Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I had decided, a while back, not to buy an iPhone. Too expensive, for one thing. I like my 60G iPod that I’ve had for a while, and although I tire of lugging around three electronic devices (cell phone, Palm, iPod), and that my current phone is about to fall apart, the cost and the fact that it was so new made me decide not to go for it, even though AT&T is my carrier.

But then,  Apple dropped the price $200, and it made me ponder. But nope. No iPhone for me. Why?

This is why.

I will not be buying an iPhone until they sell an unlocked version that doesn’t need to be hacked to use third party applications. The move of Apple to use software update to break hacked and unlocked phones is somewhat ironic, given the attitude of Jobs toward DRM, and the open source basis for OS X. Jobs understands that DRM doesn’t work, and doesn’t help sell music. He should understand that the same thing is true for iPhones.

The good news is that eventually, hackers always win. A few years down the road, when successive updates of the iPhone get hacked, they will give up, and open it up. And, maybe they’ll even figure out that open will likely make them more money than closed. But for all of Steve Jobs smarts, sometimes he can be pretty dumb.

So what am I going to replace my current phone with? I don’t know yet, but whatever it is, it will be unlocked.

I’m on vacation/fiction writing retreat this week. So, no blog posts from me here until I get back to work on October 1st. But I might write an entry or two on my personal blog, if you’re interested.

You’ve been told that insert_cool_open_source_software_project_here might be the ticket for a specific function or system you’d like to implement in your nonprofit organization. Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. How do you go about finding out whether it’s the right software, and whether the project has a healthy community, since you don’t want to adopt a project that doesn’t?

• Check out the website. Make sure that the features that it outlines there match your requirements. See if they have good documentation.
• Check out the forums of email list archives of that project. How busy is it? How easily or quickly does it seem that questions get answered?
• Look at the “download” page (or “releases”). When was the last release? How much time generally passes between major or minor releases? (Minor releases are, for example, when a project goes from 2.2.3 to 2.2.4. Depending on project, going from  x.2 to x.3 might be a major or minor release. Going to a x.0 release - for example from 2.x to 3.0 is always major.) Rule of thumb: projects that haven’t had minor releases in a year or more are definitely in danger of becoming projects that are no longer under development.
• Look at ohloh.net - they have great info on most projects - how many developers, lines of code, how active development activity is.
• 
• Send queries to nonprofit tech lists for experiences and information, like nosi-discussion, nten-discuss, riders-tech, and others.
• Google it - you might find articles and reviews that might be helpful
• Try it out. These are almost always free to download and try out - this is easier for some projects than others. Luckily, most web project have online demos, which will give you a feeling for the software without having to spend too much time configuring a server or webhost to use the software. Many standard virtual hosts have “one click install” or “fantastico” - which makes it easy to try out some kinds of web applications.

There is an interesting discussion happening between Holly Ross, soon to be ED of NTEN, and Allan Benamer, about web statistics, and whether or not nonprofits should be “transparent” and publish their web statistics. Allan’s argument is that because NTEN is in a leadership position in the field, it should lead in showing transparency by publishing its web stats. And, he thinks that NTEN should be responsive to him, as a member, in asking to publish web stats. Holly’s argument is, basically that web stats don’t equal accountability.

The question I want to ask is, what do web stats really mean, anyway? For organizations, web stats are useful indicators of how many people are being reached by their message, the geographical spread of the visitors and whether or not a specific campaign was successful in driving traffic or creating actions (like donations, or letters, etc.) It is an internal assessment tool which helps organizations figure out what parts of their online strategy are working, and what parts might need tweaking.

As some sort of measure of accountability, raw web statistics (this site got x visits and y pageviews in t timeframe) mean zilch. Nothing. Nada. Just because organization 1 gets 45,000 unique visits per month, and organization 2 gets 3,000 means nothing in relationship to the impact that organization has in the world, or in relationship to how it uses its resources. Organization 1 could be spending all of its money on its web presence, and none on its mission, organization 2 could be doing just the opposite. And the mission of the organization matters too. Even for NTEN, which is extremely web-heavy in its mission, raw visit numbers will mean nothing related to how well it is doing its job.

The idea that web stats = some measure of nonprofit accountability is a result of a mindset that suggests that web presence should be the central part of a nonprofit’s communications strategy, and that raw numbers of visits has some relationship to how well a nonprofit works. For some organizations with some limited kinds of missions, this may be the case. But for the vast majority of nonprofits out there, web strategy is a small part of their communications strategy, and the numbers of people that visit their site bears little or no relationship to how well they do their work, or what they do. And, I actually hope that doesn’t change. I don’t think we want homeless shelters, food pantries, mental health organizations, etc., to care a whole lot about how many hits they got in comparison to similar (or different) organizations. I don’t want to start a race to the top of the Nonprofit 25 - where organizations start spending more time worrying about their position on that list, and less time feeding people.

Allan says:

Granted, web site stats will not tell me anything about how many hungry people a nonprofit feeds. How odd is it then to teach Google Analytics to nonprofit techies but then say that site statistics had nothing to do with a nonprofit’s mission? Why bother having a web site at all? Properly used, web sites are more than just a payment solution for credit card bearing donors. They can be used for a nonprofit’s mission and that is why nonprofits should exercise transparency on web site analytics.

How does giving resources to nonprofits to help them understand how to use web stats to do internal assessment of web strategy inconsistent with choosing not to publish raw web stats? Asking NTEN to show leadership by publishing web stats is to suggest that NTEN would think that publishing web stats is a useful measure of nonprofit accountability. Holly doesn’t think so, and I don’t either.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with OpenOffice.org lately. I’ve been running OOo, as it is often abbreviated, for many years now (I used StarOffice before OpenOffice.org was created.) I have used it everyday, to do everything (all of my spreadsheets, worksheets, articles, presentations, I used it to write a novel, I used it in seminary for papers, etc., etc.,) for at least 4 years. I’ve not owned MS Office in a very long time.

Lately, I’ve been running the 2.3 Release Candidate to help with QA, which has been fun (and 2.3 looks mighty good - especially with the improvements to Base.) I wrote an article on OpenOffice.org for LASA’s knowledgebase, and I wrote another one on Base specifically (Base is the database component to OOo, new in 2.0, and pretty good, and improving fast.) that will be published in Linux Identity Magazine. I hope to start doing OpenOffice.org training soon.

I happen to think that unless an organization has deeply invested in developing custom Access databases, there aren’t too many reasons left not to switch to OpenOffice.org. Actually, even if they have, for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, it’s really great. It’s stable, feature rich, uses open standards, reads and writes MS files, and, did I mention it’s free? No administration fees, no license checking, no running out of licenses for larger organizations, nothin’. Download it and put it on every desktop and get rid of that license manager thingy. In talking with organizations that are using it - adoption issues for staff seem to be fairly minimal (my partner, a non-techie writer, uses it everyday, with no complaints.) Of course, like all open source software, it is “free as in kittens” - but this particular kitten is pretty grown up, and already spayed and litter trained.

So, here’s the great news: Hot on the heels of Microsoft missing the ISO boat, IBM is lending their weight to the OpenOffice.org suite. They are having 35 (!) programmers work on OOo. It’s not only that they are going to be contributing to the project - but remember the old adage “no one ever got fired for buying IBM”? IBM’s reputation is bound to help increase adoption of OpenOffice.org. More adoption means more developers involved, more users helping, more resources available. Outside of the US, OpenOffice.org adoption is growing fast. I imagine that will begin to happen here as well.

(In the spirit of full disclosure: IBM has given grants to NOSI in 2003 and 2007 for the NOSI Open Source Primer.)

An interesting study was released yesterday by an organization called the Computer and Communications Industry Association (with heavyweight members like Google and Microsoft) which shows that fair use exceptions to copyright generate more economic benefit than copyrights themselves. Here’s a tidbit of a Infoworld report about the study:

By one measure — “value added,” which the report defines as “an industry’s gross output minus its purchased intermediate inputs” — the fair use economy is greater than the copyright economy.

Recent studies indicate that the value added to the U.S. economy by copyright industries amounts to $1.3 trillion, said Black. The value added to the U.S. economy by the fair use amounts to $2.2 trillion.

The fair use economy’s “value added” is thus almost 70% larger than that of the copyright industries.

The $4.5 trillion in annual revenue attributable to fair use represents a 31% increase since 2002, according to the report, which claims that fair use industries are responsible for 18% of U.S. economic growth and almost 11 million American jobs.

So, if fair use adds more economic benefit than copyrights - what would open source do? Well, we have some data from Europe:

FLOSS potentially saves industry over 36% in software R&D investment that can result in increased profits or be more usefully spent in further innovation.

ASAY: Importantly, these savings apply to everyone, not merely open source companies/developers. Open source isn’t biased in distributing its benefits.

…• Increased FLOSS use may provide a way for Europe to compensate for a low GDP share of ICT investment relative to the US. A growth and innovation simulation model shows that increasing the FLOSS share of software investment from 20% to 40% would lead to a 0.1% increase in annual EU GDP growth excluding benefits within the ICT industry itself – i.e. over Euro 10 billion annually.

The evidence seems to be growing. At least on a large scale, open is economically better than closed.

Update: Nick Carr thinks the fair use study is “a crock.” He has some good points. 

I have a few little tidbits, each don’t make enough for its own post, so here goes…

• Nicholas Carr (the Rough Type smart dude) tried out Adblock Plus, and has some very insightful comments about it. He even asks “What would Jesus do?”
• O’Rielly has a new online series about Women in Technology, with some really great articles. Worth a read!
• AgencyByte has a great article on how to prevent scope creep.
• Although the breaks I take during my work day don’t look like this, I liked this cartoon.
• I’ve been reading Matt Asay’s blog on open source business models, and he has an interesting post which suggests that writing documentation is a good marketing strategy!
• OK, no, I’m still not convinced, but here’s an interesting take on Second Life from Frogloop. Also, they have a very interesting ROI calculator for social networks that is worth a look.

For those of you that pay attention to open standards, this is old(ish) news. Earlier this week, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, rejected Microsoft’s bid to fast-track OOXML (Office Open XML) to standard status. What this means is that MS will have to take all of the varied input from the ISO bodies, and go through a second vote early next year.

Microsoft thinks that it will win approval, but that is far from clear. (If you read that link, which is basically a copy of a press release from Microsoft, you’d think they had it all sewn up. In fact, that is far from the case.)

Office Open XML is Microsoft’s XML-based file format which is now native in Office 2007. Instead of adopting the already ISO approved Open Document format, it attempted to get through ISO a standard that, among other things, depends too much on non-standard, non-publicly available legacy file formats. Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of an open standard.

Microsoft is in an interesting place with their cash cow, Office. They have increasing competition from OpenOffice.org, Google Apps, and, on the Mac, iWork. A lot of governments are demanding that document formats be open standards, so it is important for MS to be able to get OOXML through ISO.

I’ll keep you posted.

One of the cool things about free and open source software is that often (not always, but often) they provide an open platform for add-ons. As a full-time user of both Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m really enjoying the benefits of these open platforms, and the immense creativity of people who create add-ons. And it’s all free!

A few Firefox extensions that I can’t live without include a new one I discovered recently, called “AdBlock Plus.” This is the best thing since sliced bread. It blocks banner ads, Google adsense ads, stupid dancing aliens for mortgages, etc. I love it. I know a lot of people get revenue from ads, and I sorta feel bad promoting AdBlock, but the truth is, I never click on ads, so no one ever gets any revenue from my actions anyway. It’s nice to have clean, ad, free pages, and especially without the distracting moving ads. Plus, pages load faster without ads.

The other Firefox extension that I use a lot is Google Toolbar. It’s great to have easy Google tools at my fingertips.

For Thunderbird, the two I’ve been trying out include XNote, which is kinda fun, it  allows you to add sticky notes to email messages.

Lightning, which is a Sunbird calendar plug in, that gives me a calendar integrated with Thunderbird.

There are tons of other add-ons for all of the Mozilla Suite applications. I’m trying out some new themes soon.

You’ve probably heard the news, and I’m taking a break from my break to write about it. Convio has registered to go public. This means that the “big three” nonprofit CRM/Fundraising/Advocacy vendors will all be publicly traded companies, and thus completely beholden to their shareholders to maximize profit.

Unlike Salesforce (also publicly traded, where nonprofit paid accounts are a tiny, tiny minority of their earnings,) every single penny of money that these corporations earn come from nonprofit organizations. Thus, every single penny of their income comes from donations that nonprofit organizations raise to, theoretically, fund the missions of their work.

OK, so I’m going to sound like a broken record. But, hey, why not?

How about some community-owned, community-driven free and open source options? How about options where investment feeds back and benefits everyone, instead of a few people? How about bigger bang for the donation buck, where the money that nonprofits spend on CRM/Fundraising apps goes to options that just get better and better - a rising tide that truly lifts all boats?

This is neither impractical nor rocket science. All it takes is leadership, collaboration, and, most importantly, will.