so much, I wrote
a wiki module to the now pretty much defunct open source CMS I\'d
written. I\'ve contributed to Wikipedia, and probably about a
half-dozen other public wiki projects. But what I wanted to talk about
here is how I use wikis everyday.
First, I use a wiki pretty much everyday to keep track of some of the
things I need to do. The company that I do my
technology implementation with has a wiki for technical documentation,
and other things that the group needs to keep track of. I keep my to do
list for them on that wiki, so that not only can I edit it, but others
can edit it, add to it, take off things, help me prioritize, etc. (Yes,
I will still complain that it doesn\'t integrate with my other to do
lists, though.) Also, the technical documentation on a wiki is so
helpful, because it is easily editable by multiple people, and we can
see the history of the edits.
The second way I use a wiki very often is in the workings of the
organization I am now coordinator of, NOSI (the
Nonprofit Open Source Initiative.) We have a wiki used just by the
steering committee, with agendas for conference calls, notes for
meetings, ideas, projects, etc. It\'s very helpful to have all of that
information in one place, and editable by the whole steering committee.
I\'ve decided that I like wikis even better than Google Docs for sharing
content with people. Google Docs has it\'s advantages, and it\'s nice
that you can generate a well formatted document when you are done, but
if that doesn\'t matter, it\'s hard to beat a wiki in terms of ease of
collaborative editing. Wikis are light, simple to learn to use, and
pretty easy. And they don\'t need AJAX to make them work well.
My favorite wiki software, I think, is
MediaWiki, which is the wiki that Wikipedia
runs on. My second favorite, is
PurpleWiki, by Blue
Oxen. It\'s got some very interesting
features, and I\'ve enjoyed working with it. I\'ll likely install it on
my own server to play with it at some point.
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 30 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I don\'t really think of myself as a pundit, probably because I am very
willing to admit that I am sometimes wrong. Sometimes I don\'t have
enough information and come to somewhat erroneous conclusions because of
it. So, in that spirit, I\'m eating a bit of, as Katrin called it,
humble pie.
A while back, I had a post called
\"Metaphors\" where
I lamented the fact that there had been a large movement toward using
Salesforce. I questioned the use of
business metaphors in nonprofit organizations (which is still something
I find problematic,) and questioned the use of sales metaphors in
software that nonprofits use.
Well, I didn\'t have enough information. Because I\'m writing a
whitepaper on APIs for NTEN, I had a great
conversation with Steve
Wright of the
Salesforce Foundation, the part
of Salesforce that is giving away their services to nonprofit
organizations. And I learned a lot about what they are doing, and why.
And I think I\'ve realized that I jumped to the wrong conclusion about
the use of Salesforce in nonprofit organizations. It sounds like they
have some pretty interesting ideas about building horizontal platforms,
that, in the end, might benefit the sector more than it detracts,
especially given the kind of resources they have available to them.
So, live, work, talk to people, and learn more. There are some
interesting things brewing in my head about open source and the new ways
that the open source ethos and mentality is spreading faster and broader
than the actual thing itself. But that\'s another post. This is the
humble pie post.
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 28 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 5 Comments
Well, both in the process of learning about all of the very cool web 2.0
apps out there, and beginning to try and use them to create content and
organize my life, I have come to the following conclusion: the apps are
great, but integration still sucks.
First, there\'s the blogging issue. I keep 2 blogs of my own, and
contribute actively to one community blog (at
nosi.net) and could, potentially, contribute to quite
a number of others. I don\'t get paid to blog, so I don\'t really want
to spend my time doing that. And, I also don\'t want to do too much
cross-posting of content. But the community blogs do provide a way for a
wider audience to read the content that I have created. Unfortunately,
the nptech world hasn\'t yet caught on to the \"Planet\" phenomenon of
the open source world (see Planet Ubuntu
Women.) These are sites that are
simply aggregators of the blogs of those involved in a particular open
source project (like, in this case, women involved in
Ubuntu). It\'s a great idea, I think. I\'m
aggregated on live.linuxchix.org - a planet
for those who are involved in Linuxchix. I
think it would be very great to have a few nptech-focused \"planets\"
out there. I think those are better ideas than community blogs - and
it\'s so easy for people to get involved. (Hint to
NTEN: Affinity Group Planets!)
Second, is bookmarking. I now have accounts at del.icio.us, ma.gnolia,
furl, and stumbleupon. They each have their good points and bad,
strengths and reasons I use them (I use furl, for instance, to save
pages I think might go away, or become paid content after a short time
being free.) But I\'m really getting toward the end of doing double or
triple bookmarking. It\'s just so ... painful.
And then there are to do lists. Right now, I am a pretty multi-faceted
person (well, I always was, but right now, I am very much so in
practical terms.) I am working on several projects, both collective and
personal. And I like and use to do lists. But, I have some to do lists I
need to share, and others I don\'t. And, of course, not everyone I work
with is choosing the same to do list or project manager. And even if
they were, they might not integrate well (For example, I use three
different Basecamp accounts - which don\'t
integrate with each other.) Wikis are another great collective to do
list/project management tool, but they don\'t integrate, either.
Luckily, it seems that most of the project manager type apps in web 2.0
land are either using iCal, or integrating with Google Calendar (my
present calendaring software). So that\'s good. But the integration
there even can be clunky. And it\'s one way. I can\'t change a basecamp
milestone in Google Cal, I have to go back to that particular basecamp
account to change it. Sigh.
It\'s a mess out there. Anyone going to help clean up? I\'m getting
tired of wasting more time in front of my computer. I\'m ready to save
time so I can go out in the sun.
Technorati Tags: linuxchix,
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On 26 Nov, 2006 By mpm
Watch this video. It\'s interesting, and should make us think a lot
about why to use open source software.
Thanks to Jon Stahl for the heads
up.
Technorati Tags: economics,
intellectualproperty,
nptech,
opensource
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On 26 Nov, 2006 By mpm
Next week is Ubuntu Open Week,
a series of events and classes about Ubuntu
Linux, and for people interested in getting
involved in Ubuntu. The events are all on IRC (Freenode). I\'ll be
sitting in on a few, I\'m sure, mostly for curiosities sake. Ubuntu
seems to be becoming the linux distro of choice for a lot of people, and
so far, it\'s my favorite. Using Red Hat, as I often do sometimes, feels
like doing battle in comparison. Ubuntu took the best that
Debian had to offer, and left the weaknesses
behind, I think.
Anyway, I think it\'s worth checking out.
Technorati Tags: linux,
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On 20 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 5 Comments
I have, for a while, maintained accounts on just about all of the IM
protocols out there (AIM, ICQ, Jabber/GTalk, MSN, Yahoo) mostly because
there are some people that I know who are on one of the less used ones
(like Yahoo or MSN). And most of my work colleagues use AIM or ICQ, if
they are on IM. Lately, however, I\'ve been noticing that a lot of
nptech folks use skype possibly exclusively. I like Skype, and certainly
the ability to actually talk with people is really useful (I have both
SkypeOut and SkypeIn as well.)
So, is this a trend? What are people\'s opinions on using Skype vs.
other IMs? Do you mostly use Skype to IM or actually talk? Inquiring
minds want to know.
Technorati Tags:
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On 19 Nov, 2006 By mpm
Here are some tidbits from the open source world that might be of
interest...
- Sun makes Java open
source.
This is a big one. A few components (like the compiler javac, and
others) have been open sourced under the GPL, with the rest of the
SDK to follow next year. Find details at the Open JDK
Project.
- Make has a
kit
for an open source mp3 player. Yes, open source hardware. Cool!
- This is old news, but I\'m finally getting to understand it. Some
really big 800-pound gorillas (Microsoft and Oracle) are bullying
their way into the open source sandbox. The Oracle issue is much
more straightforward - Oracle unveils \"unbreakable
Linux\" -
providing support for Linux that severely undercuts Red Hat\'s
support prices. There are some interesting theories afloat about
this one (a ploy to then do a hostile takeover of Red Hat?) The
second was the deal with Microsoft and
Novell. Basically, they
have agreed to collaborate on technologies and support. Here\'s the
kicker. Novell is paying Microsoft basically protection money.
Microsoft agrees to give Novell customers indemnity against any
patent or IP challenges. Eben Moglen thinks that this deal will be
dead in the
water
because of the GPL 3.0. I\'m not so sure, since no software project
has to choose to adopt 3.0. It does mean that there will be a lot to
watch in the next year or so.
- After you camp
out,
and fend off the violent
hordes
to get your Sony Playstation 3 - you can boot linux on
it.
- Watch this documetary on Net Neutrality:
Technorati Tags: java,
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On 16 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I bet you thought I\'d stopped reading? Or given up? Nah. It gets chewy,
for sure, but it feels like every chew is worth it. I\'m reading this
book at the same time as I\'ve been working on the Nonprofit Open
Source Initiative. I\'m realizing that all of the
justifications for why I am so into open source and free software is
right here in this book! So here\'s the summary for Chapter 3.
Chapter
3
is a discussion on Peer production - it talks about how it is that
people have come together to collaboratively create software and content
- basically, knowledge production. A salient quote:
... the networked environment makes possible a new modality of
organizing production: radically decentralized, collaborative, and
nonproprietary; based on sharing resources and outputs among widely
distributed, loosely connected individuals who cooperate with each
other without relying on either market signals or managerial commands.
This is what I call \"commons-based peer production.\"
He talks about three examples which have become classic - free/open
source software, SETI\@Home, and
Wikipedia. He spends a fair bit of time
talking about the Wikipedia model, and how, basically, amazing it is.
The important point is that Wikipedia requires not only mechanical
cooperation among people, but a commitment to a particular style of
writing and describing concepts that is far from intuitive or natural
to people.
He then spends some time making clear how the new networked environment
makes peer distribution possible. Napster and and it\'s follow-ons are a
prime example:
What is truly unique about peer-to-peer networks as a signal of what
is to come is the fact that with ridiculously low financial
investment, a few teenagers and twenty-something-year-olds were able
to write software and protocols that allowed tens of millions of
computer users around the world to cooperate in producing the most
efficient and robust file storage and retrieval system in the world.
He then talks about something that I find really interesting, and
hadn\'t fully understood until I read it: why the radio spectrum was
regulated in the first place, and why now, regulation is basically moot.
It\'s really worth a read.
In the next
chapter,
he will talk about the economics of social production, and the
motivations behind peer content creation.
Technorati Tags: media,
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On 15 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 3 Comments
One of the things I really like about the nonprofit technology community
is that there are so many women involved. There are lots of women on the
varied lists I read, there are nonprofit technology organizations that
have lots of women leaders, and all of that is great. But then, there is
the little secret (well, it\'s not so secret). When you look at systems
administrators, or coders, or net-heads ... the women kinda vanish.
When it comes to conversations about things like the innards of APIs
(REST or SOAP?), why Ruby on Rails rocks (or doesn\'t), what\'s a good
alternative port to run SSH, when we\'re going to implement IPv6 or ...
there\'s a whole lot of testosterone, and not a lot of estrogen hanging
about. So where did the women go?
As someone who was a real rarity in my early years (how many African
American women neuroscientists have you heard of?) I didn\'t ask this
question too often (it would just depress me.) But as I re-enter this
field I love, I can\'t help but think about this question again.
This is why, by the way, I love hanging out with
Linuxchix. This community has been around
for a while, and its full of women who know their way around a linux
kernel (some of them even get paid to hack it,) and can answer just
about any question on Apache mod_rewrite I can come up with. There are
some really great men who hang out too, who don\'t mind being around a
bunch of geeky women.
So maybe, we can get some Linuxchix to get involved in the nptech
community, and we can get some nptech women who might be a little shy
getting their toes wet with technology installing linux and writing
code, with Linuxchix support, and have some nice synergy.
Technorati Tags: linux,
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On 09 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 3 Comments
This is
great.
It\'s the announcement for NTEN\'s video/mashup contest. You gotta watch
the video!
Technorati Tags: nptech,
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On 09 Nov, 2006 By mpm
I\'ve been asked by NTEN to write a whitepaper on
APIs, following their Open API
debate.
I\'ve been learning about some interesting examples of the use of APIs
in nonprofit organizations, as well as learning what vendors (both
proprietary and open source) are thinking about the issue. I\'m looking
forward to getting into the meat of the writing. It\'s funny, I write a
lot here on my blog, and I forget how much I enjoy technical writing (or
semi-technical, in this case.)
In the process of reinvigorating the NOSI (Nonprofit Open Source
Initiative) website, I took a look at the
Primer on open source software I wrote
eons ago in Web time. I think it needs some updating, but it\'s actually
still pretty relevant. That\'s a good thing.
If you have any API wisdom, examples, strategies, what have you, that
you\'d like me to hear about, please drop me a
line.
Technorati Tags: nosi,
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On 02 Nov, 2006 By mpm
With 5 Comments
I like Gmail, like a lot of people. I decided to give Gmail a whole
month of my total attention. I forwarded all of my mail to Gmail, and
used only Gmail for about a month. I dug all of that AJAX goodiness. And
now, I\'m going back to the Mac OS X Mail.app.
Mail.app has it\'s drawbacks, but the filing mechanisms that I\'m used
to (nested folders) work so much better for my brain and work than the
label system that Gmail uses. And, OK, I\'ll admit it, I\'m not liking
so much some of the ads that have showed up next to emails from my SO,
or my friends. Who wants advertisements for cough suppressants, or sleep
aids, or ... well, you can guess.
Mac OS X Leopard is supposed to include a major upgrade to Mail.app. So,
perhaps some of my issues with it will be dealt with. Who knows.
Continue Reading
On 30 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 4 Comments
This Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
has given me a chance to read some blogs I don\'t usually get to read,
since I\'m so often focused in the tech field. All of these articles
were interesting and thoughtful. It\'s really nice to learn more about
what people are talking about.
And in realms more familiar:
Continue
Reading
On 29 Oct, 2006 By mpm
Chapter 2: Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation
This is a really interesting chapter, where he lays out the basic
economic theory behind information production. He basically starts out
with asking what is the most efficient way of producing information, in
the sense of the greater good. Basically, the most efficient for
society\'s greater welfare is if everyone gave information away for the
cost of distribution only. He says that the standard reason why people
say that exclusive rights are important is that this will encourage
information production and innovation:
\"In order to harness the efforts of individuals and firms that want
to make money, we are willing to trade off some static inefficiencies
to achieve dynamic efficiency. That is, we are willing to have some
inefficient lack of access to information every day, in exchange for
getting more people involved in information production over time.\"
This is, in fact, a critical issue. He further says:
\"If information producers do not need to capture the economic
benefits of their particular information outputs, or if some
businesses can capture the economic value of their information
production by means other than exclusive control ... the
justification for regulating access by granting copyrights is
weakened.\"
He goes on, in a variety of ways, to show that both of these things are
true.
He talks about quirks of information production, and the concept of
rival vs. nonrival goods. A rival good is something that if you have it,
I can\'t - if I want one, someone has to work to get/make it. Food items
are rival. Cars are rival. A nonrival good is something that both of us
can have at the same time, without any additional labor or resources.
Electronic information is nonrival - it\'s marginal cost (cost after
initial production) is basically zero. Because of this, there in fact
might well be negative benefit to copyright, not positive benefit. In
fact, he shows that the data shows that there is a decrease in
information production with increasing patent protection. This is
because the cost of more information production (which, of course, is
based on previous information production) increases with patent
protection and copyright.
He goes into a very interesting discussion of the matrix of strategies
of information production: Rights-based, Nonexclusive-market, and
nonexclusive-nonmarket types of production. He then discusses the
strategies of each: like the Romantic Maximizer film director who sells
work to a \"Mickey\" like Disney, or the \'Jane\' (he uses Joe, but I\'m
taking liberties) Einstein sitting in her basement coding, releasing her
software via copyleft to a Limited sharing network.
He then talks about these different types, and the revenues that they
actually get that depend on copyright protection (not a whole lot.) He
then says:
\"The difference that the digitally networked environment makes is its
capacity to increase the efficacy, and therefor the importance, of
many more and more diverse, nonmarket producers falling within the
general category of [Jane] Einstein. It makes nonmarket strategies -
from individual hobbyists to formal, well-funded nonprofits - vastly
more effective than they could be in the mass-media environment.\"
What I took home from this chapter are two things: 1) in effect, in this
networked environment, copyright and patent protection are, in fact,
counter to the greater good of society (I knew that one already - but
it\'s nice to have economic arguments to help) and 2) There is a lot of
potential that is available to be harnessed from people who are doing
things for a wide variety of reasons. Stay tuned for Chapter 3.
Continue Reading
On 27 Oct, 2006 By mpm
Next week, the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants
is hosted here! I\'m behind - I was supposed to tell you about this
a few days ago! (I have a sort of good
excuse.)
I don\'t have a theme - please send me your best stuff! You can email
them to me. Because I\'m delayed, you
have through Sunday evening. I\'ll be posting the Carnival on Monday
afternoon.
Continue Reading
On 20 Oct, 2006 By mpm
On my regular blog, for reasons that are mostly historical, there is
tag-team blogging going on between me and a fellow religious blogger by
the name of Scott Wells. The issue is -
using used laptops with Linux (specifically Ubuntu) for cash-strapped
churches or nonprofits. I realized that the series would be of interest
here. So:
- First, Scott starts
off
with the main issue: what kind of laptop would be good for running
Ubuntu
- I follow up with an
answer
sort of from the horse\'s mouth, and ask a follow up question about
how to get people to use Linux.
- He answers my
question
quite deftly, and asks some more questions
- And I follow up with some
details
about why linux is so great for used computers.
We\'ll see how far this goes...
Continue Reading
On 20 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
This morning, I sat in on the \"Great Open API
Debate\"
hosted by NTEN. First off, a tip o\' the hat to
NTEN for organizing this, the participants of the panel for an
interesting conversation, and Mark Bolgiano from the Council on
Foundations for awesome
moderation.
There were four perspectives:
- [For-profit vendors]{.underline} - Tom Krackeler,
GetActive ,
Steve Wright, Salesforce, David
Lawson, Kintera, Dave Crooke,
Convio
and Shaun Sullivan,
Blackbaud
- [Nonprofit vendor]{.underline}
- Nick Ballenger,
Democracy in Action
- [Open Source developer]{.underline} -
Zack Rosen, Chapter
Three
- [Nonprofit Organization Tech]{.underline} - Peter Campbell,
Goodwill
If I was going to complain, I\'d say it was way for-profit vendor
heavy (63%?). It would have been nice to have heard from a circuit-rider
or \"for-little-profit\" integrator/consultant type person, and maybe
another nonprofit type (a moderately tech savvy ED?)
There was also a backchannel chat room, which was really useful and
interesting. (I hope NTEN can post the transcript.)
I\'m not going to go through everything they said at all - I think a
recording will be available on the NTEN blog or site at some point soon,
I expect. But I\'m going to highlight what interested me most, and talk
a little bit about the zen of APIs.
So, first off, one of the interesting things was that there was some
initial differences of opinion as to how to define open APIs, and what
they were used for. There were two different kinds of APIs discussed -
the ones that help organizations with interoperability within their
organizational systems - getting data from one app to another, and using
APIs for things like Google maps mashups. Also, basically, what made an
API \"open\" was that it was free to use, and well documented. It seemed
that only Blackbaud had APIs you have to pay for. The other vendors
either supply their paying customers with APIs, or, in the case of
civicspace, the APIs are, well, free and open, like everything else
about open source. I have to admit that I went into this thinking much
more about the more public types of APIs even though the APIs for
internal data integration has been a real interest of mine, and a real
concern, as well.
Zach brought up an interesting point, and I think it is worth
highlighting. From his perspective (and mine, too) one of the big issues
(as he put it, the elephant in the room) is how open APIs impacts the
business model of vendors. It\'s no secret that some competition for the
vendors comes from open source software, and perhaps that\'s a good
thing - it provides them with the incentive to match features - like
open APIs. One vendor said that very few nonprofits have the resources
to take advantage of APIs. Someone (I think it was Nick or Peter) said
that nonprofits can do more than vendors think they can - so providing
the resources is important.
One of the other key things that I think was important is the sense that
in some way, openness and security are at odds with each other. As both
someone in the backchannel, and a couple in the debate said - security
is important the minute you open one port to the world. You can have
openness and security. I did feel that the vendors had a small
tendency to indicate some concern about security when asked about
openness. That bothered me a bit - they are totally different issues.
So what I got out of this was a couple of key points. This conversation
would not have happened a couple of years ago, and that it is happening
now is great (late, but great.) The sores on my head have only just
recently healed (must have been seminary) from helping a couple of
organizations a few years ago to plan for integrating some of their
internal databases with a big vendor database that-shall-not-be-named.
So I guess I should be happy that there were so many for-profit vendors
at the table, and that this means that it will be easier for nonprofits
to do the kinds of integration between applications that was nigh
impossible a couple of years ago. That\'s good news.
APIs are here to stay. In fact, they are the future. The standards and
technology have matured in such a way as to provide the potential for
real richness in data integration, both inside organizations, between
organizations, and with bigger, broader entities such as Google. The
more that nonprofits understand them as useful to them, and demand them
from vendors that provide (or build) software, the better, as far as
I\'m concerned.
Continue Reading
On 19 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
- For you Windows types, IE 7 is
out, and they
found a
vulerability
24 hours after release.
- Also, for you Windows types, here is a plain english
interpretation
of the Windows
Vista
EULA (End User License Agreement.) How about this one: \"You may
not work around any technical limitations in the software.\" What
else is it that us geeks do? You can\'t play mpeg-4 videos except
under extremely limited conditions, and if you upgrade your computer
more than once, you\'ll have to pay. So if you are a hardware geek,
expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard. And
since they seem to upgrade their OS every 6 years or so ... I have
a suggestion. Get Ubuntu, and have done
already. Notice, I didn\'t say \"get a mac\". You could, and still
be better off. Apple\'s OS is, of course proprietary, and Apple\'s
EULA is a little less evil. And, you can run any windows software
you want on it, at either native speed, or a bit slower in
emulation. But you\'d still have to buy Windows. So you\'d still
have the same problem. But if you really want to have done with
stuff like this, get Ubuntu. It\'s the best flavor of Linux out
there right now in terms of ease of use. (Some think that Microsoft
is abandoning power
users.)
- A company going in the other direction: Eudora is going open source
(no, they are not open sourcing old Eudora code, they are changing
direction to use Mozilla Thunderbird as the underlying technology.)
- There is a new site, called \"Campus
Reader\" which aggregates feeds from
college news sources. I like it. A lot. Anyone for \"Nonprofit
Reader\"?
- Yahoo and Microsoft have Google
Envy.
Is this news?
Continue Reading
On 17 Oct, 2006 By mpm
One of the best parts of Web 2.0 for geeks is
APIs. These are Application
Programming Interfaces, and they are a relatively new part of the way
that Web 2.0 works. Like the freedom that RSS gives to end users in
terms of getting the data that you want in your hands, to read when and
how you want it, APIs give programmers (and, at times, end users) the
freedom to get data from Web 2.0 services, like del.icio.us, google,
flickr, and many, many others, and use and manipulate this data to their
own ends.
One of the best examples of the use of APIs are Google Map
mashups.
These are using data in your own databases, and grabbing maps from
google maps and putting them inside your application. Other examples
include desktop applications that allow uploading photos to
flickr.
Folks at NTEN have been thinking about
APIs,
and will host a discussion about them on
Friday.
I intend to be there, and listen in, and take notes, and post my
opinions about the zen of APIs for nonprofits.
But I have a first take. I think that APIs are an expression of the best
of what the internet is about. The free sharing of information in ways
that allow for new innovation. It allows nonprofits free access to data
that they would normally not have access to (like mapping data), or
would have to pay a lot for. And if nonprofits, in making their own Web
2.0 applications, provided their data via open APIs, it would help other
nonprofits, and the sector as a whole. I have dreams of applications
that combine, say, available bed space in shelters and soup kitchens,
all mapped for people to find. Or any other interesting combination of
things. It\'s all possible if people freely share the data they share
anyway on the web in an API.
Continue Reading
On 10 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
I kept hearing about this book. My friend Katrin over at
NTEN told me about it first, then it kept popping up
all over. The book is \"The Wealth of
Networks\",
by Yochai Benkler, who is a professor at Yale Law School. It\'s
available at that link in a multitude of forms. I have it in nice,
wonderful book form. I like portable that way.
Anyway, I should apologize in advance for overlapping series (or not, I
guess.) I\'m not finished with the Web 2.0 series, but I really wanted
to delve into the meat of this book, and blog about it. I think I\'m
liking the book so much because it\'s an amazing combination of some of
my favorite things: technology, law and economics. (No, sadly, no
theology here, but I could probably find a way to weave it in.)
I\'ll start out with Chapter
1,
which introduces the basic ideas of the book, and the importance of this
particular moment. He lays out the beginnings of his arguments - that
information and cultural production are central to human freedom and
development, and that this new, \"networked information economy\" is
providing a disruptive moment in time, and, with social action, we can
use this new kind of economy to further human freedom, even as other
forces are trying to create systems that will limit it.
He lays out some interesting concepts, things I\'d been aware of, but
not really studied enough to articulate. He talks about how the
motivations for information and cultural production are very often
nonprofit and nonproprietary, and that as the costs of information
production goes down, those motivations start taking the fore - they
become more important. He talks about the ways that a networked
information economy increases autonomy for individuals, and he deftly
answers the critiques of the democratization of information that the
networked information economy provides. And then he lays out the
resistance of actors which he calls part of the \"industrial information
economy\" that are working to limit this broadening effect on autonomy
and freedom. He argues that we are going to have to work for this -
it\'s not going to just happen because the technology provides these
opportunities.
I\'ll be blogging chapter by chapter, probably. They are pretty dense,
although I\'m having a great time with Chapter
2
already - it\'s nice to see empirical evidence for things I\'ve been
thinking for a while.
Continue Reading
On 10 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 4 Comments
I\'m a fan of metaphors. Human beings use metaphors all the time to
understand the world, and to frame it. Metaphors are powerful in terms
of the way we think about things. Think about how powerful the use of
the metaphors around the \"war on terror\" are, and how differently
we\'d think about our world and our life if the prevailing metaphor were
one of \"catching criminals who use terrorist tactics.\"
Software uses metaphors all the time as well. And we all know how
organizations end up reworking their procedures and way of doing things
when a new large software implementation happens. It\'s inevitable.
It\'s impossible to shape software completely to ways of doing that
already exist - so those ways end up being shaped by the software
implemented. So doesn\'t the metaphor used for that software matter,
then, in a nonprofit setting?
One of the big changes that has happened in the nptech space, besides
the ways in which Web 2.0 has clearly changed the nptech providers
community, is the increasing use of
Salesforce as a nonprofit CRM tool. I know
it was sort of in process when I was fading out, but I wasn\'t much
aware of it. When I came back, I was surprised to see how many
consultants and technology providers have jumped on the Salesforce
bandwagon.
Of course, the use of business metaphors, language and procedures in the
nonprofit sector in general is far from new, and it\'s been a trend
I\'ve not liked much. And I know that many nonprofits use software
designed for corporations and for-profit entities, such as Quickbooks
(although I know there is the NonProfit Books variant.) For the most
part, this has been simple exigency. There just isn\'t the number and
richness of nonprofit software options out there that exist in the
for-profit sector (except, of course, in fundraising software, but
that\'s where the \$ is.)
Part of my perspective on this blog is a perspective I take in life: the
means are the ends. If we adopt, in whole, or in part, the metaphors of
the corporate world, whose basic fundamental goal is making a profit,
and use it in the nonprofit sector, whose basic fundamental goal is
making people\'s lives better, does that create a problem or conflict? I
don\'t know how many people have raised this issue, but I think it\'s
one worth raising.
Continue Reading
On 07 Oct, 2006 By mpm
RSS, is, in my humble opinion, a core component of the grease that makes
Web 2.0 move. Open APIs are the second core component, and that\'s next
up in part V (I think, unless something else comes up.) What is
RSS? It stands for
Real Simple Syndication (or, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary
depending on ones point of view.)
I have a number of things to say about RSS. First, I\'ll describe it,
and how it works, and how to use it. Then, I have a very bold proposal
that almost no one will agree with, but I think may, in fact be an
interesting proposal to at least talk about (patience, patience, don\'t
run down to the end \<grin>.)
So, we are in this new milieu of fast updating content - so how do we
keep track of it? I don\'t want to have to go manually through each of
my bookmarked sites to figure out what sites have changed, and have new
content, etc. (although some people do this.) I want to know, all at
once, what\'s new, what I should go and read.
So this is where RSS comes in. When new content is generated (whether
this be a blog, new photos on flickr, new bookmarks in del.icio.us, new
videos on You Tube, etc.) there is a way for those sites to add to a
feed (which can either be a static file, or dynamically generated) that
a \"newsreader\" or \"aggregator\" can read, and tell what is new (what
you have not read). This feed is in XML - which is a not-so-new standard
for self-explanatory information (it tells you what it\'s going to tell
you, then it tells you.) You get that new content by \"subscribing\" to
the content using some sort of RSS reader - it could be your browser, or
a standalone desktop client, or a web service.
So, if you are new to using RSS, the first step is to choose a method of
reading feeds. For a while, I was using a program for the mac called
Newsfire. I tried a number of desktop
clients, but in the end, a web based service worked best. I used
Bloglines for a long time, but I am now sold
on Netvibes. (Moving from feed reader to feed
reader isn\'t too hard, because of the file format called \"OPML\" - you
can export an OPML file from one client, and import it with all of your
feeds to a new reader.)
One of the great things about RSS is that, well, lots of things can be
feeds! I am subscribed to people\'s flickr photostreams and the nptech
tag at Technorati (which is, of
course, itself an aggregation of feeds), as well as many blogs and news
sources. Most newspapers and magazines have one or many RSS feeds to
subscribe to. Many sites allow you to create dynamic feeds from
searches, and you can see what new content that fits that search
criteria becomes available. Google news is a great example of this. You
can do a Google News search on, say, \"Peak
Oil\"
and then you can get, in your aggregator, anything new that is posted
with those terms.This is really useful if you are keeping track of
certain kinds of news.
And there are new kinds of aggregations. Many blogs allow you to add
feeds that end up being blog posts (like del.icio.us bookmarks, for
instance.) And there is an interesting thing called \"SuprGlu\" which
allows you to aggregate as many feeds as you\'d like. (See my
page for an example - it combines both
blogs, flickr, and del.icio.us. It\'s pretty interesting. RSS, and these
kinds of tools create opportunities for communities to create aggregated
feeds, for individuals to put their work together in one place, etc.
RSS is a powerful tool, and it is useful both as an end-user to gather
information, connect yourself to sources of information and people. And
it\'s a very useful tool for nonprofits to get their information out to
their constituents.
So this is where my bold proposal comes in. It might seem too risky or
bleeding edge for organizations to do right now, but who knows. I would
love it if every nonprofit that I got an email newsletter from, or
a request for donations, or a news item about a new campaign or program,
would just stick it into a feed, instead of sending me an email. I
don\'t really want any more emails. I want to go to my netvibes page,
and see, right there \"oh, Move On has a new ad, and HRC is starting a
new campaign and ...\" It would save them money on bandwidth and
expensive email newsletter services. I would get the message anyway, and
I might even be more likely to respond (usually, I get so annoyed about
getting yet another request for money in my inbox, that it goes right in
the trash.)
I know I\'m not very representative of the general population - or even
the population of those people who are donors. A lot of organizations
(especially the big ones) do have RSS feeds on their sites - for blogs,
or news, and such. But I\'ve yet to hear about a concerted effort to
move people from email newsletters to RSS - and that\'s what I\'m
looking for.
I think this is an example, from my perspective, of newer might actually
be better. RSS is an incredibly powerful tool, one that provides more
opportunities for individuals and organizations to gather more
information, and work together. Imagine what a site with the aggregated
feeds of many of the organizations that are doing, say, human
rights work, would look
like!
Continue Reading
On 03 Oct, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Catching up with the
nptech field over
the past few weeks has been a lot of fun. I\'ve even been mentioned in a
few places (including Beth\'s
blog,
and the
blog
I will describe a bit below), which feels good. I\'m glad people are
liking what I\'m saying.
I\'ve added a bunch of new feeds to my netvibes page (I\'ve got a whole
tab devoted to nptech blogs - if you are a netvibes user, or want to try
it out, click
here
to add my tab to your netvibes page.) and I\'m enjoying reading the wide
variety of things people are thinking and doing, and I\'m looking
forward to my minor (or major) forays back into the field. (If you want
any details about what it is I\'m doing with my life, and where it is
taking me, check out my main blog for
that info.)
I\'ve learned about a couple of good nonprofit-related blog virtual
events: the Nonprofit Blog
Exchange,
and the Carnival of Nonprofit
Consultants.
I\'m involved in the Nonprofit Blog Exchange, and I drew one of my
favorite new (for me) blogs: (East coast) Michael Stein\'s Non-profit
Technology Blog. It\'s one of my
favorites because he and I seem to share some similar sensibilities
about technology, but he covers a very different range of issues than I
do - so I get to learn things. He has a interesting, good, and
informative
post
on website accessibility - something that, unfortunately, is something I
haven\'t taken as seriously in the past as I should.
Anyway, I will be commenting on occasion about the nptech field as I see
it now, and how dramatically it seems to have changed in just my year
and a half or so away from it.
Continue Reading
On 29 Sep, 2006 By mpm
So, this blog won\'t be totally technology zen. Sometimes, I\'ll talk
about technologies I think are just cool, and useful, and, well geeky,
\'cause I can\'t help being a geek.
IPv6 is the next generation
Internet Protocol. That is, basically, the addressing system computers
and routers and such use to direct traffic around a local network, and
the internet. IPv4, the last
version, was thought up in the world that existed when PCs didn\'t
exist, really, and no one could even imagine that, well, you\'d want to
give your refrigerator an IP address. It allowed for 4,294,967,296
addresses. Which, on one hand, seems like a lot, but it\'s not, when
every cell phone, PC, router, cable set top box and toaster has one.
So in comes IPv6, a different kind of addressing protocol. It allows for
5×10^28\
^ addresses, which, for those interested, is 50 octillion. It will
likely even manage to make it into space, I think.
One of my favorite people who makes geeky stuff understandable is Carla
Schroeder. She wrote a great
series of articles for O\'Reilly about
IPv6.
They are worth a read.
Continue Reading
On 27 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
When I start out these series, I seem to have an idea in hand about how
to organize them, which, invariably, gets rearranged in the course of
writing. Such is life. I had originally planned to talk about RSS/XML
after tagging, but I decided instead to hold off on that as a start on
the posts about the inner guts of Web 2.0. So, here\'s the post about
Blogs, and their follow ons: podcasting and vlogging.
Blogging is old hat. I\'ve been doing blogging for almost 4 years now. I
wrote a blogging module into my web database project, Xina, more than 4
years ago. I have pretty much always understood the difference between
blogs and websites - but I recently got a better feeling as I was
redoing my own website. It\'s not so much
about depth and breadth, although that certainly can be a part of it.
It\'s more about the ephemeral versus the enduring. Blog posts get old,
and out of date fast. That\'s part of the point. Websites
shouldn\'t. Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations
don\'t need blogs. But that topic will wait for a few paragraphs - let
me finish my descriptions first.
There has been a lot of talk about nonprofit blogging in the last while.
Most recently, Michael Gilbert pointed
me to a very good whitepaper by
Nancy White about blogs and community. It\'s worth a read. She has some
interesting things to say about the emergent properties of blogging
communities. At this point, many nonprofit technology providers have
blogs, and use them to get their message out (and, I think, create an
interesting community that is somewhat changed from the community I knew
pre-seminary, which was primarily fueled by email discussions.) The
originators of blogging probably thought of it mostly as a way for
people to be able to easily update their websites quickly, and provide
interesting content on a moving basis. I think the community aspects of
blogging were somewhat unexpected.
Their natural follow-ons, podcasting and vlogging are not as ubiquitous,
or as frequently used in the nonprofit technology space. Beth
Kanter has been doing some great
coverage of the emerging fields of blogging, podcasting and vlogging
(she has a fabulous linkroll of blogging how-to\'s on her blog.)
Podcasts are simply audio blogs that were downloadable, and you could
put on your favorite digital audio device (hence, \"Pod\"casting).
Vlogging are video blogs - and they are as simple as a talking head in
front of the camera, and as complex as including animation and other
things.
It could be argued that iTunes made podcasting mainstream. But without a
doubt, YouTube made vlogging, and mass video
creation mainstream. And the major engine that makes these three types
of ephemeral media really work, is RSS, which is the subject of the next
post.
So, now the question - should a nonprofit organization have a blog?
Should staff of a nonprofit blog? Would this help: 1) gain donors? 2)
communicate the message? 3) keep stakeholders informed? 4) provide
collaborative opportunities within, and between organizations?
All of these are good questions, and will be totally different for
different organizations. I can think of two organizations that I\'ve
worked with, which are, in a sense, case studies for why to have a blog,
or not to have a blog.
Organization 1 is a medium-sized mental health organization in a
smallish city in the Northeast. It gets most of its clients by referral,
and just about all of its funding by state or federal contract. It has
really defined policies and procedures. It continues to grow, but is
growing in well-defined ways, that mostly don\'t require communication
with many stakeholders.
So, should this ED start a blog, or should the organization have a blog?
Unless the ED wants to provide some kind of leadership in the mental
health or nonprofit space, this ED doesn\'t need one, and neither does
the organization. The time and effort it would take to maintain a blog
isn\'t going to result in any better accomplishment of mission.
(Actually, they don\'t even have a website. Which is just fine.)
Organization 2 is a small pro-choice membership organization that
depends upon outside funding, has many stakeholders in many different
communities, and provides advocacy and activism nationally. Should this
ED, and/or this organization have a blog? Heck, yes (in fact, it was for
this organization that I originally wrote the blogging module that I
mentioned above.) The time and energy that it devotes to their blog(s)
(yeah, they should probably have more than one) would likely pay off in
the short, and long run.
But there are many, many organizations in the middle of these extreme
examples. Blogging takes time, focus, and energy from someone or
someones. And it only makes sense if the connections that can be made,
the communication channels opened, the voice heard is worth that
investment.
As for podcasting and vlogging. I\'m much, much more bearish on those
technologies (oooh, something I can be bearish about. \<wink>) First
off, both of these (particularly vlogging) take an order of magnitute
more time and energy to produce than a blog. And they likely have an
order of magnatude less audience. I\'d argue that it\'s likely that only
organizations who\'s major focus is technology or media, or who are
large enough, and have enough audience (like an Oxfam, or a Greenpeace)
should tip toe into this territory.
And, I\'d argue, the stakes are higher for an organization than an
individual that starts a blog, or podcast, or vlog, and then decides
later to stop. I think it might be better not to start at all. But it
does require a lot of thought. Look at what organizations like yours are
doing. Look at what kinds of things you can do to your website, for
instance, to create RSS feeds for new content, instead of thinking of
starting a blog.
It is my not so humble opinion that, like many technologies, simply the
presence of them provides pressure for some to adopt them. I\'m an early
adopter, I know - it\'s easy to feel like everyone\'s doing it, and
maybe I should look into it. Or whatever. But like any technology
decision, it requires thought about how useful that technology will be,
and whether, and how, it will serve your mission.\
Continue Reading
On 24 Sep, 2006 By mpm
I\'ve been beginning to think a lot about databases, and where they are
going. I\'ve been using databases now since grad school, and relational
databases for the past 10 years or so. There have been two specific
advances in Web 2.0 that might, in the end, change how we think about
databases.
This is described well in a post on O\'Reilly
Radar,
which describes what Google did when it was creating a new bug tracking
system. They, of course, have the worlds most kick-ass full-text
searching system (I\'m not sure whether that\'s Web 1.5 or 2.0.) So they
combined that system, with specific kinds of tagging and metadata, to
decrease the structure of the database of the bug tracking system - they
were encouraging people to just put in lots of text in a free-form
field.
It made me think - how many kinds of databases that we create and use
could be simplified by adding tagging, and really good full-text
searching? I already can imagine something like an event management
system, or some kinds of content-rich applications that depended upon
highly structured relational schema, that could use this kind of new
idea. Come up with one good full-text and metadata search functionality
(or use someone else\'s) and trim down the time and energy both creating
the schema, and entering in the data, at the same time as you enrich the
content.
I kinda like it.
Continue Reading
On 24 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 9 Comments
After writing my post on
tagging, I got
sidetracked by Marnie Webb\'s
mention
of ma.gnolia, and then went off to investigate,
then decided to write about social bookmarking tools. Ma.gnolia is a
new(ish) social bookmarking tool. There are some interesting
comparison\'s out there - see
Notmyself,
Phil Crissman, and Jeff Croft for a
good review
of Ma.gnolia\'s open API.
First, I\'ll do a quickie review of the social bookmarking phenomena and
why I\'ve been using del.icio.us, and why I\'m switching to Ma.gnolia.
And then, I\'ll ask myself some questions about it.
So, all browsers keep bookmarks - it helps one easily go back to and
find sites that you go to regularly. These days, most browsers have a
nice bookmark bar - that really helps organize sites you visit
regularly. But what about sites people who do the same kinds of work
that you do, or like the same kinds of things that you do? You could
google for them, but wouldn\'t it be great to see other people\'s links
- things they found organically? Also, wouldn\'t it be great if no
matter where you were, you could get to your bookmarks?
So those are the reasons I use a social bookmarking tool, like
del.icio.us. (Here\'s a pretty complete
list of tools
from listible, another kind of social bookmarking tool.) I have to admit
that my reasons have more to do with the latter (getting at my bookmarks
in an organized fashion (i.e. tagged) from anywhere,) but I do like, on
occasion, to find people who are kinda like me, and find out what their
bookmarks are - and I like contributing my bookmarks. Which, in the end,
is why I\'m choosing to switch from del.icio.us to Ma.gnolia. I like the
interface better, and the social part of the bookmarking is actually a
lot better done (they have groups, as well as contacts.)
But some comments on the whole phenomenon. First, the major problem is
that there are, at this point, so many of them, and although many
(most?) of them have open APIs (that is, they allow other software to
interact with them, and grab data, or add data,) they aren\'t really
interoperable (see Marshall Kirkpatricks excellent
post
on issues regarding Yahoo and del.icio.us and other of it\'s
acquisitions - adding another good reason to switch away from
del.icio.us.) In the sense that there isn\'t a way to, for instance, add
the same bookmark to several social bookmarking sites at once (there is,
however, a cool greasemonkey script
that allows you to copy del.icio.us bookmarks to
ma.gnolia.) You basically
have to either decide which site has your loyalty, and then stay with
that one (or spend a lot of time importing and exporting and
double/treble/quadruple bookmarking. It should be interesting to see how
this plays out. del.icio.us clearly has had the lion\'s share of
attention for a while, but who knows how long this will remain.
The next question is, well, how useful is this anyway? In some ways, I
use social bookmarking tools like listible as a more directed google
(I\'ve yet to create any lists). I use furl to
keep pages that have content that I absolutely want to keep, in case the
site goes away (furl could go away, of course, so maybe I should save
that stuff to my hard drive - they have a cool export feature.)
Bookmarking saves me time, for sure. But it\'s also true that a lot of
the \"social\" in social bookmarking has been more of a time suck than a
time saver.
But, as I\'ve said, it\'s not all about efficiency. Does it really
connect me to people? Sometimes, but not generally. In general, at least
del.icio.us\' focuses more on the metadata aspects of the social part of
social bookmarking (centered around tags). Ma.gnolia seems better.
We\'ll see. But in the meantime, social bookmarking tools are I think a
useful part of Web 2.0.
Continue Reading
On 21 Sep, 2006 By mpm
The first set of new technologies that I\'ll talk about that are part of
Web 2.0 is something called \"tagging.\" Tagging isn\'t really a
technology at all. It\'s really a new method of keeping track of
metadata. It is a key part of all of the best Web 2.0 tools out there
which are about collaborative content creation, like
del.icio.us, flickr,
listible, and others.
What makes tagging special, I think, is that the tags chosen are totally
up to the user. And that helps to create what are called
\"folksonomies\" -
collaboratively created categorizations of information. This is in
contrast to most previous techniques of categorizing data - some
individual or organization came up with a way to categorize things, and
individuals had to conform to those categorizations. Folksonomies are
the result of many individuals choosing, with or without influence, tags
to use.
Many nptech (the favored tag for the Nonprofit technology community)
folks have talked about tagging and folksonomies, and there are some
interesting projects afoot (keep track of the
netsquared project - it\'s all about Web
2.0). I think the activity around tagging has mostly settled down -
tagging has become mainstream, and part of everyday tech life.
From my perspective, tagging is one of the most important new features
of Web 2.0. It promotes democratic, collaborative content generation,
and makes it easier to find information that you want or need, based on
the way that you look at things, not based on someone else\'s way of
categorizing information you need to learn. It connects people. I love
following other people who use some of the stranger tags that I\'ve come
up with - it turns out that a lot of their bookmarks are useful to me.
I do think that like all technology - tagging has it\'s limitations.
It\'s not going to change the world. Tagging is, in the end, about
bringing people together, and empowering people to be creative. The
results of that creativity might be, well, not what you\'d
hope. But it is one of the
things that has made Web 2.0 head and shoulders better than Web 1.0.
Continue Reading
On 18 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 8 Comments
Yes, I promise, the post on tagging and folksonomies is coming. But
first, a great example of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 - I wanted to talk about
Google Analytics. I found this by
way of one of my favorite new blogs,
Lifehacker. Lifehacker is great, and shares
some of my ethos about technology. They had a link today to a great
page: how to dissuade yourself from becoming a
blogger.
It\'s funny, and appropriate. I think some nonprofits should read it.
Anyway, being a poor student, and having a few extremely low-traffic
sites, I figured I\'d stick with Site Meter,
which seems to be the best of the free site analysis tools. It gives you
all of the necessary stats: page hits, visits, referrers, some nice
geographical info, etc. Google Analytics is also free. You can follow 10
sites instead of one. And it does all of the same stuff, except better.
And you don\'t have to have that silly cube graphic in some far corner
of your site. (Some of what Analytics does I don\'t even understand
yet.) And in terms of interface, it blows Sitemeter out of the water.
Continue Reading
On 09 Sep, 2006 By mpm
I liked doing the Intellectual Property
series in the
earlier incarnation of this blog. Writing a series I think gives me the
space and time to think about particular technology issues in way more
detail than I can in one post, and Web 2.0 is a big enough topic that it
really lends itself to a series. So this is the beginning of a series of
posts on Web 2.0. What I\'ll do in these posts is first explain a bit
about one particular aspect of Web 2.0, and then talk a little bit about
it\'s implications in the nptech field, and then my own view of it from
the neo-luddite perspective.
Before I plunge in to talk about the individual parts of Web 2.0 that I
will highlight, I\'ll give you a short definition of what Web 2.0 is.
The Wikipedia entry on Web 2.0
is quite good, so if you want more detail, certainly go there. But I\'ll
give you my quick definition:
Web 2.0 is a series of innovations in web technology that have come
together in unexpected ways, to change the experiences that people have
in using the internet, and has made it much more deeply a many-to-many
experience, rather than the more one-to-many experience it had been
before. The technologies generally connected to Web 2.0 include,
depending on one\'s definitions, many new kinds of communities such as
MySpace and Flickr,
blogging, podcasting and vlogging, tagging and folksonomies, RSS feeds,
content rich web applications using technologies like Flash and Java,
open standards and APIs that allow seamless connections between
different web applications, new kinds of user interfaces using
AJAX, and
different design aesthetics. Hallmarks of Web 2.0 sites include a
democratic approach to content, organization by tagging, and new, much
more flexible and intuitive interfaces.
At this point, I use Web 2.0 applications every day. I blog, I use
Flickr, I search blogs using Technorati, I
use del.icio.us and tag my links, I contribute
content to a number of sites, including H20
Playlist. I think Web 2.0, like it\'s
version number suggests, is a much richer, more rewarding experience
than Web 1.0 was.
And, I think that there is a lot that the nptech field can get from
using Web 2.0 tools - since in many ways, the most important aspects of
Web 2.0 are about empowerment of individuals, and connecting people to
each other by the content that they create, or are interested in. But
there is a lot of hype regarding Web 2.0, and I want to talk about that
hype, and talk about the possible pitfalls of jumping on the Web 2.0
bandwagon. Jumping on any technology bandwagon has its pitfalls, and
this one is no different.
So, what\'s on tap?
First up, after this post, will be an investigation tagging and
folksonomies. Then, I\'ll talk about RSS and XML. These are, I think,
the two most important aspects of Web 2.0 in terms of their positive
impact. I\'ll then talk about blogging, podcasting and vlogging, which I
think are probably the most hyped, and potentially least useful for
nonprofits to jump into without a lot of thought. After that,
I\'ll go under the hood, and talk about things like open APIs and AJAX.
Continue Reading
On 06 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I came across, in my catching up period, an article titled \"Ten ways
to change the world with Web
2.0\"
It\'s actually a great article, by Marnie Webb of
Compumentor, who I think thinks cool
thoughts, and does cool things.
I got on Beth Kanter\'s case a
while
back,
when she was posting about \"Tagging for social
change.\"
One of the things I said to Beth was:
I have to admit to some hesitance even thinking about a phrase like
\"Tagging to make social change.\" There is no question that
technology in general has created sea changes in the ways in which
organizations get and use information, reach donors and constituents,
create campaigns, etc. But I think the jury is still out, at least
from my perspective, on whether or not this sea change in
communication has actually resulted in very much on-the-ground social
change. Are there actually really any fewer homeless people? Did
MoveOn actually manage to help elect someone more progressive? Is the
environment any cleaner?
I do think the jury is still out, and I think that using language which
raises expectations about any one single new technology (like Web 2.0)
is not a good idea. Yes, let\'s talk about how Web 2.0 is doing a great
job at bringing people together in ways that are new for this newish
media called the internet. But lets not fool ourselves into thinking,
without proper evidence, that this is going to be any more effective
than lots of old technologies non-profits have been using for years.
Continue Reading
On 04 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 1 Comments
One of the nice things about catching up with the field is that you get
to aquaint yourself with people who you\'ve just heard of, but never
met. This includes the \"East Coast\" Michael
Stein. (I have worked a little with
the \"West Coast\" Michael
Stein.)
He has a great post about interruptive
technologies,
like phones, text messaging on phones, and IM. He says:
Observing my response to these two items helped me understand the
Amish response to the ubiquitous telephone. I\'m never without my Treo
Smartphone. But I wouldn\'t
[dream]{style="font-weight: bold; color: rgb(102, 0, 0);"} of
answering it during dinner, and I often let it go to voice mail during
the day. As my coworker Krista says - \"the phone ringing is an
invitation, not a command. \" People talk about \"disruptive\"
innovations - seems to me the mobile phone as a highly
\"interruptive\" technology that needs to be controlled. Unlike email,
for example, that you can check when you are ready to.
It is a set of interesting questions. I am much better at not answering
my cell phone when I don\'t want to, than I am at keeping my IM off when
I want to concentrate. But I like that idea. To some extent, it is true
that interruptive technologies like IM and cell phones do increase my
tendency toward multitasking in a way that probably leads to less
awareness, not more.
Michael Stien might not like being called a \"neo-luddite\", but my
definition is anyone who asks questions that potentially makes us think
about our assumptions about technology, and it\'s present course.
Continue Reading
On 03 Sep, 2006 By mpm
For some of you, this is old news, but in the process of catching up,
this came to my attention. Last year, several of my classes in seminary
used Blackboard, which is the major player
in the e-learning space.
In the patent office\'s completely non-infinite wisdom, they granted an
extremely broad
patent
to Blackboard for e-learning. This means that it\'s competitors, which
include both commercial as well as open source software, are
theoretically in violation of those patents. And they are beginning to
sue.
There is a really good
review,
with lots of great links, on O\'Reilly
radar.
So what\'s the problem from my perspective? I\'ve talked about patents
before
in this blog (in it\'s previous incarnation). My perspectives haven\'t
changed much. Education is not a luxury, to my mind. I\'m not especially
a fan of Blackboard, but what\'s true is that it was helpful for the
courses I was involved in. And, further, for distance learning, it\'s
essential. The patent office giving Blackboard what amounts to a
monopoly position in the e-learning space is bad enough. Blackboard
choosing to enforce that monopoly simply stinks.
Join the boycott.
Continue Reading
On 01 Sep, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
It\'s not until I\'ve spent a little time reading a wider array of
nptech blogs that I have realized how much has changed in the last year
or so, since I was last really imbedded in the field. I\'m hoping that
will provide some very interesting things to blog about over then next
few weeks, as I regain my footing.
Obviously, the biggest change is the ubiquitous nature of Web 2.0, and
the ways it\'s made itself into the nonprofit sector. I think that a lot
of Web 2.0, particularly RSS and folksonomies, are aspects of Web 2.0
that are incredibly helpful, and provide things that really do connect
people, and help people decide in a much more granular way what they
want to read, and have access to.
Some of Web 2.0, though is more hype than useful. How many nonprofits
really need to have a blog? Sure, I\'d love to see more nonprofits move
from sending their newsletters out by email, to getting them into an RSS
feed, which I can choose to look at, or not. Otherwise - I think it
depends a lot on the mission of the organization, for sure.
Anyway, I\'ll have more to say about Web 2.0 soon, once I finish
catching up.
Continue Reading
On 31 Aug, 2006 By mpm
Slashdot, in it\'s standard inimical way,
poopoos
parents who opposed giving students
laptops.
Schools giving away laptops are hardly new. It has been considered a
good idea to give students laptops, to give them access to the wealth of
resources available, learn about technology, learn to make ...
powerpoint presentations ...
It turns out, a lot of students spend time playing things like World of
Warcraft, or cruising the net, instead of using their laptops to
actually learn something, like ... powerpoint.
OK, I imagine you are getting my drift here. Does it make sense to give
every student their own laptop? A while ago, it was about getting
students ready for the new workplace (ugh), and bridging the digital
divide (a laudable goal.) Now, in the US, for the most part the digital
divide isn\'t between the economic haves and have nots, but mostly
between the technology want-ers and want-nots.
My suggestion? Something old. Computers in classrooms where they make
sense, and in the library. Provide help to parents who really can\'t
afford to buy their kid a computer or a laptop. Leave it at that.
Continue Reading
On 31 Aug, 2006 By mpm
With 2 Comments
Blogs die, blogs come back, new, different, and informed by experience.
I\'ve lived a year without doing much technology work or being involved
or engaged in the nonprofit technology field. I\'ve lived a year
thinking about spirituality and religion, reading sacred texts, and
living and talking with people whose lives are centered around the
divine, and the heart. I\'ve lived a year knowing that the most
important thing in my life is my connection to the divine/ultimate
reality/my highest self. I\'ve had a benefit of distance, as well as the
benefit of a year of thinking about what\'s really important to me in
life, and what I think is important in the world as we are going to
enter some difficult times.
So what is this blog going to be? Think of it as a place where you\'ll
hear hard questions asked, assumptions questioned and technology trends
dissected. A place where technology is more about connecting people,
than making work more efficient. Where technology is more about making
our lives more interesting and creative, instead of making a buck. And,
because of that, it will be a place where you\'ll hear that it might
just be better to sit in a room with people than send them email. Or it
might be better to throw a fundraiser instead of putting a button on
your website. Or better to get up out of our chair, instead of sitting
in front of a screen. A place where the default is slowing down, not
speeding up, Staying still, not upgrading, a place where less is more.
I\'ve been an early adopter pretty much my whole life, and I have spent
an inordinate amount of time in front of computer screens. And part of
what you\'ll hear here is me asking questions of myself. Why is it that
I want X that new technology gadget with five gazillion cutting edge
features? Why is it that I read fifty gazillion blogs in a day? What
does it add to my life? What does technology really add to my life?
I hope that it will provide, at least, some food for thought.
Continue Reading
On 25 Aug, 2005 By mpm
I heard the announcement about Google\'s
Talk, and I did a quick perusal
of the website, and saw that they were only going to release a Windows
client, and I decided not to bother with it. First, I was annoyed, as
usual, with Windows only clients. And then, based on what I\'d read in
the mainstream press (I actually only read one article in the LA times
last weekend,) I figured that this was going to be too little, too late,
even for Google. But then, I then found out from another
blog that
the protocol Google talk is using is Jabber!
For those of you who are not familiar with Jabber, here\'s their good
basic info page.
This changes everything. Jabber is an already established open
protocol, that has been a favorite of geek types for a while. There are
multiple clients available for all platforms. There are all sorts of
cool ways that developers can extend this.
I am connected with Google Talk (talk.google.com) using my Mac OS X
iChat client and my gmail username.
It might take a while for it to take hold, and take over AIM, which,
from what I can tell, is the most popular IM system, but it was an
incredibly smart move for them to do this - it also allows them to do
very interesting things with gmail, and google itself, with the kind of
interoperabilities they are building.
Google will take over the world. I just hope they don\'t become like
Microsoft in the process. They seem to have been making the right steps,
keeping things open each step of the way, unlike MS, which is the king
of closed, non-interoperable, non-standards compliant development.
Continue Reading
On 18 Aug, 2005 By mpm
Here are a few tidbits I\'ve come across in the Intellectual Property
arena in the past few days.\
\
Downhill Battle, which is an
organization people interested in the whole \"copyfight\" issue should
know about, has a new project, called Participatory
Culture. They\'ve just
released a beta version (sorry, Mac only, for once) of a new platform
for internet video, called DTV. This is very cool. It makes finding
channels with interesting video easy, as well as making channels easy.
It\'s definitely a thing to watch. It might indeed make vlogging a lot
easier as well. I\'m looking forward to the Crooks and
Liars channel! I\'m going to watch this
pretty carefully.
There is a very interesting PDF floating
about with a powerpoint
presentation by the CEO of the RIAA about the copyright/filesharing,
etc. issue as they see it. Uck.They still don\'t get it. But I guess
they won\'t, given their position.
There is a new, interesting project under Creative
Commons license. It\'s called
Orion\'s Arm, which is a huge collaborative
science fiction world-building project. It looks pretty amazing - and a
great testament to what open source licensing can do for creative work.
Continue Reading
On 17 Aug, 2005 By mpm
With 2 Comments
I\'m trying Ubuntu Linux on an old compaq
laptop I have (and brought with me to California.) It\'s an old Compaq
Armada (m300) that I bought used last year, and weighs about 2 pounds
without the accessory bay. It was pretty cheap when I bought it, but it
must have cost a fortune when it was new. I\'ve installed regular
Debian on it, plus a couple of versions of
Fedora.
I\'ve been hearing all sorts of good things about Ubuntu, and I figured
it was time to try it out. Here\'s my basic experience and review of it.
The most recent version of Ubuntu is 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog). You can get
it from their download page.
They have regular ISOs, bittorrent files,
and jigdo files. They\'ve got some good
mirrors, because the regular ISO download isn\'t too slow.
I am intimately familiar with Debian, and Debian installs, but I\'m
going to write this as if I wasn\'t - I think that would make it the
most useful.
The first part of the install process (basic configuration, partitioning
and base system install) is very straightforward - there were few
choices to make, the hardware was detected flawlessly, and the install
went easily. I kinda went away after the first reboot, and was greeted
with the login screen when I came back. No intervention was necessary.
Easier install than Windows, I think.
A few things were a bit odd - for example there wasn\'t a request for a
root password - the default root password seems to be the same as the
password for the single user account that was set up during install.
Gnome is the default desktop, and the only one
installed by default - I\'m a KDE fan. I switched
my desktop environment in a way that I\'m familiar with (install the kde
packages, then change the default desktop manager in /etc/X11.)
Kubuntu, which is the sub-project to bring
KDE to Ubuntu, seems really nice - and if I\'d read the Kubuntu page
first, I would have had an easier time switching to KDE.
The basic add/remove applications interface is nice, and the advanced
panel has everything. The configuration editor is not really intuitive,
but for those who don\'t like the command line, it\'s an improvement
over basic CLI configuration.
All in all, I\'m pretty happy with Ubuntu so far - the ease of install
and configuration, matched with Debian\'s ease of software update, etc.
We\'ll see how it works when I try to set up development environments
(both Postgres/Perl and Ruby for Ruby on Rails) but I can\'t imagine,
given the Debian base, that I\'ll run into trouble.\
Continue Reading
On 10 Aug, 2005 By mpm
With 1 Comments
Since I\'m travelling, I haven\'t had much time to think in depth about
much of anything. However, in my snippets of time reading my blogroll,
there are a few technology snippets that I\'ve come across that are
interesting.
Beth Kanter has been
investigating
vlogging
- that\'s video blogging. It\'s pretty interesting - and I imagine that
once high bandwidth connections are truly ubiquitous, vlogging might get
pretty popular. But the barriers to entry are pretty high. I\'ve done a
little video editing, etc. myself, and the time and energy it takes to
do it well is pretty daunting. I think I\'d be lucky to get one or two
vlog entries a year actually done. More power to Beth, though! And great
to start thinking about this new technology and how nonprofits might use
it. I also have been watching her
coverage of
Blogher - something I just learned about, and
sounds really interesting. I wish I\'d known about it sooner.
There are rumors that
Palm is going to move off of the Palm OS platform, to possibly to
Windows Mobile. Case in point - the new Treo 670 has been seen running
Windows Mobile.
Anyway, this is all rumors and innuendo, but the truth is, if Palm moves
to Windows Mobile, I hate to say it, but I dump Palm. Sad but true.
I\'ll hold on to my Treo 650 until it falls apart, then figure out what
to do next.
Unintended consequences: The new energy bill has in it a change in the
daylight savings
time,
which hasn\'t changed since 1987. So there are a fair number of devices
that have programmed in them the old schedule. I imagine this will be
worse for devices not connected to the internet in any way. Could have
some interesting side effects.
I\'ve been pleasantly surprised in my travels how much I\'ve been able
to use wifi, most places. Most of the chain motels are sporting Wifi,
tons of cafes and the like are, and even rest stops seem to have wifi. I
think the days of ubiquitous Wifi are coming. The question is,
ubuquitous free? Will that grow, or will it move to become ubiquitous,
but you pay for it? Not clear yet.
Continue Reading
On 10 Aug, 2005 By mpm
OK, this is great. At the same time as the patent office is granting
business method patents that everyone knows have tons of prior art, they
are busy rejecting trademarks, based on who knows what, exactly. Case in
point: the organization \"Dykes on
Bikes\" was denied a
trademark
of their name because the word \"dyke\" was vulgar. Nevermind that dykes
have used that word in a positive self-affirming way for 30 years now,
and there is tons of evidence for that. (I mean why call your
organization by a name if you didn\'t think it self-affirming??)
LawGeek
has a nice little rant on the issue - much more in depth than I could
provide. Boing Boing also has a
post on
this.
So when is the USPTO going to get their act together? I\'m not holding
my breath. I think what I might be waiting for is for the whole system
to fall in on itself.
Continue Reading
On 28 Jul, 2005 By mpm
I just found this very cool tool, called
MacStumbler. It\'s a wifi network
sniffer. It will tell you what networks are around, and whether they are
open or not, and what\'s their strength. It\'s useful to troubleshoot
home hotspots, and find ones out in the world.
So I\'m sitting at my now most favorite free wifi hotspot (Bart\'s in
Amherst
- it\'s quiet and easy to find an outlet) and I happen to be looking at
MacStumbler at the same time as a bus drives by. The busses around here
are called PVTA - for Pioneer Valley Transit Authority.
Anyway, as the bus rolls by, I see \"PVTA_0333\" come up on the
MacStumbler, then leave! Yeah, really, really! It reminds me of the time
a friend of mine and I were driving to Rhode Island on the highway. I
had her laptop open, and I saw a \"Ford_F350\" network come, and go.
There is something called a \"Stomp
Box\" - a wifi hotspot
connected to a cellular 3G network. I think it\'s a great idea for, say,
an RV or something. But a car? Hmmm.... So when does this become
ubiquitous? Maybe faster than we think.
Continue Reading
On 27 Jul, 2005 By mpm
David Geilhufe has a new post on his
blog,
entitled \"Social Source Socialist?\" It raises an important issue, and
I\'ve been wanting to talk a bit about the ways in which open source
software in the nonprofit space is related to our economic system. This
is pretty airy-fairy pie-in-the-sky stuff, but why have a blog if I
can\'t do that?
The nonprofit sector (often called the \"Third Sector\") is primarily
(although not exclusively) geared toward the betterment of human lives.
The \"First Sector\" (or is it the \"Second Sector\"? I never know.)
which is capitalist enterprise, is primarily (although not exclusively)
geared toward maximizing profit. It is true that this sector provides
some betterment of lives based on employment, but as we\'ve seen lately,
this tends to mean paying as many people as little as possible, leading
to their need of Third Sector services. The real betterment of lives
this sector provides, at least in the last 20 years or so, has been the
very few at the top.
One of my pet peeves, over the time I\'ve worked with nonprofits, is the
extent to which they\'ve incorporated business (that is, capitalist
enterprise) processes and ethos into their operations. I have to say
that one of the most disheartening and troubling things that I come
across is nonprofits that see other nonprofits as their \"competitors.\"
How is it that nonprofits \"compete\" to better all human lives?
Doesn\'t this detract from what the core ideals are? I understand the
reasons that this happens - decreasing revenue, and competition for the
same private donors, foundation grants, and government grants. But I
wonder if it is really necessary as many nonprofit \"gurus\" say it is.
It has always been my argument that the way an organization does its
work is as important as the work it does. Corporate practices
(competition, resisting unionization, efficiency as means of maximizing
revenue, etc.) are usually not consonant with the goals and ideals of
most nonprofit organizations.
So this leads me back to software. How could changes in the ways that
nonprofits look at the way they do their work, and where they get their
software change the kinds of software they use? If nonprofits thought
differently, more collaboratively, a natural outgrowth of that would, I
believe, be collaborative IT projects, leading to the kinds of economies
of scale that large nonprofits (or corporations) can achieve. And it
might lead to rethinking the use of closed-source commercial software in
favor of open source software that can benefit the commons, instead of
the few.
David says:
\"Shouldn\'t technology enable nonprofits to do more and to do it more
effectively? Restricting nonprofit use of fundraising tools (through
expensive proprietary software licenses) limits the number of people
nonprofits can engage, the volume of donations nonprofits will receive,
and ultimately, the universe of people nonprofits can help.\"
I couldn\'t agree more.
Continue Reading
On 21 Jul, 2005 By mpm
First off, this post is in honor of the EFF
Blogathon. Read all about it. I\'m
hoping that by writing this series, people who haven\'t been aware of
these issues become more aware, and understand the stakes involved.\
In the first
part
of this series, I talked about my perspectives on open source software,
and it\'s position in the whole intellectual property debate of our
times. The second
post
was about the evil of patents. This third post, I want to talk about the
issues of intellectual property and creative work.
First, though, some background on my own \"vested interests\" (or, more
honestly, lack thereof.) Although I am a published poet and author
(that\'s a stretch - I\'ve written some articles that have been
published in edited volumes, journals and a magazine few have heard of,)
and I occasionally make music (that\'s a real stretch,) I\'ve never made
a dime off of my creative work. I have made many dimes from my creation
of software, but that was part one. So, for some, this does not make me
one who should say much about copyright of creative work. But, I\'m
going to plunge in anyway.
And, also, in internet parlance, IANAL (I Am Not A Lawyer). I am
fascinated by the law, and read about the law, but I\'ve never been to
law school. Copyright law is a pretty obtuse field, and I don\'t even
begin to pretend I know it. What I\'m going to talk about, though, is
broad brush issues. What does the current landscape in copyright law
look like, what are the issues arising, and who benefits from the
current system, and who could benefit from a system that is more open.
Right now, creators of creative works are protected by copyright for
their lifetimes, plus 70 years. So many works will be protected for 100
years or more. (Most work that was created prior to 1923 is in the
public domain.) Copyright
means that no one can take the work, whole or in part, and reproduce it
without the consent of the copyright holder. Also, no one can produce
derivative works without the consent of the copyright holder. Copyright
is granted automatically when a work becomes tangible - but it is up to
the holder of copyright to enforce copyright. (Some links are at the end
of the article.) There are exceptions, called \"Fair
Use.\"
So what\'s up now? Why is this such a huge issue, and what\'s at stake?
Very simply, technology. It all started with the Xerox machine, the
audio cassette deck, and the VCR. These technologies, and the
technologies that have followed (computers, scanners, DVD recorders, MP3
players, software for ripping CDs, etc.) have made copying creative
works trivial. At this very moment, if I wanted to, I could find (and
download) most of the music that has been recorded in the last 20 years
or so, most of the movies, quite a number of books (text or audio),
etc., and pay not a dime, except the cost of bandwidth and storage,
which is minimal, compared to the cost of buying all of that content.
Of course, I\'d be infringing on the copyright of all of those copyright
holders, which, for the most part, are record companies, publishers, and
movie studios, all of whom have big bucks, and all of whom are extremely
unhappy at the current state of affairs.
Now I\'m sure some of you reading this remember the brou-ha-ha about
cassette tapes, and how that was going to spell the end of the music
industry. Didn\'t happen, did it? And VCRs were going to spell the end
of the movie industry. Not
hardly.(In
the end, they benefitted from it mightily.) Now, of course, Napster\'s
progeny (currently named bittorrent) will
spell the doom of both the music and movie industry. I have my doubts
about that, too.
But they are very busy making their case that they will be done in by
this technology, and, because they have all sorts of money on their
side, they are getting heard in Washington (as well as Silicon Valley -
more on DRM
later.) The most important law that bears upon this is called the
DMCA (or Digital Millenium
Copyright Act.) This was a very broad law, that basically criminalizes
production of technology that makes it easier to infringe on copyright,
and increases the penalties for copyright infringement on the net.
There is a fascinating example of the new ways in which technology can
be used to create and disseminate content in ways that, although
violates present copyright laws, in fact hurts no one (and might be
argued would help the owners of the copyright.)
In 2004, an artist named DJ
Dangermouse created a mix
of the Beatle\'s \"White Album\", and rapper Jay-Z\'s 2003 \"Black
Album,\" to create an album called the \"Grey Album.\" It was only
available as a bootleg, since he didn\'t get permission from anyone to
do a mix. The result was amazingly creative, and critically
acclaimed.
Although DJ Dangermouse violated the copyrights of varied owners, it
would really be difficult to argue that the resulting work would in any
way damage those owners of copyright. EFF has a good review of the
legal issues.
Now some people realize that the internet could provide a really great
vehicle for disseminating creative work. (Wow, really? Took them a
while.) Enter ITMS (iTunes Music
Store) and the reborn Napster. These two
sites have different models (ITMS you download a file, and are free to
do certain limited amount of things with it, Napster is a subscription
service. Let the subscription lapse, and your music library goes
silent.) What they have in common, though, is called
DRM, or
Digital Rights Management. One of these days, I\'ll actually spend some
time to write about DRM, because the concept and technology are
interesting, and there are ongoing arguments as to whether it could work
at all. But what the folks who are allowing you to download content for
a cost are doing is hobbling that content in various ways to control
your access to it.
This is a lot like commercial software. You don\'t really own it, and
you are told specifically how you can use it. Who does this benefit?
Like software, it\'s basically the big, powerful people who already have
lots and lots of money. Most musicians and authors, like software
developers, make a living (actually, many don\'t), and that\'s about it.
Some do better, many never make a living.
So, as the content industry (record companies, movie studios and
publishers) move in the direction of disseminating content
electronically, but in ways that strictly control how you can enjoy it,
there is another movement, that is a combination of people who\'ve
learned lessons from open source software, musicians that have always
been friendly to music copying, and content creators who would like to
more directly be in control of their own creative content.
This movement is made up of small, independent music
distributors that allow you to download,
sample and/or buy MP3s (sans DRM) online and creative authors licensing
their work with open source-like
licenses, allowing you to create
derivative works from their own work. Let me talk about why I think this
model, rather than the model being fostered by the RIAA and MPAA works
in everyone\'s interest (er, except for people who want to make oodles
of money off of other people\'s work.)
1) Creators of content can choose how and when to disseminate their
creative work - they can choose someone to help them promote it, or not.
2) As happens often, word-of-mouth and freely released copies of content
and derivative works actually increase the interest (therefore revenue
generated) in the creative work. Here\'s a new
example. And here\'s
another, from a sci-fi author.
3) Consumers of creative work get maximal control of how they can use
the content they have obtained (either for a fee, or for free).
4) Authors of creative work can be inspired to create new work based on
the work of others, taking it in directions that are unpredictable, and
potentially very interesting (like the Grey Album, except in this
scenario, DJ Dangermouse won\'t get ceast-and-desist letters.)
I think this is a much better model than the model that only lets you
play music you bought on pre-approved devices, only read a book you
bought on your desktop computer, and not also on your laptop and
palmtop, and continue to pay a fee for music, and if you stop paying,
you lose the music. I can\'t believe that most consumers will put up
with this for a long time (although I have been
amazed
before about what consumers will put up with when it comes to
technology.) It will be interesting to see how things finally shake
out.\
Links:
- basic copyright
FAQ\
- wikipedia entry on
copyright\
- EFF on DMCA\
- ALA\'s guide to the
DMCA\
- Creative Commons
Blog-a-thon tag: EFF15
{width="105"
height="40"}
Continue Reading
On 21 Jul, 2005 By mpm
I hate spam. I always have. But lately, I don\'t have to deal with much,
which is true for most people. Between server-side bayesian filtering,
and client-side filtering, only two or three spam messages gets into my
actual inbox everyday. Very nice.
But now, it appears that spam is making it\'s horrible way to the web.
The first I heard of this was the blogs (on blogger, mostly) designed
only to be created to manipulate search
engines.
Now, there is a trend in domain name
hosting.
People will register a domain, test it for traffic, and use it only to
deliver Google or Yahoo ads. If that domain can generate one or two
dollars more than the cost of the registration, then they keep the
domain. If you do this for thousands of domains, this can generate
thousands of dollars in revenue.
I imagine that, like bayesian spam filtering, tools like
del.icio.us and other collaborative bookmarking
tools will mean that people will come across those blogs and domains
less and less (and thus not make them cost-effective,) but in the
meantime, we have spam to deal with.
Continue Reading
On 18 Jul, 2005 By mpm
With 4 Comments
As I\'ve stepped out of the direct role of being a nonprofit technology
consultant, I\'ve realized that it is giving me a chance to see things
from a bit of a different perspective. I\'ve been faithfully following a
number of recent discussions on nonprofit
blogging,
social bookmarking, new
and exciting
tools,
and the like. I\'m having fun reading all the great posts on the blogs
of friends and colleagues whose opinions I value highly (like Beth
Kanter, Deborah
Finn, Jon
Stahl, Katrin
Verclas, Art
McGee, David
Geilhufe, Marnie
Webb and others) that I didn\'t have time to read
before. This is all very cool, and makes the geek part of me happy. I\'m
beginning to wonder, though, what is the role of the \"über\"
consultants, as I\'ll name them (us? do I qualify?)
I spent a lot of my time as a technology consultant helping nonprofits
see the value of open source software. For the first few years I was
doing this, I would use the words \"open source\" and I\'d see this
glazed, distant look in their eyes. They had no idea what it meant, why
it was important, and how it could help them. For the most part, my
clients were doing really, really well when I could get them to remember
to test their backups, run virus protection, and troubleshoot why the
printer doesn\'t work.
I can guarantee you that if you said the words \"nonprofit blogging,\"
\"RSS\" or \"social bookmarking\" to your average E.D., or even CIO/CFO
you\'d see that same glazed distant look. I spent a bit of time recently
helping my congregation migrate their website (since I, the major
webmaster, was leaving to go to seminary), and they were grappling with
issues that we\'d been hashing out oh, 3-4 years ago, when we first
started talking with organizations about CMS vs HTML.
Does this mean we should stop talking about all of those cool new things
happening in webland? No, not at all! There is a lot for all of us to
learn with these new tools and ideas, and adding them to the nonprofit
technology toolkit is a great idea. And disseminating those ideas to
people who are in a position to use them is important. But I worry
sometimes that we (I include myself in this, for sure) are acting a bit
too much like the hare, and not enough like a turtle booster. \"Slow and
steady wins the race.\" Nonprofits still struggle with data management
issues, the sector still struggles from lack of standards, there is
still an amazing lack of inexpensive, good, solid software for nonprofit
mission-critical tasks.
Continue Reading
On 18 Jul, 2005 By mpm
This is incredibly
cool.
I don\'t know if it\'s true, but I like it. A lot. If true: get an intel
Mac, run Mac software, Windows software and UNIX software (via X
windows) too. Wowie Zowie! Not only a geeks dream, but a very nice
solution to all sorts of problems.
Via
digg.
Continue Reading
On 17 Jul, 2005 By mpm
With 5 Comments
Today, in the New York Times, there is an
article
(reg. required), that talks about how people are throwing away their old
PCs, in an effort to rid themselves of spyware, viruses and the like.
\"throwing out a computer \'is a rational response,\'said Lee Rainie,
director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project...\"
A rational response?? Rational would be to wipe Windows and replace
Linux. Rational might be, like the woman pictured, throw away the box,
and get a Mac (or, for the brave, you can wipe windows and put Mac OS
on the same
box).
I can\'t quite believe we have gotten to the point where people are not
only willing to put up with the viruses and spyware, but are willing to
go out and buy another Windows machine! Microsoft, who makes a decent
amount on each purchase of a Windows machine, must be jumping for joy.
They are entering the anti-spyware business, and, of course, they will
\"not [be] providing protection for people who have earlier versions
of the company\'s operating system.\"
First off, MS entering the anti-spyware business is kind of like a
vendor who sold you locks that are incredibly easy to pick, coming in
and saying they\'ll clean up after the mess created by a break in (for a
fee, of course). And, if the mess is too much, they\'ll sell you more
locks!
How long are people going to put up with this nonsense? And how long are
nonprofits, where every dollar spent on new PCs means a dollar that
doesn\'t feed someone, or give someone services, or pays for medicine,
or an activist on the hill, going to put up with this?
Continue Reading
On 14 Jul, 2005 By mpm
This is a very cool tool, discovered via my buddy Deborah
Finn.\
\
H2O playlist is basically a way
to share lists of content about a specific topic. It\'s a great way to
create syllabi and other teaching resources that others can share. I can
think of a number of ways this would be useful. In some ways, why not
just create your syllabus on H2O playlist, and use that as a way to
share it with your students? Once lots of things start to get
characterized (I was amazed to learn that, for example, the Tao Te
Ching was already on quite a
number of playlists.)
And, the ability to make RSS feeds out of playlists, new playlists, etc.
is fascinating. And, like wikipedia, the more people that use it, the
more useful it is for everyone - so I beg to differ with Deborah - use
it! (I\'m creating a playlist now on the progressive religious
movement.)
The one odd thing - just about all of the playlists that I\'ve seen so
far either have 5 \"bulbs\" of influence, or none. So I think the
algorithm for figuring out influence needs some tweaking. :-)
Continue Reading
On 14 Jul, 2005 By mpm
Why on earth did they pick the most obnoxious, polluting, gas guzzling,
view obstructing vehicle possible to promote their new version of
Windows
Automotive? I
guess it\'s in character.
\
Via Engaget, of
course.
Continue Reading
On 27 Jun, 2005 By mpm
The supreme court handed down a unanimous ruling in Grokster v.
MGM. I\'ll be
talking more about it later, once I read and digest everything (I\'ll
make it part of the IP Part III post I\'ve been promising.) But
beforehand, here\'s BoingBoing\'s
post on
varied coverage.
Continue Reading
On 26 Jun, 2005 By mpm
My colleague David Geilhufe, with whom I\'ve spent many an hour
discussing open source software issues, just posted on his blog, Social
Source Software a
post
where he begins to lay out his vision for the open source ecosystem in
the nonprofit sector.
I especially like the different perspectives on effective and affordable
software from the closed-source vendor vs. open-source vendor
perspective, and I look forward to hearing more.
Continue Reading
On 25 Jun, 2005 By mpm
I came across an amazing tool connected to the social bookmarking tool
del.icio.us. It\'s called del.icio.us
direc.tor. It is rather
amazing. Here\'s a screenshot of what it looks like for me:
{width="300"
height="154"}Basically,
it takes your tags, and organizes the bookmarks according to their tags.
This is very, very cool.
There are details on how this works (via XML, XSLT and Javascript). It
only works in Firefox and IE, it doesn\'t work in Safari (here is what
the author of this tool has to say about
Safari.)
It makes me want to bookmark and tag just about everything I come
across, though!
Continue Reading
{.post-icon
.standard}
On 24 Jun, 2005 By mpm
OK, first, I lied. I\'m going to talk about patents before I talk about
copyright and copyleft of creative content.
As I said in part
I
of this series on intellectual property, I am not a purist about open
source software, and you\'ll find out in part III, I\'m not a purist
about copyright and copyleft of creative content, either. However, when
it comes to patents, I am a purist. In my opinion, patents are wrong,
and even more so in their current implementations. Patents and patent
law is complicated, and many people think that it\'s not relevant to
their lives. Nothing could be farther from the truth.\
Patents on things like business methods and software methodology are at
the very least annyoing, and limit creativity and innovation. Patents on
drugs, living things and food crops are, plain and simply, evil. And as
far as I am concerned, the baby needs to be thrown out with the
bathwater.
What do I mean by evil? Well, one of these days, on my ministry
blog, I\'ll have
a post on what I think about evil - it\'s outside of the scope here.
Suffice it to say that patents on those things create situations where
wealthy people and corporations hold, in the palm of their hands, the
lives and well beings of the most vulnerable beings on our planet, and,
in fact, profit from suffering. I can\'t possibly think of another word
to describe that besides evil.
Patents have an interesting history, one that I have only a passing
familiarity with. You can find out a lot more in the list of links at
the bottom of this article. Patents are supposed to provide protection
for the inventors of a product, method or process, so that these cannot
be used by others without being compensated. Now at first, this sounds
pretty reasonable. And, in fact, for a long while, it worked fairly
well, and protected inventors from being taken advantage of by big
companies that could manufacture a product and bring it to market in a
way than an individual inventor could not.
But something happened on the way to the forum. Individual inventors
went the way of the dodo, technology changed the face of products and
processes, corporations started filing patents on things they hadn\'t
actually invented, and the patent office went off the deep end (or,
rather, caved in to corporate pressure.)
Let me first start with software and business method patents - things I
know a little bit about, and patents that are more annoying than evil.
As a generic web developer, I am in violation of several patents, just
by doing what I do. It\'s a good thing that the owners of these patents
haven\'t yet decided to go after the likes of me, and that I don\'t
worry too much about it. If I did worry about it, or if they did come
after us web developers, it would absolutely stifle creativity and
innovation in software and the internet. I certainly couldn\'t afford to
pay the fees they would want me to pay.
Let me give one example,
frames. This is
pretty old news. SBC communications owns the
patent on frames, which
is a very common method used in websites. In fact, it\'s quite likely
you visited a site recently that used frames. They\'ve tried to enforce
their patent, and demand fees from web site owners. Now frames is a
standard HTML element, that has been used for years (it was a Netscape
specific extension to HTML 2.0, and became part of the HTML 3.2
standard - which was released in
1997.) I don\'t know what has finally happened to this, but it is a
clear example of a problematic patent. Another example is that Jeff
Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, and owner of the famous \"one click
shopping\"
patent, also now owns a patent on \"Information exchange between users
of different web
pages.\"
This means that, if he wanted to, he could ask for fees for websites
(like this one) that use the trackback technology. Ouch.
Luckily, some in the nonprofit sector are getting hip to the issues
involved in software and business method patents, and see how they could
be detrimental to the sector. Yay for
NIA.
It\'s pretty simple to see how software and business method patents
stifle innovation, communication, and ultimately don\'t benefit the
common good. No, not evil, but certainly problematic.
Let\'s talk about the really bad patents. First, drugs. Drug patents are
designed to allow drug companies time to recoup their R&D costs, by
giving them exclusive right to the drug for a certain number of years.
Right now, drug companies have 20 years from the invention of a drug, to
exclusive use of that drug, before generic companies can begin
manufacturing that drug.
I could go on for days about the fallacies behind drug company R&D (they
spend more on marketing than they do on R&D, and a lot of drug R&D is
funded by the government and private foundations.) But what happens is
that drug companies get to set any price for a drug during the time that
they have exclusive rights to manufacture it. This is why, for example,
South Africa had been violating the drug patents for AIDS drugs, so that
it could get drugs to people who need them (luckily, the drug companies
relented in their fight.)
Amazingly enough, drug companies and
others are fighting
to extend that time. Given the current realities of our health care
system, the more years that a life-saving or quality-of-life-improving
drug can be exclusively marketed by a drug company, means the more
people who will be choosing between living (or feeling better) and
eating or paying rent. And this means that the drug companies are
profiting from their suffering. Now, you might think, the way they talk
about this, that drug companies are hurting. Nothing could be further
from the truth. The drug industry is the most profitable
industry there is.
Now, on to patents of living things. Ever heard of the
OncoMouse?
It is a mouse that was developed to study cancer, and the first animal
to be patented. (The first living organism to be patented was a
bacterium.) There are a number of problems with this patent. First, it
will stifle research on cancer, since the owners of the mouse can charge
fees for research using it. Second, is the basic bioethical issue of the
ownership of a type of living animal, however it might have been
developed. Third is the animal rights arguments - these mice live to get
cancer and die. (I feel torn about the animal rights arguments, but I
wanted to raise them.) These all are good reasons to reject patents on
research organisms.
An extension of the precident for patenting organisms, is the process of
patenting genetically engineered food crops. These crops have been
genetically
modified for
certain characteristics (depending on the type of food.) The genetic
engineering is problematic in the first place (as you can read in that
link above,) and the addition of patents takes control of the use of
food crops out of the hands of farmers, and into the hands of large
corporations.
In third world countries, this risks disaster. All to make money for
people who don\'t need it.
As someone who is deeply concerned about the ways we treat each other on
this little spinning ball we\'re sitting on, the current state of
patents, and the kinds of negative affects it has on people, suggests to
me at least a major overhaul, if not a wholesale abandonment of the
patent system. I wished that more organizations, whether secular or
religious, would understand and embrace these issues, as complicated and
esoteric as they may seem.
One thing I didn\'t say about open source software in part
I,
is that software has become an essential part of the matrix in which we
live our lives and connections with each other. Who controls that
software has an effect on that matrix. We all eat, many of us take
drugs, and benefit from scientific research. Who controls those things
has an effect on our lives, and it\'s time we understood this.
Links:
Continue
Reading
On 24 Jun, 2005 By mpm
With 2 Comments
One thing I haven\'t yet written much about in my blog is intellectual
property issues. I do, in fact care deeply, and think frequently about
them.
Part of my interest in intellectual property issues (the whole range,
from patents, to copyright) stems from my interest and fascination with
the law. Part of it comes from my interest and knowledge about
technology, and how technology has, for many reasons, changed the
equations about intellectual property, and made the whole set of issues
quite a bit more complex than they used to be. And lastly (but far from
least), my interest in intellectual property issues comes from my
interest in the common benefit, collective creativity, and common good
of all human beings.
In this post, I\'ll start with open source software, it\'s position in
the intellectual property realm, and why I think supporting and using
open source software is so important. Part II will focus on copyright
and copyleft, and new ways of distributing creative content (writing,
music, art, video, etc.) and the benefits I think we\'ll gain from it.
Part III will focus on patents, and why I think they are evil (really, I
do.)
Many of you know what open source software is already. For those who
don\'t there is a great wikipedia
article on it (and, why not,
I wrote a
primer
on it for the nonprofit sector.) What open source software introduced
into the world is the idea that you can make software better by having
it open to scrutiny, collaboratively developed, and freely accessible.
What it has also showed, over time, is that it can be a more economical
way for people to take advantage of technology.
Microsoft, and other traditional software makers, make money from
packaging and distributing their software in a form that is unreadable,
unscrutinizable, and costly. They have elaborate EULAs (end user license
agreements) which limit the ways that end users can use their software
(you mean you thought you owned that copy of Microsoft Office?
Sorry to tell you, you don\'t.) The money traditional software makers
make on their products goes to two places: their investors, and back
into more development (to make more money.)
Open source software makers (everyone from IBM and
Red Hat, publicly traded corporations, to
individual software developers) primarily make their money by selling
services and consulting that goes with the software they give away. You
can always get the software free, but if you need or want support, it\'s
available at a fee. Some (especially Linux distributions) do actually
sell their software packaged (but free versions are available). Some
open source software is developed by non-profit organizations (the
Mozilla Foundation, for example,)
which get some funding from fundraising and grants.
There is plenty of evidence, now that open source software has been
around for a while, that it is possible to make money at developing open
source software. I doubt, honestly, that a new Microsoft will emerge
from the open source field. But there are plenty of mortgages are being
paid, families being fed, and retirements being funded.
And what happens to the code? In the case of traditional software
vendors, the code stays secret, stays with them, and no one except them
(or select partners) ever sees it. In the case of open source software,
it stays in public view, downloadable, and modifyable by anyone with the
expertise and interest.
I think it\'s pretty obvious why this is more in the common good. Third
world countries are getting on the open source
bandwagon big time. Why?
Because they can implement open source cheaply, using less expensive
hardware. I\'ve
been
saying that nonprofit organizations should do the same, much for the
same reasons, as well as the additional reason that they support a
system of software development that benefits the common good, which, for
most nonprofits, is what they exist to do.
In some senses, the whole set of intellectual property issues right at
this moment comes down to that one question: who will benefit? As we
heap more and more dollars on people who already have more than enough,
we are also putting in place more and more structures (patents,
copyright extensions, regulations like
DMCA) that keep the copyright holders in
control (who, by and large are large and wealthy corporations) and then
can limit access and use of the software available and keep prices high.
Lest you think I\'m a purist - I\'m actually not. I don\'t think all
closed-source software is evil, and I think that there is no reason that
there can\'t be a healthy mix of open source and closed-source software
in the marketplace. Heck, this blog was written on a Macintosh (which,
in some ways is an interesting mix - an open source core of
BSD-Unix, with a closed-source
GUI, and I\'m using the open-source
browser Firefox.) But many
traditional software makers (unlike Apple, which
seems to mostly feel fine coexisting with it) see open source software
as a threat, and would like it to go away.
What\'s most important, is that I do think that we should, as
individuals and organizations, think carefully and make careful
decisions
about the software we use - right now, it has more impact than we might
think.\
Continue Reading
On 23 Jun, 2005 By mpm
With 19 Comments
OK, so I\'m feeling old today. I just came across a
post
on slashdot, talking about a 1.5
petabyte system. A petabyte is
1,000 terabytes. What\'s a terabyte, you ask? That is 1,000 Gigabytes. I
have about .5 Terabytes worth of storage attached to my computer (500
Gigabytes), and that\'s a lot. Most people are happy with 40 Gigabyte
hard drives.
I remember, somewhat fondly, the old PDP-11 70 that I worked with in
graduate school, back in the early \'80s. It had a 10 MB hard drive,
that required two people to lift and put into the drive bay. I have no
idea how expensive it was, but I imagine it cost thousands of dollars.
Now, a flash drive with 10+ times that will sit lightly on your neck,
and lighten your wallet by a mere \$20.
And there are 1 TB hard
drives
(that\'s 100,000 times that old 10 MB drive) that you can now take away
for a mere \$900, and will sit on your desk.
No wonder people keep talking about how people will stop deleting
things. With tools like spotlight, or google desktop search, you can
find anything, at any time. I have files that I\'ve carried from my
first computer in 1987, that are on my hard drive now. I won\'t be
surprised if I still have those files on my new computer with a 1 PB
hard drive that I buy in 20 years time.
Continue Reading
On 23 Jun, 2005 By mpm
I came across this site called
we-make-money-not-art today,
thanks to BoingBoing (as usual, the some of
the most interesting technology stuff gets posted there first). It\'s
chock-full of interesting tidbits (like the prayer
rug that gets
lighter the better it\'s pointed toward mecca.)
What really caught my eye was a cube that plays
video. It\'s
a new project (just in prototype phase) that sounds really interesting -
make a cube you can easily carry around, with six faces of video on it.
Strange, but interesting.
Might be a neat site to watch.\
Continue Reading
On 23 Jun, 2005 By mpm
I decided it made a lot of sense to divide my blog space, and create a
brand-new technology blog. I\'ll focus on nonprofit technology issues,
open source software, gadgets, useful online tools, and the like.
I imagine my posts both here and on my main blog will be a little less
frequent, since I\'m splitting my time. But it seemed to make the most
sense. So if you are interested in my view/approach/ideas about
technology, this is where to look.
Although I\'m going to seminary, technology is, and has been for almost
30 years, in my blood. I can\'t help it, I think about technology, read
about technology, live technology. So here you can read about
technology. If you have any ideas or suggestions, please feel free to
drop me a line.
Continue Reading
\
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3.0 Unported License.
