Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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.

• Amy Kinkaid, of Fundraising Breakthroughs, has some great advice about asking for money without shame.
• Generative Transformation talks about what leadership is, and means - particularly that it means self-awareness.
• A Girl’s Guide to Managing Projects has a nice post about what Project Managers do all day, anyway.
• Getting Attention talks about boosting blog coverage - it can have good offline benefits for your organization.
• David Maister asks "What do consultants know?"
• Reasoned Audacity has some good tips on how to prepare for a radio or TV appearance.

And in realms more familiar:

• This week’s nptech tag roundup has some great stuff to read about

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.

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.

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…

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 - Tom Krackeler, GetActive , Steve Wright, Salesforce, David Lawson, Kintera, Dave Crooke, Convio and  Shaun Sullivan, Blackbaud
• Nonprofit vendor -  Nick Ballenger, Democracy in Action
• Open Source developer -  Zack Rosen, Chapter Three
• Nonprofit Organization Tech - 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.

• 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?

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.

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.

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.

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!