Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

I’ll be doing a webinar on open source CRMs tomorrow. In the process of going deep into those CRMs, I’ve been thinking about how nonprofits might choose CRMs to begin with. Of course, all nonprofits already have a CRM (even if it is a spreadsheet) - the issue is, generally, migration to a new system, or integration with what they already have to add new features.

Idealware has a great article on CRMs, and how they are different, and how you can begin to figure out what might work best. I also wrote a software choice worksheet, that can help with the process of looking at a wide variety of tools.

One of the fascinating things to me is how quickly the CRM space is evolving. New open source players entering the market (more on them soon),  high satisfaction for other open source tools, and SaaS vendors throwing the doors open so that nonprofits can integrate their systems well (I’m psyched to hear about all the new connectors, mashups and apps happening all the time.)

The lesson here, I think, is that CRM, even for large organizations, is changing rapidly, and the days are numbered where systems that are expensive, proprietary, and closed rule. I’m glad to see that. And I think that nonprofits should make sure when they choose to look at the wide range of options, some of which are very cost-effective, and open. And you don’t need to feel overwhelmed by vendor sales-talk - it’s possible to get things translated to language you understand.

After the webinar, I’ll be putting the slides up in varied places, and NTEN will have a recording of the webinar.

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.

As most people deeply imbedded in Web 2.0, I am an avid Wiki user. I have become a complete devotee of Dokuwiki, which I use locally on my laptop, for my to do lists, notes, etc. I love it because it’s really easy to set up and back up (it’s all files, not in a database,) and it’s has draft autosaves (yay!).

I have two other wikis (a public and private wiki) that are in Mediawiki, on my web host. And I contribute to varied other wikis, which are on varied other wiki platforms.

And none of these have the same syntax - they are similar, but slightly different. Different enough to drive me crazy.

A while ago, when I was still developing web applications, I wrote a wiki plug-in for this behemothic open source CMS/Web database system that I wrote, and has (mercifully) died a slow death (there are still a few installations of it in use, hopefully soon to be retired.) I didn’t get so far into coding the markup, but I had decided that I’d follow MediaWiki’s syntax, since it was the most popular wiki software.

I just wish that somehow, the  gazillion wikis out there could decide on syntax they all would agree on. I doubt it, but it would be nice.

I’ve been writing a surprising amount about nonprofit CRM tools lately. It’s such an interesting space, and there are some really intriguing things happening with software in that space.

NTEN is trying to get a handle on all of this, and find out what people use, and how much they like what they use. I can’t wait to get my grubby little fingers on the data on CiviCRM and Salesforce.

So, let your voice be heard! Fill out the survey.

Blackbaud, which is one of the big gorillas in the CRM/Fundraising space bought a littler guy, eTapestry. This is not so far on the heels of the acquisition of Get Active by Convio. Blackbaud has done other acquisitions in the past. And, I’m sure there are more to come.

There basically are three types of software acquisitions that companies make. The first is to acquire a company that does something that you do not. For example, Yahoo bought del.icio.us - it didn’t have social bookmarking. In those situations, generally, the product remains largely the same (with some branding changes over time.) The second kind of acquisition is to acquire a company that does something you do, but much better. Like Google buying YouTube, or Yahoo buying flickr. In that case, the acquiring company eventually does away with its own product, and the acquired product becomes that companies offering in that space (with changes.) The third type of acquisition is when a company buys a competitor, which may or may not have technologies that it has. In that situation, the acquired company is basically engulfed by the acquiring company, and eventually (or immediately, in some cases) completely disappears as an option. This third type of acquisition has been the hallmark of the acquisitions in the CRM/Fundraising space. GetActive is no longer an option to choose from. Nor is Giftmaker (bought by Blackbaud.) True, eTapestry had a platform that Blackbaud does not - but don’t mistake that as the first or second type. eTapestry as a separate choice is bound to go away. And this is a bad thing for the many small organizations that have been using eTapestry for reasonable prices (or free).

You have heard me rant and rail about the fact that the vast majority of money (both from nonprofits themselves, as well as by investors) goes into developing, maintaining (and acquiring) CRM/Fundraising software. This is something that, honestly, we as a sector are complicit in. And there are fewer and fewer choices every single day. Fewer choices means less competition, which means that prices will likely rise. And nonprofits often feel they have no choice but to pay big bucks for fundraising/CRM packages.

If nonprofits want to have a good fundraising platform that they can know won’t be bought and swallowed and changed so that they’ll have to shell out more, it’s time to invest money and effort in an open source platform. One already exists that needs support and development to make it ready to compete with the big guys. Allan Benamer says:

Obviously, Blackbaud is taking a page out of Oracle’s playbook and applying it to themselves. Rapidfire acquisition of smaller players so that you can wrap it up into a system of systems seems to be their strategy for now. They now control the vertical fundraising environment for nonprofits from the base of the nonprofit market (eTapestry) to its apex (Target Software).

Blackbaud is publicly traded. It is important to think about the fact that dollars raised by nonprofit organizations are going to Blackbaud’s investors whose major interest in Blackbaud is the profit it can produce. That is the driving force behind what Blackbaud is doing - maximizing profit. It is unrealistic to expect that acquisition mania in the CRM/Fundraising space is going to result in anything except fewer, more expensive choices. (Remember that as good and open and free as Salesforce is, it also can be acquired, and nothing is guaranteed.)

We don’t have to submit to the “Buyout Blues”! We have power and options in using open source solutions. Isn’t it time we began to realize the power of community-owned and driven software that no one can buy?

I’ve been a part of the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative for a long time, and I’ve been advocating for the use of open source software in the nonprofit sector for years. More lately, I’ve been working to focusing my advising practice on helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in their organizations, providing advice and training. I’ve installed more versions of varied Linux flavors than I could even think about remembering (going all the way back to the first or second versions of Slackware in the mid-90s). I’ve been responsible for administering many Linux servers over the years, some Red Hat, some Debian.

And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. I had a (very) brief flirtation with Windows (2000) as my primary desktop, but ever since 1987, when I bought my first computer (a Mac SE) I’ve owned at least one Macintosh. I’m not about to change that.

I’ve tried making Linux my primary desktop many times (5 at last count.) It was always something that got in my way of migration. In the beginning, it was lack of software (I first tried this back in 1999), or printer drivers. More recently (last time I tried this was back in 2004) it was not being able to sync with the palm treo I had at the time.

But, Linux has changed, and I have changed. And, in some ways, NOSI has changed - we’re thinking more and more about talking about Linux on the desktop, which we thought was not ready for nonprofit primetime for a long time. I think it’s ready now. I certainly will see. This is the 6th, and last time I will do this. Why last? Because I’ve decided that no matter what, I’m not going back. Because I want to understand, in the most personal possible way, what the pains (if any) of migration to an all free and open source platform will be.

So, I did some research, and realized that the best choice for me was to get a Thinkpad - most everything works right out of the box. I have been, unfortunately, a bit hampered by the fact that my satellite modem died last week - so we’ve been on dial up at home (and broadband at the “local” cafe). But here’s Ubuntu week 1, not edited or smoothed out. I’ll understand points of pain, for sure.

Week 1

I should have taken pictures - unboxing a new laptop is a lot of fun. I got a Lenovo Thinkpad Z61m. Good specs, cheap price. My first step was to make sure the laptop booted. It booted fine. I stopped at the license agreement. I popped in my Fiesty Fawn (Kubuntu 7.04) CD that I’d burned from a downloaded ISO, and rebooted. Once Ubuntu finished booting, I clicked the wonderful “install” icon at the top. Because the recovery media for this laptop was on the hard drive, and I also wanted to create a separate /home partition, I did a manual partition, deleting both partitions on the hard drive, and creating three partitions: /, /home, and swap. (I might regret hosing the recovery media w/o getting them on CD later, but I hope not - I was in a purist mood - I would have had to have agreed to the license agreement for Vista and activated the product in order to burn the media, and I wasn’t about to do that.)

A few minutes later, I had a Ubuntu install with KDE - but it was bare bones. The next step was to get online. That’s the first snag. Ubuntu doesn’t come default with an easy GUI way to connect to a wireless access point. I had to go command line in order to get online. I imagine if I was wired, it would automagically work (that’s been my experience in the past.) So I had to dig out of my memory (and do some online looking) about iwconfig. I also ran into a weird problem with a daemon called “avahi-daemon” which is basically the Linux implementation of “Bonjour”. I’m glad it’s there, but it mucked with my network, and it seemed strange that it was on by default.

So, I got on my wireless network, finally, and got online (I had to use a CLI tool called dhclient to get an IP address. That was annoying.)

So, so far, the major pain has been the wireless stuff. We’ll see how that works once I am able to download some of the good wireless GUI tools out there (like NetworkManager, which I hear is good.)

Next up, let’s see how the details of migration (web, mail, address book, etc. work.)

Technorati Tags: linux, nptech, opensource, windows, ubuntu

A blog reader introduced me to a new blog by a guy named Phil Jones. Among other great things, he has this amazing post about Microsoft, and their future. Basically, he argues that in the era of Web 2.0, the only really compelling platform they have is Excel. Read this post, it’s dead on.

I’ve always loved Excel (and, since I don’t own a copy, I hobble along with Open Office’s pale, pale substitute.) I’ve thought that it was truly one of the best pieces of software ever written. Really. And it’s amazing how much it can do, and how much an organization can do with it. There are plenty of very small organizations (and not so small) that run on Excel. Many shouldn’t, but, some, arguably, certainly can. And if the ideas he suggests for bringing Excel fully into the new age were actually done by Microsoft (fat chance) that would make it even better.

Technorati Tags: microsoft, web2.0

I know most of you aren’t surprised, but I’m not the Richard Stallman of the nonprofit technology community. And it’s not just because I’m female. I’ve never been dogmatic. I’ve always known that when it comes to implementing free and open source software in the sector, pragmatics are important. (And, no, don’t even think about comparing me to Eric Raymond!)

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Web 2.0 - and how that changes the equation for nonprofits. There are now three choices for many applications: proprietary, open source, and web-hosted. The web-hosted applications aren’t software, they are a service. One could argue that whether or not they are open source is about as relevant as whether or not Google is open source.

Of course, there are all sorts of other reasons for people to choose open source software over hosted software. Data privacy and security is one really important one. (Some organizations with some kinds of sensitive data, like reproductive rights organizations, should always host their own data.)

But is open data a good substitute for open source? If a proprietary web-hosted service (most are) has lots of open APIs, providing free and easy access to data for an organization, is that OK? Is that enough? I’m tempted to say “absolutely.” Of course, the best web-hosted alternative is one that is both open source and open data - these exist, but are few and far between.

This is, of course, from one single organization’s point of view. From the sector’s point of view, open source is better. One single organization certainly isn’t going to be in the position to do anything if, for instance, if Salesforce.com open-sourced their code. But, a group of nonprofits who do particular kinds of work could potentially modify a codebase like that to create something that worked really well for them.

So, I’m pragmatic. I want the best quality, most open (data and source), and least expensive solutions for nonprofits. I’ve come to realize that can come in different kinds of packages.

Technorati Tags: nptech, openAPI, opensource, web2.0

I listened in on the conference call about the merger of Get Active and Convio, because I was curious, and I wanted to find out what the lessons are in terms of both open source options, as well as openness of data. I was pleasantly surprised about how much was talked about in both of these realms. If this had happened a couple of years ago, I doubt much would have been said.

On the call: Gene Austin: Convio, Sheeraz Haji: Get Active, Tom Crackeler: Get Active, Dave Crooke: Convio

They talked about being excited by the openness of the Get Active architecture with Get Active Extensions - they expect to accelerate the openness of the Convio architecture. Sheeraz talked about having both development teams working on opening up the Convio and Get Active systems and APIs

They seem quite committed to provide openings and hooks into their applications that allow clients to get at their data. There was quite a lot of talk about APIs, and integrating the applications with other applications, including Google. They will use the need to move data from Get Active to Convio as a way to create ways to create external transactions and the like that will be opened up completely. Convio uses Salesforce for their customer relations management. They are a big Salesforce user, but they haven’t had many requests for integration with Salesforce.

A question was asked about open source - whether they were moving in that direction. David Crooke talked about how they think that open source is a great model for developing software. Both companies use a lot of open source components in their development. They think open source has a lot to offer to the nonprofit sector. They don’t envision opensourcing their codebase. The value isn’t the software, it’s the service.

And in terms of integration with open source CMS systems such as Plone or Drupal, as they develop integration between CRM and CMS we’ll also put that in. Talked about Get Active hooks with Plone. They envision doing more like that. It will never be as tightly integrated as the Get Active CMS - but they want to make it possible to have their customers work with whatever CMS they want.

All in all, it was an interesting call. I’m glad I listened in. It provokes the thought of a post on “openness vs. open source” that I’m marinating in my head.

Technorati Tags: crm, fundraising, nptech, software

I know you’ve been waiting for this. Here is, finally, chapter 4. This book is really good, but it’s also very slow going. It will take me a while to finish it, I think. I’m hoping to really read a lot of it in the next couple of weeks.

A note, for those of you that don’t read my personal blog: I’m moving on Tuesday, from California back to Massachusetts - a very long meandering trip that will take about a month (it’s a long story - read the blog). So I’ll probably be doing more blogging on my personal blog than on this blog, just because I won’t have lots of online time, and I’ll be more in a travel mode, than a thinking-about-technology mode. But I do have a bunch of things on tap, like continuing with Benkler, finishing my Open Standards series, and continuing the open source databases. I also have been doing a bit more thinking about what is, in some ways, the undercurrent of this blog: spirituality and technology. There have been some interesting ideas marinating, that I’ll share soon. OK, on to Benkler…

Chapter 4 is called “The Economics of Social Production.” In this chapter, Benkler is laying out an important argument: people engage with social production for a variety of motivations, and that it is possible to generate economically significant amounts of effort with motivations that are not economic. In addition, the increasing involvement of social production in market-based business will change the way that business is organized. His basic argument is summarized as :

“It is the feasibility of producing information, knowledge, and culture through social, rather than market or proprietary relations - through cooperative peer production and coordinate individual action - that creates the opportunities for greater autonomous action, a more critical culture, a more discursively engaged and better informed republic, and perhaps, a more equitable global community.”

I think that’s something we can likely all agree is a good thing.

First, he asks “why do people participate” - he talks about the simple economic models of human motivation - which assume that there are “things people want, and things they want to avoid” and those can be translated into money - a universal medium of exchange. He explains, with some great examples, of why these are wrong. “If you leave a fifty-dollar check on the table at the end of a dinner party at a friend’s house, you do not increase the probability that you will be invited again.” He then talks about the importance of social capital over money: “If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm’s hiring partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash.” People would rather participate in some things for social standing and recognition, rather than money.

He then talks about feasibility and efficiency of peer-based production vs. market-based production, and comes up with this stunning statement:

“A society whose institutional ecology permitted social production to thrive would be more productive under these conditions than a society that optimized its institutional environment solely for market- and firm- based production, ignoring its detrimental effects to social production.”

His arguments are compelling, and interesting. He then talks about how social production has emerged in the digitally networked environment, and the ways in which it has interfaced with market-based production - using examples such as Red Hat and IBM. And he talks about how the relationship between users and businesses changes:

“Active users require and value new and different things than passive consumers did. The industrial information economy specialized in producing finished goods, like movies or music, to be consumed passively, and well behaved appliances, like televisions, whose use was fully specified at the factory door. … Personal computers, camera phones, audio and video editing software and similar utilities are examples of tools whose value increases for users as they are enabled to explore new ways to be creative and productively engaged with others.”

The nonprofit take-away came to mind for me was to think about the model of nonprofits as passive consumers of software, vs. nonprofits actively engaged in collaboration in a peer-production environment - they are more able to define clearly what that software looks like, and how it works for them.

On to chapter 5…

Technorati Tags: books, intellectualproperty, nptech, opensource, peer2peer