Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

This will be my last post of 2007 - I’m taking some days off from work and blogging, and won’t return until the beginning of the year. First, links for the day:

• High Tech Trash - it’s an in depth photo essay and interactive feature on the National Geographic website. It’s sobering - as much as I love technology, it scares me how much damage it can do to both people and the environment, once we’re done with it, and ready to upgrade to something new.
• Many nonprofits have Linux file servers in their back offices. In a huge agreement, Microsoft agreed to share information about Windows to the Samba project, so that it can keep up to date easily. This was to appease the European Commission. This is great news.
• OpenOffice.org is coming closer to doing PDF import. Happy dance, anyone?

I’ve got a number of ideas up my sleeve for next year for this blog, one of which is to take up the challenge that Beth mentioned, and do 100 posts on something. So next year, I’ll be doing 100 posts on particular free and open source tools.

And now, the top ten posts of the year, according to my Google Analytics stats:

1. Getting Naked: Being Human and Transparent. Hmmm, think it was that keyword? However, the bounce rate on that one was well below average, so maybe not.
2. How do we make change if we keep doing things the same way
3. Platforms Break Open
4. The Search for Good Web Conferencing
5. Open Source Database Solutions, Part I
6. Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants (November)
7. Linux, Ubuntu, Fiesty Fawn and Me
8. Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants (May)
9. Time to find a fundraising solution that can’t be bought
10. Spirituality and Technology

And, just to be fair, the least favorite post is What do you expect from a technology provider? Two whole pageviews. I find that fascinating.

I wish all a holiday season full of fun, quality time with family (chosen or otherwise), and joy.

Today seems to be Asterisk day. What is Asterisk, you ask? Asterisk is the open source PBX application that works by using VOIP. It rocks. I wrote a case study about it in the NOSI primer - it can allow for really great flexibility in building phone systems. And today, I learned about two online tools written with Asterisk, which would have been impossible a few years ago.

Committee Caller seems like an amazing tool. You choose the House or Senate committee you want to call, type in your phone number, and Committee Caller will sequentially dial each member of the committee so that you can leave your comment. I haven’t tried it yet, but I will.

Rondee is a new free conference calling utility, also built on Asterisk,  which has a much nicer and easier to use scheduling interface than Freeconference.com, and some very cool features -  like if you register your phone #, you never need to enter a pin, because the system is smart enough to know what conference call you’re supposed to be on - you’ll just get joined to it. It seems cool, and a great alternative to freconference.com. And it’s free, too. Asterisk made it possible for the company to provide this service without huge infrastructure costs.

I look forward to seeing more of what kinds of new and interesting tools can be powered by Asterisk under the hood. Oh, and did I mention - it works really well as a generic PBX - something lots of nonprofits need.

I seem to have lost my head. Really. I was all curmudgeonly until last week, when I started tweeting and got into Spock. You know why I started to twitter. Ages and ages ago, when Spock was still in private beta, I got an invite, and used it. I was underwhelmed, and forgot about it. Then, last week, I got a request from Beth Kanter and Deborah Finn to join their “trust networks.” Well, I already trust them, so I joined them. I then decided, why not - let’s find out who else is on Spock. So I did the usual, gave up my gmail password.

Turns out, unlike Facebook, or Myspace and such, the “Spock Bot” makes pages for people without their knowing. So people who were in my gmail address book, and in Spock, got a request for trust from me, not knowing where it came from. So, although I can trust Beth and Deborah, it appears I can’t trust Spock.

There have been lots of blog posts about Spock,  mostly negative. I’m hoping that Spock ends up in the dead pool, but who knows.

Then, for the creepy part. I joined Spokeo. Spokeo takes your gmail, aol, or yahoo address book and, looking at a wide variety of web 2.0 communities, from LinkedIn to Flickr to … Amazon.com, keeps track of your contacts content. So when someone in your addressbook posts a new photo to Picasa, or tweets, you’ll know about it. Creepy part: do I really want to know what’s on my ex-girlfriend’s MySpace page? Or that a certain nonprofit Executive Director Dugg a post about starting a video game company? (Although I do have to admit its fun to know what a very old friend is listening to on Pandora.)

What have I learned in all of this? What my colleagues and friends do has influence. I did set a pretty high bar a while back for the next social network I’d join. And what did I do with the influence of colleagues and friends? Walk right under it. This is not at all to blame them, it’s just to state a reality - what other people (those I trust and follow) do matters, and I think it matters for most people.

What else have I learned? Privacy matters. I happen to be someone who has had a relatively high online presence since before the web (remember Usenet?) I’m someone who has, since day one, tried my damnedest (and succeeded 96% of the time) to only say by email, or put up, what I would say in a room full of people. But for a long while, it took a lot to gather all of that information. No longer. The tools are getting better and better, and one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 - the APIs, make it all the more simple to aggregate all of someone’s online content.

I think I’m going to wait at least a few weeks after getting an invite to the next web 2.0 tool to jump in. Or perhaps maybe I won’t even. What a concept. Maybe it’s time to go back to being a curmudgeon.

I feel misunderstood. Earlier this week, I wrote a post on about the NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. I’ve now seen two posts (one from David Gielhufe, and one from Lobo of CiviCRM) suggesting that I dismissed the extremely positive results for the open source CRM tools (particularly CiviCRM) because the sample wasn’t large, or representative of the sector.

The whole point of the post was to crow about how positive the open source results were. But if I crowed about those results, without making sure that people understood that the sample was small, and not representative (which is impossible to argue against) I would be irresponsible. No concrete conclusions can be drawn about overall use of or satisfaction with CRM tools from this survey. It wasn’t scientific, and the sample was about .05% of the nonprofits in the United States (the foundation center says that there are about 1.4 million of them.) How could that be representative?

NTEN did a great job of beginning to approach this topic, and it was great data. To my mind, it bodes well for the open source tools. That was my point.

This is old news, sort of. A ways back, Six Apart promised that it would open source MovableType, their flagship software product, and the software that underlies their TypePad service. Yesterday, they finally released it. This blog (and my personal blog) were on TypePad for years, and I rather like the MoveableType interface and feature set. Their new version, MT4, looks pretty good, and it’s a great thing that it’s now open source (released under the GPL v2, interestingly enough.)

I’m liking Six Apart more and more these days. They are really putting their money where their mouth is, in terms of working toward more openness. They’ve been supporting open standards for years. Had this happened 6 months ago, when I was ready to migrate my blogs, I would have just migrated them to MT4, instead of WordPress. But, that said, I like WordPress, too.

I imagine that this is a bit of a response to WordPress (others think so too.) It will be interesting to see how this all plays out - both are incredibly strong applications. MovableType is written in Perl, which I hadn’t realized until I was doing research for this blog entry. But in any case, it should work on all generic hosting environments, and it looks easy to install. So here’s another good option for organizations that want powerful blogging software to use on a generic (read: cheap) hosting environment. Hurray!

I had a good look at NTEN’s CRM Satisfaction Survey (yippee for data!), and although the sample sizes were small, and not representative of the nonprofit sector as a whole, the people surveyed seemed to like the open source tools available. There were 6 open source (or sort of open source) tools that showed up on this survey. They included CiviCRM, SugarCRM, and vTiger (which is actually a modification of SugarCRM), all with vibrant developer and user ecosystems. The three others are Democracy in Action, which is a SaaS that is open source, CitySoft says it’s open source, but I don’t know whether it is through an OSI approved license (since they don’t say. Taken at face value, CitySoft certainly doesn’t violate the letter of the law, since you can get the source code if you buy their product, but their source code is unavailable otherwise, it sort of violates the spirit of open source.) Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access).

201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. I don’t think that’s possibly representative of the sector (especially since in the survey, the most popular CRM was CiviCRM.) That said, for the most part, except for CitySoft and vTiger, people seemed very satisfied with these tools. CiviCRM was first in satisfaction, SugarCRM, Organizer’s Database, and Democracy in Action were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. That’s pretty impressive. Among those surveyed, 4 of the top 5 tools in terms of satisfaction were open source (or sort of open source) tools. The only other tool in the top 5 was Salesforce. Satisfaction with Convio, Kintera and Blackbaud all trailed these top 4 tools.

We really can’t draw any conclusions from this - the sample size was small, and, as I mentioned, not representative of the sector. But it’s a very good sign that people seem satisfied with the open source tools available for one of the core functions of nonprofit organizations.

LinkedIn, the serious MBA wielding brother to the Facebook fratboy and the MySpace rockergrrl, is really putting on the suit now. They’ve included some new features like a new personal homepage with things like “Company Updates” - news about your company, and other business-friendly features. Also, they have a partnership with Business Week - so you can see how you are connected to companies and indivuals covered by clicking on links.

It all sounds like LinkedIn wants to pull all of those people who have been migrating to Facebook back into their fold, with the idea that LinkedIn is serious about business. It’s an interesting strategy. So, how is this relevant to nonprofits?

I expect that this will enhance the appeal of LinkedIn for nonprofit executives, staff, and consultants for our own networking needs. I think in some ways, this might decrease LinkedIn’s usefulness as a platform for fundraising or constituent-building by nonprofits (it has always seemed less viable for this than either Facebook or MySpace.)

Hat tip to Marshall Kirkpatrick who tweeted about his Read/Write web post (wow, twitter has already come in handy.)

Yes, it’s hard to believe. I succumbed. I have said many times that I wouldn’t Twitter. I’ve critiqued Twitter and social networks in general. So what’s the story? Michelle twittering?

There are a number of factors at work. There seemed (to me) to finally enough interesting people and things to follow on twitter - it began to seem like microblogging was more that just about what kind of tuna sandwich someone was eating (although it sometimes still is that.) There are substantive conversations that happen, and real information gets shared. Since I already was a facebook status addict, once I learned that I could basically make twitter my one-stop status shop (put it in my blog, on facebook, wherever I wanted) that seemed to make sense to me.

But, the biggest reason that I’m twittering is that as the Coordinator of NOSI, I’m experimenting with Web 2.0 in general, which includes Twitter, Facebook, and others - with the goal of crafting a strategy. I think given the audience that NOSI is reaching, and wants to reach, a concrete, well thought out Web 2.0 strategy that includes a whole host of tools, including Twitter, is a darned good idea.

So, if you want to follow me on Twitter, please do.

I’m at the Open Translation event, and we’ve just had a great session on open content business models. It was very useful, and interesting, and gave me lots of food for thought. I’ve been interested in issues of how we sustain open content for a long while. I was the note-taker for the session, and I feel like there are a lot of great ideas out there.

In general, it seems like most models depend on some sort of up-front funding, whether it be an investment or a grant, to fund the initial writing of a large amount of content. The problem of how do you fund the actual writing of content was not really addressed, and I think that is one of the harder nuts to crack. There was one interesting model was asking for pledges, and if the pledges got up to a certain amount, the content would be produced. But ongoing sustainability of already written open content seems to have been at least conditionally solved by a variety of folks in a variety of ways:

• Training and consulting based on existing content
• Generating revenue by doing print on demand, with a markup
• Production of corollary items such as t-shirts
• Hybrid model - most content is free, some content is closed, and paid for
• Advertising on a site with open content
• Corporate sponsorship
• “Robin Hood” models: asking larger Northern organizations to subsidize the distribution of content for the developing world

This is very interesting fodder for my thinking about the puzzle that is how to make NOSI a strong, sustainable organization. The thing we have actually done the most of is write the primer, and I’ve got more ideas for types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these suggestions for business models are quite welcome.