Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Here’s a few interesting tidbits gleaned from the net:

• It appears that Microsoft’s bid to get Office Open XML, their new office standard did get through ISO. Interestingly enough, lots of developing world countries voted against it. There’s lots of great details on Groklaw.
• Venture capitalists are liking open source more and more. Why do we nptechies care? More $ toward open source is a tide that lifts all boats.
• It’s still mighty small (still around 2%), but Linux Desktop market share grew from 40-60% (depending on who you ask) from last year.
• Adobe (yeah, Adobe) joined the Linux Foundation, and released a Linux alpha of Air, their new application platform.

If you’re not so connected either to the “twitterverse” or the web industry, you probably haven’t heard a lot about the buzz that is currently happening around the issue of data portability, and the dataportability.org organization and effort. I figured, since I’ve been getting a bit involved in the community, I’d give a bit of a summary of what’s going on, and what will possibly come from this effort.

Dataportability.org - the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. These include Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and many others.

So first, what is data portability? Basically, it means that the data that you put into social networking sites, like profiles, social graph (those who you are connected to,) media, etc. are *yours* to do whatever you want with. In addition, they are portable - you can move your data from place to place. And you have control over who can see what. There is a good blog article, which, in some regards, might be seen as a criticism of the dataportability.org group, but which, to my mind, actually defines quite well what I’ve thought data portability means.  He talks about data “accessibility”, “visibility”, “removal” and “ownership” - all things that, to my mind, are components of data portability.

I’m involved in the evangelism action group. So, I’m evangelizing. I’ll be doing an entry soon, sort of “how social networks could use open standards 101.” I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 tools, they need to understand the implications of what they do, and demand that the tools use open standards.

Last week, I covered the Richard Scoble dust-up. Thanks to twitter (hat tip to marshallk), I learned about today’s big news: Google, Plaxo and Facebook joined the Data Portability working group. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, everyone’s social graph and data will become portable, but it’s a very good sign that perhaps, after all, things are moving in that direction.

I think that people are getting wary of social networks where they have no control over their own data. And, of course, nonprofits should be especially keen on being able to keep control of their data. This is a good sign that things are going in the right direction. I’ll keep you posted, for sure.

Read/Write Web and TechCruch have good coverage of this.

Update: LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter have now joined Dataportability.org. This is, of course, great news. But the real question is: will this actually result in data portability?

It’s been mostly fun so far at the Open Translation event here in Zagreb. I’ll leave the complaining about Croatian food and other things to my personal blog, when I get the time. The event itself has been fab.

As one of those monolingual American types, I’m learning a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different languages. It is actually pretty mind-boggling. There are issues that relate to encoding, fonts, and character sets, machine translation, interfaces to facilitate human translation, issues of workflow, volunteer and project management, and a whole host of other issues.

It’s also really interesting to see how free and open source fits into all of this.  What are the tools like? How do we replace proprietary tools? How does this all get paid for?

My role has been to gather up the use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That’s been a very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools are present that can do what’s needed, and what gaps exist.

Check out the wiki. Lots of food for thought for NOSI and the future.

The buzz of the blogosphere is the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial. I thought that it would be a good idea to describe what it is, and what it might mean for the nonprofit sector. Marc Andreessen, who is, of late, connected to Ning, has a great blog entry with details.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs. It’s aimed primarily at developers. Google has a number of partners, including social network sites like LinkedIn, Friendster and Ning, as well as Salesforce, which does have very interesting implications given the increasing use of Salesforce in the nonprofit sector.

OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript. Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network - any OpenSocial “container”. That means developers need only write an app once, and it can get used on any of the networks involved, like Orkut and LinkedIn. Basically, if the more social network sites that adopt OpenSocial, the more open the whole thing gets.

One of the big issues about social network platforms was that once Facebook made its platform available, and MySpace and LinkedIn followed, it looked like developers would have to port their apps to each social network. OpenSocial means, basically, they can port to a whole lot fewer of them. Hopefully, eventually, they can write their apps just once. Facebook has quite the motivation to keep people on Facebook, and keep the eyeballs there, because of their revenue model, which is ad-based. This breaks the whole thing open.

I’m not so clear about how this helps users. I expect, that because the APIs allow connections to profile, social graph, and activity data of users, that portability and permeability between social networks is bound to happen. But the path to truly portable (with adequate privacy controls) profile, social graph and activity data is still not entirely clear.

What does this mean for the nonprofit sector? Allan, in his inimitable style, talks about how most nonprofit organizations will not be able to take advantage of OpenSocial. No question about that. Most nonprofits haven’t even begun to take advantage of the Web 2.0 world in general, let alone the bleeding edge of OpenSocial. And I’m not entirely clear yet how many should be jumping on this bandwagon to either do fundraising or community-building. Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and LinkedIn have very different demographic and geographic reaches. Ning, which is the social network of social networks, could end up being a very important player here.

I think that the inclusion of Salesforce in the mix will be very interesting for web-savvy nonprofits who are thinking about, or have started writing apps for social networks. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out - what kinds of integration will be possible between social network data and CRM data?

Anyway, OpenSocial is something I’ll be watching, playing with, and writing about as time goes on, and considering what it means for those of us in this sector.

Update: MySpace, SixApart (LiveJournal, Typepad and the newish social networking blog platform Vox), and Bebo have now all joined OpenSocial. This is getting really interesting!

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.)

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.

I’ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. (The content centered ones, like flickr, del.icio.us and our own Social Source Commons, are a different animal.) I’ve been playing with LinkedIn for probably a year, Facebook only for a couple of months. It has been fun, in many ways, but I’ve not figured out the utility for me in terms of my work, although others have had a better time of it. But, something has always been nagging me about them, especially Facebook. In some comments in a post of mine about Facebook, someone mentioned the article “Facebook is the new AOL” and I also mentioned an article I’d read asking how open is Facebook, really?

Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens”. Even though it is true that anyone can join either network, the data in them is limited only to those who join, and join networks and have friends.

I’ve always been an advocate of open data and open standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street. Wired says:

Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you’re sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can’t see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.

I’ve been slowly but surely realizing that the time and energy I’m putting into Facebook is likely benefiting Facebook more than it is benefiting me. Yeah, it’s fun that there is a great mix of people that I can keep track of (and they can keep track of me) - that’s the part of the equation that’s hard to find elsewhere.

So I’ve decided to, for now, keep my accounts, but dramatically curb my time with Facebook and LinkedIn, and spend more time exploring the ways I can use truly open technologies to do some of the same things. There are some great tips in this Wired article. And I’ll also be experimenting with the XHTML Friends Network, which looks like an interesting start on an open way to connect people.

Back in December, I had planned to talk first about document format standards before I plunged into XDI. But, a couple of things intervened. First, I decided to write a full blown whitepaper on document standards. So it will be a bit before it comes out. I think people (especially in the nonprofit sector) take document formats far too much for granted, and I think they deserve more treatment than just a blog entry.

I also had a chat with Andy Dale, of ooTao, and it provided lots of great fodder for an informational blog entry. So, here it is. I won’t go nearly into as much detail as he went with me - at some point I’ll write something much more substantial. But this is a good start.

What is XDI, anyway? XDI stands for XRI Data Interchange. It’s all about standards for sharing data over the net via XML and XRIs (eXtensible Resource Identifiers - URIs on steroids.)

If you look at the basic problem - how does data source “A” talk with data source “B”? We’ve done a lot of that via APIs - but that’s a set of idiosyncratic solutions to individual problems (solving the Convio <-> GoogleMaps problem is different than solving the Joomla <-> Salesforce problem, for instance - lots easier than it used to be, but still atomized.) How can this be standardized?

It’s important to understand that this problem has many layers. The first is the identifier layer. Who are you, anyway? Then - authentication - how do I know that you are who you say you are? Then there is authorization/trust - what are you allowed to do, what data can you see? And, finally, there comes the data sharing layer. That’s where this is all leading, of course, but what if when you finally get down to that layer, I say “tomayto” and you say “tomaato”?

Each of the technologies implemented at these layers have to be optimized for different things - you wouldn’t want your data sharing layer to have strong crypto, and be optimized for figuring out who you are, would you? That would be inefficient. So these layers are separate, and, in most situations, pluggable. For instance, you could plug OpenID into the authentication layer for internet transactions, and use Kerberos for internal organizational purposes.

So, to the bottom layer of XDI is optimized for figuring out how the data should be shared. For example - think of a lexicon for all the ways that “First Name” exists out there (”given name”, “First”, “nombre”, etc.) - so it would be possible to share that data. Also, one idea that is a part of XDI is that some data is persistent, and some data is simply a link to persistent data - so the data doesn’t hold my address, for instance, but it does hold exactly where (the XRI) to get my current address.

Andy and I talked a bit about his work in the nonprofit sector. He sees the sector as a great place to try these ideas out - because, for the most part, there is a much more open and flexible ethos around data sharing. I think that probably is mostly true, but as I pointed out to him, the sector is often years behind the for-profit sector in terms of technology. There is a pilot project with Kintera to expose a subset of one nonprofit’s data to an XDI interface. There are others lined up to try it, and the hope is it will spread. I certainly hope it does, and I will be keeping track of this effort, for sure.

I think the idea of this kind of standard - moving data sharing beyond what we (barely) have now, which are these very atomized sets of solutions (even though they are solutions we badly need.) If every data-centric application (ooh, that’s redundant) that a nonprofit implemented had a standard interface for data sharing - think about the possibilities there. Right now, it’s still basically impossible to look at big pictures across a wide range of data domains. This kind of standard would make those kinds of analyses a lot easier.

So this is the next jump beyond open APIs: imagine SQL-like queries on any data, anywhere you were trusted, and across those sources. And I thought open APIs were the holy grail!

Technorati Tags: nptech, openAPI, openstandards, xdi

So first a note. I’m again doing this horrible practice of overlapping series. I know that I haven’t finished my series on the Wealth of Networks - but I hit a snag in reading: my last papers to write for seminary, and transitions. So, once the papers are done, and things settle back down, I’ll plunge back into Benkler, and keep going.

In the meantime, something that’s been on my mind for years is the concept of Open Standards, and their potential value in the nonprofit sector. I think it’s a really good topic for a series, because it’s meaty, there’s lots to talk about, and there is some news in that arena, around Microsoft’s Open XML standard, which was just approved by a standards body, and Open Document Format, supported by Open Office, and others. I’ll talk more about that in part II.

So first, what is an open standard? Wikipedia defines it best:

Open Standards are publicly available and implementable standards. By allowing anyone to obtain and implement the standard, they can increase compatibility between various hardware and software components, since anyone with the necessary technical know-how and resources can build products that work together with those of the other vendors that base their designs on the standard (although patent holders may impose “reasonable and non-discriminatory” royalty fees and other licensing terms on implementers of the standard).

So what this means is that if a standard is open, it’s documented, and anyone can use it to create things. A great example of a standard is HTML. Any web browser anyone puts together can render HTML, anyone can write a file in HTML, anyone can write an HTML editor, and then someone can move that HTML from program to program. You can write an HTML document in Dreamweaver, then open it up to edit it in Mozilla, then open it up to edit it in a text editor, then …

An open standard (in the software realm) gives developers the freedom to develop applications that use that standard, and users the freedom to take their data wherever they want, or move their data from one application to another freely, because the applications speak the same language.

So what’s on my plate for this series? In the next post, I’ll talk about the document format war. After that, I’ll talk about identity standards (like XDI). I’ll talk next about microformats, then I’ll wrap it up talking about some possibilities for nonprofit focused open standards (like the seems to be deceased OPX.)

Technorati Tags: microsoft, nptech, openstandards, standards