Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org, thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good” and “Drupalchix”) was the PostgreSQL group.

Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.

I was always aware that Drupal supported PostgreSQL, and I didn’t really have any plans to use it. And there are varied opinions as to it’s usefulness (which I beg to differ on.) But as a long time lover of PostgreSQL, I couldn’t let this drop. And, I’d been looking for a good solid project to get me going in Drupal, so it looks like I found it. So I’ve adopted it.

But, it turns out that with Drupal 7 (the development branch) it’s virtually impossible to install Drupal, and even though I did wrangle an install (all of the right tables seem to show up in the database), it doesn’t actually work, and I can’t yet figure out why. I don’t yet really grok the structure of Drupal, so it feels like sorting through spagetti right now.

There are several core modules with PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on those first, before I can think about tackling what’s wrong with install.php and PostgreSQL.

I don’t usually title my tech blog entries with quite that sort of title, but that’s how I feel after spending 3 days with one of the most fabulous groups of people I have had the honor of spending time with in recent memory. I was at the Nonprofit Software Development Summit, which was an event full of great sessions, meeting neat people of all sorts, and having lots of geeky fun.

It was a great combination of really detailed tech learning (like I learned a really cool trick using JQuery to generate rounded corners, which is generally not an easy thing to achieve,) and big picture thinking. I got to learn a ton, and contribute a bit.  Sessions I went to included:

• Open Source Ecosystems
• Customizing and Extending CiviCRM
• What is Ethical Consulting (not so surprising, I facilitated that one.)
• Designing RESTful APIs
• CiviCRM for Advanced Users
• Advanced Drupal Theming
• Business Models
• Tech Cooperatives
• The Power Vested in JQuery
• Designers & Developers and Empowering Clients (combined session, I co-facilitated)

There are lots of great notes there if you missed those sessions, and I’m looking forward to reading the notes from other sessions I wanted to go to, but missed. Now, I’m just going to sleep.

Getting involved in a social network, whether it be something like Facebook or Myspace, or a content-connected social network like flickr or delicious (I’m starting to get used to writing that without the dots,) is pretty easy. But there are SO many, and they all have their pros and cons.

What I have learned, though, is that a social network is only as good as something that you have absolutely no control over: how many of your real friends and colleagues use it. Sure, you can join a social network, and “friend up” a bunch of people you don’t know. Perhaps you’d meet some cool people. But you’d primarily be wasting lots of time.

And if you’re a nonprofit trying social networks out to figure out how to leverage your modest resources for maximal impact, it’s really important to know where your constituents are.

Over the last two years, I’ve joined more social networks than I can count (even after I vowed, and only a couple of times violated my vow to only join social networks that were based on open standards, like OpenID and ODD (Open Data Definition.)) The content-focused networks, like delicious, slideshare and flickr, I generally use as primarily a one-way method of publishing specific kinds of content to people I know (and, of course, people I don’t know, since it’s public.) I’ve learned that there are only a few that I really need to bother with:

• Facebook: I consider it a watershed moment when my partner joined Facebook last week. The majority of people who are my Facebook friends I’ve actually met in person, and a surprising percentage of my actual, real, in person friends are on Facebook (considering that I am a relatively old fart of the Facebook set at 49.) I’m not bothering with MySpace, Orkut, etc. etc. If, perchance, there was a wholesale migration of my friends to a new platform, I’d certainly move, but it makes no sense to join a social network that might be more open, for instance, if no one I know is there.
• del.icio.us (sorry, I couldn’t help it): I actually barely use the social networking capacity of delicious. I use it as both my personal repository of sites I want to keep tabs with. I know it’s public, and it also serves to share with people interesting stuff I think is worth looking at.
• Flickr: I also don’t use the social network capacity of flickr much, except to keep track of the photos of a few real friends and family.
• Twitter: The nonprofit technology community has chosen twitter as the microblogging service that it uses, so even though I use ping.fm to send status updates to plurk, identi.ca, rejaw, and some others, I never actually go to those sites. Very few people I care about are there (and they twitter too, anyway.)
• Slideshare: Again, a service I hardly use for social networking - I use it to make public presentations that I’ve done.
• LinkedIN: The professional, serious, network. I hardly use it, but I know it’s there, and it can be useful sometimes.
• Plaxo: Once just my address book backup, it seems to now have become a social network on it’s own. I only agree to be friends with people on Plaxo who are actually already in my addressbook (or I know should be.) That keeps the address book more likely to be correct. I don’t want or need Plaxo to be anything else, thankyouverymuch.
• FriendFeed: The compendium, with comments and likes. It’s great that I can follow all of the content (blogs, tweets, Flickr photos, etc.) of people that I want to all in one place.

An oddball one:

• Seesmic: I am completely conflicted about Seesmic. For those of you who don’t know Seesmic - it’s a video conversation social network. I’ve had some great conversations with people (including Deepak Chopra, who seems to not post much anymore.) It’s fun, and I love the idea, and I think it has the potential to be very powerful. But, I have to say that it feels like 85-90% of the conversations on Seesmic are, well, inane. There are some great exceptions to this, like a recent conversation about electric cars. But then it seems like with interesting conversations, some guy pretenting to be a robot, or someone else will post something completely inane, and then it devolves from there. Of course, some large percentage of tweets are inane as well, but there isn’t the same overhead. It will take me half a second to scan the “I’m cleaning my garage” tweet (and another second more to scan the responses, if any,) but do I really want to spend 5 minutes hearing about it? And spend the time playing the responses to it? Not hardly. Also, unlike the others, there really isn’t a nonprofit technology presence (who has the time?) So conversations I care about aren’t really going to happen there until that changes.

I was perusing the program for a local “green” event, when I noticed a full page advertisement for Firefox, saying that it’s software was “100% organic.” I kind of chuckled. I thought, what does that really mean?

For Firefox, it means, “open source, community-powered.” And I realized that they had an interesting point. In my mind, it harks back to the arguments that Yochai Benkler made in his book “The Wealth of Networks,” that a ecosystem full of open source, community-powered software was, in a sense, more sustainable, and promoted more, not less innovation than the proprietary software ecosystem.

So now I think I agree with the Mozilla Foundation that a good metaphor for open source as any is that it is to software what “organic” and probably “fair trade” is to food. Too bad the metaphor doesn’t go both ways, because then organic and fair trade food would be free, too.

And, like both of those labels are complex and not entirely easy to nail down with food, so it is with software. But I think it works.

I’m learning Drupal bit by bit - one of the first tasks was to learn how to make a new theme. It’s one of those things which is actually fairly straightforward-seeming … until you hit a snag. And then it’s opaque.

One thing I learned is that it is incredibly sensitive to typos. One space accidentally inserted between the “<?” and the “php” led to a completely blank page. Ah well. I’m certainly learning what mistakes can lead to what kinds of issues, which is good. Eventually that becomes second nature.

But, in any event, by the end of an hour or so of hacking, I’d turned a template that I found online at Open Web Design into a Drupal template. I felt accomplished! I’m going to do a few more, and see how sophisticated with it I can get.

One thing I ran into (and haven’t been able to solve yet) is that it’s not easy to have navigation that requires more than just the standard <ul><li> tags. Adding <span> tags, for instance (which makes possible some more interesting looking navigation buttons) seems, at least at first, far from trivial.

I’m making a list of little(ish) projects that I want to do - sort of like problems I think I want to know how to solve.

• Drupal and google docs single sign on. There is already a SSO Module for Drupal 5.x, and someone submitted a patch for it, but it’s still up for review. I’d also have to cough up $50/year to get a google account that has the SSO API, but it might be worth it.
• Drupal sidebar connecting with the NPR API - perhaps to provide a targeted news stream?
• Doing a google map mashup of data in Drupal
• Working with getting flickr photostreams to show in Drupal

I’m still looking for a good project to try out in Cake. Unfortunately, the module Drake, which is meant to be a bridge allowing you to run Cake applications within Drupal, seems moribund. There is only a development snapshot for the 5.x branch, and no one seems to be picking it up for 6.x. Sigh. There is, for sure, another whole blog entry about Drupal modules.

I’m going to go out on a really thin limb here, and feel free to saw it off in the comments. :-)

If you haven’t been to change.gov yet, you need to go. Now. I’ll be here when you come back.

There is little question that Obama was Presidential Candidate 2.0. And it’s becoming increasigly clear that he’ll be President 2.0. What made this possible?

Of course, without his intelligence, and desire to be involving and inclusive, it wouldn’t have happened. But there is no question that there is a technical aspect to what made this possible. New technologies, the web, Web 2.0 services like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, text messaging, all of these made this possible. Plus some amazing underlying technical infrastructure. It engaged voters (largely young voters, but others as well.) It allowed people to get involved and helped motivate.

So, to go even deeper, what made all of this possible? Well, Web 2.0 depends largely on two things: open standards, and open source software. It is my arguement that without these two things, Obama would not have been able to harness the technology in the way that he did. He might have won anyway, but I think that these two factors made it a lot easier. And I think that they will be key to providing Government 2.0, which is as technically transparent and open as it hopefully will be in actuality.

Open Source software and open standards are the foundations of Web 2.0. Open standards are now becoming de-riguer for application developers, and even proprietary vendors are adopting longstanding ideas and methods from free and open source software.

I think the next 4-8 years are going to prove Yochai Benkler right.

In my new explorations of PHP web application development, it seemed a good idea to get a look at both CakePHP and Symfony. Both of them seem to be PHP’s answer to Ruby on Rails.

The approaches are similar and different to each other. I set up both on my laptop, and tried out some really simple app development. In Cake, the database build is separate from the application building (you do it yourself), whereas in Symfony, you use Symfony to build the database with schema files written in YAML. Then, you build forms and such using the schema as a foundation.

They both use the MVC pattern, and both use object oriented PHP, which is great. I got a lot further with Cake in one evening of playing with both than I did with Symfony. At this point, I really prefer Cake - it feels like it jives with my own coding sensibilities better. I also don’t like the overhead of learning YAML. I can imagine, though, that the Symfony approach can be powerful.

Looking at Ohloh, Cake is more popular than Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot more developers (81 vs 17). They both have good documentation and active communities.

For now, unless something strange happens, I’ll settle on Cake - although I’ll not be spending too much time on it, since I’m working hard to grok Drupal. But perhaps a cool project will manifest, and I can use it.

Update: I learned that Yahoo and delicious have a huge investment in Symfony (which, I guess, might be why they have so many more developers.)

• One of the underlying stories of the 2008 election victory of Barack Obama is the really intelligent use of technology, in a way that will permanently change how campaigns are run in the future.
• Open Source Hardware: can it be done? I hope so, and I’m looking forward to see its progress.
• There have been a number of possible “Exchange Killers.” Open-Xchange just got a bunch of $. Perhaps it’s the one?
• The Free Software Foundation revised the GNU Free Document License (GNU FDL) to allow public Wikis to relicense their content (by August 1, 2009) to the Creative Commons By-SA 3.0. Apparently, they were asked by the Wikimedia foundation to do this. The CC By-SA is the most FDL-like of the CC licenses.
• Firefox 3.1 adds a very cool tab preview function. Woo hoo!

As I said last week, today is my day to host the Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants. I chose this as my question of the week: “Is your work changing because of the economy? How? What adjustments are you making?”

• Jane, at FIO Partners, talks about how important it is to focus on the value that consultants provide to their clients.
• The Nonprofits Assistance Fund blog talks about how during uncertain times, organizations should think about moving into “turnaround mode.”

Somewhat tangentially related:

• Although they didn’t say this was related to the economy, Strategynut gives seven tips for building trust with your consulting clients.
• A Small Change blog talks about annual board solicitations.
• Donor Power blog asks whether brand kills fundraising? Answer: no.

I have been doing a lot of thinking myself about the economic meltdown, and what it means personally for me as a consultant. I’ve talked a little before about some changes I’m making, both because of personal interest as well as what I feel is changes in the wind in terms the kinds of new priorities that might be emerging.