Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

This almost feels like cheating, talking about Firefox. Firefox, is, of course, the FOSS application that is on more desktops than all the others, combined. Although among browsers, its market share is still way behind IE - but that’s mostly, of course, because IE is the default browser for every windows machine.

Firefox is arguably the best web browser there is. It is certainly better and more secure than IE. What makes it even more powerful, is that there are tons of add-ons that make it even better. Right now, I’ve got AdBlock Plus, Greasemonkey (which is a scripting platform that allows for lots of other interesting addons,) Tor (allows for anonymous browsing,) a bunch of google toolbars, some great web developer tools, etc.

And, further, because it’s open source, there are some great spin-offs, that I’ll talk about later.

And, I can’t really talk about Firefox without mentioning Iceweasel, Debian’s rebranded browser, based on Firefox. (And yes,  it would be cheating to make that a separate blog entry!) Because the Firefox artwork is proprietary (and therefore a violation of Debian’s free software guidelines, the browser was rebranded.

Back in August, I did a review of web conferencing tools, with a decidedly unusual slant - as a presenter, I had to be able to share my Linux desktop. It was, perhaps an odd perspective, but in any event, I figured it was time to revisit this, and review what I’ve found.

Earlier, I’d found that the only tools that would work with presenters using Linux were ReadyTalk and WebHuddle. ReadyTalk is proprietary and not free (as in beer). WebHuddle is free, and open source. There does seem to be an active (but small) user community. There is, however, only one developer, and there hasn’t been a release in a while, so it’s unclear how long-term viable WebHuddle is.

I had been encouraged to look again at Yugma, because they said that Linux desktop sharing would happen before the end of last year. Well, it seems that it still is “coming soon.” But interestingly, Yugma is now integrated with Skype, which totally changes the whole audio on a separate channel issue. It does mean that everyone who is involved in a webinar needs to install Skype - but that seems to be a minor issue, to my mind. But, you can’t use the Skype edition on Linux yet, either.

I went back to look at DimDim - and lo and behold - DimDim went GPL! They now have a community edition, and there seems to be an active community of users. In addition, DimDim has an integration with Moodle (PDF)! And also an integration with SugarCRM. Now things are getting interesting. Perhaps if DimDim were also to release a version that integrated with Skype … I can’t figure out from looking around their site whether it is cross-platform enough to share desktops, but I signed up for the beta, so I guess I’ll test it out.

In doing a bit more research (which I guess I hadn’ t done this summer) it turns out that Webex seems to allow desktop sharing with Linux. I’m hoping to test it out soon, as well.

This is what I want: The community edition of DimDim that integrates with an open source VOIP system and Moodle. That can share my Linux desktop. That would be the holy grail. But at least it does appear that there might be increasing numbers of options out there for the likes of me.

I don’t exactly know where the exclamation point came from, but if you want a scarily easy CMS to install, Joomla is a place to start. Like any powerful CMS, though, there is quite the learning curve in order to get a site up and running. But at least the first technical hurdle to jump over is a small one.

Joomla is growing fast. They just released version 1.5, which, I must say, rocks. I’ll be migrating my main consulting site over to it quite soon. They have an amazing user community, and there are places to get amazing themes.

I’ll mention the other FOSS CMS systems in other posts. I’ll have to admit to my preference for Joomla, although Drupal is growing on me more and more. I haven’t spend enough time with Plone to really get a feel for it.

Joomla does have an interesting history - it was the fork of a project (called Mambo). Mambo is way less popular than Joomla at this point.

If you want to try and get a small website going for your organization - Joomla is a good place to start. It installs easily on generic virtual hosts, and has a very sweet, eye-candy full admin interface. It will take some time and effort to get a site up, but that’s standard for any website. It will probably take you less time than a generic HTML site will.

As you might have noticed, my blogging has diminished a bit. It’s because, basically, I am about as busy as I’ve been in a very long time. It feels quite good, actually. And I have lots of thoughts about what I’m doing.

I’m spending about 1/2 of my time being Coordinator of NOSI. As you’ve probably seen, we’ve been pretty busy lately. Soon, we’ll be updating the primer, releasing a report on our survey, starting a training and consulting program, doing a webinar series … phew! Lots happening! And, I’m learning a lot about what it’s like to be a leader of a small, struggling nonprofit with big ideas.

The other 1/2 of my time I’m doing consulting work, focusing exclusively on helping organizations without a lot of technical expertise navigate their way through the maze of creating and getting through technology projects. I love this work. I have some great clients, and I feel like I get to be an educator - I spend lots of time educating my clients on the ins and outs of the varied technology issues presented (and what is, and is not a technology issue.) I get to use my expertise in web application development, but not have to do any web application development (which feels to me a lot like having my cake and eating it too.) And, I think I also get to educate the varied vendors and developers I’ve been in contact with. Educate them about the clients needs, and, to some extent, hear about, and share best practices in doing this kind of work. And, I get to be agnostic. Yes, indeed, for some clients, and some situations, there are appropriate proprietary solutions.

And I’ve come to understand what I value about some development shops, and what I don’t value about others. I like proposals that focus more on the project, and show clear understanding of the project. Pretty presentation with no content is useless. I am pretty instantly aware of when the person I’m talking with knows what they are doing. I’m made comfortable by folks who speak what I think of as a good mix of development-speak and normal language. I’m turned off instantly by sales-speak. I appreciate shops that I know are giving back to the community, and that are known quantities in the nptech realm. I hate to be pushed.

I am beginning to get a really solid understanding of what it takes for nonprofits of all sizes to navigate the technology waters. What’s great is that although it’s true that there are sharks in the water, there are also lots of great dolphins to swim with, and I’m happy to be helping organizations find them.

It seems like a good day to talk about WordPress. Why? Automattic, the makers of WordPress, and WordPress.com, just got a big chunk of “series B” funding. (Not being much of a capitalist, I don’t really know what “series B” funding means, but I’m imagining it’s a very good thing.) Here is yet another amazing free and open source tool getting a lot of good attention.

Anyway, WordPress is a blogging tool (in fact, the one that runs this blog.) It is  a great blogging tool. It is another of those open source software applications that “just works.” Installation of WordPress is scarily easy. WordPress is expandable with tons of plugins. The best one, by the way, is Akismet, which is also made by Automattic. It basically eliminates comment spam, which, as you probably know, is the bane of bloggers everywhere.

Because WordPress is so easy to use, people have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. I think this is generally a Bad Idea, since there are so many easy, good CMS tools out there (I’ll be naming a few in this series.)

But if your organization decides to blog, and you want to make it easy on yourself, install Wordpress on your hosting account, or go to WordPress.com and set up a free blog. I doubt you’ll look back.

I just though I’d take a brief pause to explain my criteria for these 100 tools that I’ll be covering this year. All of the tools I will cover are tools that:

• I use every week, perhaps less often, and for a few I will have at least installed and tested out.
• Have an active user and developer community
• I know I can get my questions answered from the community
• are good enough so that you can get real work done using the tool (in fact, under most circumstances, you could do mission-critical work with it, if your mission called for it.)
• You don’t have to code to do what should be basic tasks using the tool (for instance, this eliminates a good time tracking program, which at some point I might blog about, but that you have to learn scheme[1] to get customized reports with any complexity. )

I’ll describe what you’ll give up with these tools (if anything) compared to their popular proprietary counterparts. These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations.

[1] Scheme is an obscure programming language that most Computer Science students learn, but almost no one else does, and almost no one produces production code in scheme.

GIMP stands for Gnu Image Manipulation Program. I’ve come to depend on it, first because I couldn’t justify paying for a Photoshop upgrade when I moved to an Intel Mac. Now, it’s one of a very few choices that work on Linux - and it’s the best by far.

GIMP is a very full-featured image manipulation program. Just about all of what Photoshop does, it does. I’m not a designer or photographic expert, but it’s a pretty amazing program. If you want good info, there is a great book by a fellow Linuxchix, called “Beginning GIMP” by Akkana Peck.

If you are a serious designer, GIMP has its drawbacks, specifically it’s lack of CMYK and Pantone color spaces, which, I understand, is pretty much a requirement for serious printing (but who prints, nowadays? Just joking.)  There are some other things that GIMP lacks that Photoshop has, but 90% of users probably won’t notice.

I would say if there is one really major complaint about GIMP, and it’s one that I harbor, is that the UI, well, leaves much to be desired. It’s not just that it doesn’t look like Photoshop (you can check out gimpshop - it has a Photoshop UI on top of the GIMP libraries.)  It just isn’t intuitive to use (Photoshop isn’t either, really.)

I think because of this, GIMP is missing out on the chance to become a much more popular program. If you’re a geek, you are used to getting to know new UIs, and putting up controls that are difficult to understand or get used to. But if you’re not a geek, GIMPs UI is a major hurdle.  And if you’ve been used to the Photoshop workflow, it will take a lot to get used to the very different GIMP workflow.

Oh, and one more thing. The name has to go.

• Sun Microsystems buys MySQL AB for $1 Billion (yes, that’s ONE BILLION DOLLARS)
• Acquia (a Drupal company) gets a large chunk of change (no, actually that was last month in FOSS, but it’s part of the picture.)
• OpenAds, an open source ad server (very cool) just got tons of $ in financing.
• A company that provides services for Ruby on Rails got a bunch of funding.

So what does this mean for you, o struggling nonprofit organization? Open source is becoming mainstream, and people (that is, people with money) are starting to throw big bucks in the direction of open source projects, and companies that provide services for open source projects. This is going to make these projects better, and make support for them more available. Because these applications are not proprietary, and anyone can get their hands on them, and install and use them, this means that nonprofits get the benefit. Because of the nature of open source, more money in the open source ecosystem is a good thing, and it is my belief that unlike “voodoo economics” this will actually be a tide that lifts all boats.

I’ve had a few interesting things happen lately which is making me wonder about what’s happening with open source, and the perceptions of open source in the nonprofit sector. As you know, NOSI is doing a survey on the use of FOSS in the nonprofit sector. It’s been quite slow - we have only gotten about 85 responses (so please, please, if you haven’t yet, fill it out.)

I know that surveys only get small subsets of the communities they are trying to assess. But this seems very low, considering that probably 5,000+ people saw the announcement (adding up the totals for the varied list subscriptions.)

Also, we have been accused in creating a biased survey. In a sense, we are, of course quite biased. It is NOSI’s purpose to advocate the use of FOSS in the sector. But I wondered about whether or not simply being in that position means that we will garner certain kinds of responses, and not others (interestingly, though, 25% of those filling out the survey use open source less than daily, and considering Firefox, I thought that was interesting.)

Another interesting thing was that I wrote an article for TechSoup, on “The True Cost of Free and Low Cost software.” I got some interesting comments (especially the one that said “the author doesn’t really seem to understand the distinction between free, open source, and proprietary software”, which I thought was a hoot.) Anyway, they were looking for a different article - one that was more about the advantages of FOSS, not about the broad category of free (as in beer) and low cost software, which includes FOSS, proprietary, and SaaS.

I said this at the end of my response:

This makes me wonder whether things have changed. In the past, people cared much more about whether or not something was free (as in beer) or cheap, and whether or not it was open source wasn’t on the radar. Now, it seems that people well understand that acquisition cost isn’t everything, and what’s more important to some is free (as in libre). Perhaps it’s time to change the message, a bit.

Of course, one can’t base anything on two forum comments, but I wonder if we haven’t turned a corner in the conversation. Perhaps we don’t have to spend so much time on this issue anymore.

Comments?

I have become a fan, nay, a devotee of DokuWiki. I’ve always liked wikis, and I have used MediaWiki a lot in the past, and I do like it. Dokuwiki is different in a number of ways, most primarily in that it is one of the wiki systems that stores things in files, not databases. This means that it is easier to back up and migrate, but doesn’t scale well.

Dokuwiki was designed for small scale installations, primarily documentation and such.  The one feature that makes my day: draft autosave! I love it! One drawback is that the syntax of Dokuwiki is different than MediaWiki, and so the more I use it, the more I forget when I use MediaWiki. But I’m converting my tech wiki to from MediaWiki to DokuWiki. I also use it installed on my home desktop, for notes, journaling and the like. It’s a great replacement for text or word processing files.

Anyway, it’s worth checking out.