Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.