Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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.

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.

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, nptech, nten, religion

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, fundraising, nptech, software

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?

Technorati Tags: 07NTC, nptech, nten