Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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.

Technorati Tags: puppy

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:

• Like all of us, she has a bit of trouble with Spam - and gives a great list of tips on how to avoid getting email blocked and relegated to spam jail.
• She has an entry on the Global Rich List - which I hadn’t known about, and which reminds me how incredibly priviledged I am, in a global sense.
• There’s a new Reality TV show about millionaires living undercover as poor.
• And Red is the new Pink in fundraising.

Technorati Tags: fundraising

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.

Technorati Tags: dataintegration, nptech, interoperability

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.

Technorati Tags: spirituality, technology

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?

Technorati Tags: crm, fundraising

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, intellectualproperty, nptech, opensource, peer2peer

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, tagging, folksonomies

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: 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, opensource