Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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!

Here are a few links to round out the year:

• Laura at Idealware wonders who will pay for Eben Moglen’s first loaf of bread.
• Katrin at NTEN has a great roundup of end of the year posts from the nptech blogging crowd (I’m in it!)
• Beth describes hype cycles - good to think about in the Web 2.0 swirl.
• Michele Martin talks about building nonprofit networks - good info for me right now!
• OpenID is growing in popularity. It’s probably time for me to get an i-name.
• The Queen does a podcast.
• VMWare releases a public beta of Fusion - which is the competitor to Paralells - the software that lets you run PC OSes on a Mac. I’ll be trying it out to compare.
• Nick Carr gives us his top 10.

<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>

Technorati Tags: fundraising, nptech, web2.0

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: bookmarking, socialnetworking

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.

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, web2.0

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.

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, opensource

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, nptech, openstandards, standards

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, wiki, web2.0