Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Today, someone on the progressive exchange list asked about a tool called Rapleaf. A story about Rapleaf in Clickz (a newsletter for online marketers) says this:

Rapleaf allows you to quickly and inexpensively find out the social networking footprint of those you’re marketing to. Just send the company your e-mail list and tell it what social networking sites those on your list are using, their demographics, the numbers of friends they have, how many widgets they’re using, even their interests. Rapleaf digs into the usual social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), as well as newsgroups, commerce sites (like Amazon), review sites, forums, and news groups, and even searches the general Web to find out where your people are and what they’re doing online.

An interesting conversation ensued on the list - with some arguing that this was a problematic thing. I actually thought this could be quite useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources in the Web 2.0 space. But that’s not the point of this post.

I realized that one of the most important things that we can do is educate the organizations we work with (as well as individuals) about privacy issues and data. When is data public? When is it private? How do we know? How can we assure privacy?

It is important to understand that Rapleaf is just gathering public information on people, based on their email addresses. It is an inevitable result of our desire for social networks, as well as our desire for information to be portable (like in RSS feeds.) What’s important is that we understand what is actually public, and what isn’t, and how to keep what we want to be private, really private.

Yesterday, the big news is that Google Health launched. Google says:

“Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.”

Sounds pretty interesting, but hold on a second. Before you sign up, read the privacy policy carefully. And note: this application is not HIPAA compliant. Here’s why. They do have a point - since they don’t provide health services, they don’t need to comply with HIPAA. The language (especially in this table) seems to suggest that the privacy they are providing is better than HIPAA. I’m not so sure, and, in the end, it comes down to “trust us”. I’m just not so sure how far I should trust Google with my health care data. It gives me enough pause to trust them with my email.

This actually was a post to the Progressive Exchange discussion list.

I love twitter, which in some ways surprises me, and in some ways doesn’t. It provides for me a sense of community, and a sense of what people I know and care about things I care about are talking about (in a certain realm, on other realms, not so much). I think that Twitter is, in many ways, a harbinger of the future - I think eventually, a lot of things that happen between people over the net will work a lot like twitter, even if it’s not actually twitter - social networks carrying short snippets of people’s thoughts, ideas and events.

But right now, at this moment, twitter’s demographic is both tiny and highly nonrepresentative of the population of the world. It is made up of people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices. We are still in innovator phase here, not even early adopters have signed on.

There is no question that you will get out of twitter what you give. And, wow, yeah, you can be highly successful in twitter. And so what on earth does that really mean?

If your organization’s mission will be greatly benefited by making connections with the twitter demographic then, yeah, twitter makes tons of sense. And organizations and movements can certainly use twitter to organize - I think that’s a great strategy - as long as the majority of those to be organized are on twitter - which is quite a stretch for most orgs or movements.

But there is no way on earth that I am going to suggest that a client of mine whose demographic is mostly women over 50 that they even spend any time on twitter in trying to accomplish their mission, or even get the word out about what they are doing. Should the communications person use twitter to connect with other nonprofit communications professionals? Heck, yeah, I could easily argue it will help them in their work. Should they spend a bit of time tying their RSS feed (if they have one) to a twitter account? Sure, why not. But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy”? Or even a social network strategy? I’d be really hard pressed to suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that.

I know that people are doing fantastic work around the ways in which social networks can be powerful tools. And there are, for sure, some interesting case studies. And there are also some organizations for whom this makes sense, and who have the resources, and are ready to take good advantage of all of these tools, including twitter. But from my perspective, working with organizations that are sometimes having a hard time moving from a static website to a CMS, social networks in general, and twitter specifically, are a long way away.

I feel like what happens all the time is that we nptechies grab onto a new technology, and the first thing we think is that we gotta get organizations using it. And people in orgs hear all this buzz about this thing or that thing, and feel hard pressed and stressed to get on the bandwagon. And I feel like we don’t spend enough time thinking about whether or not it is appropriate - whether it makes sense, whether it really is going to benefit the mission of the organizations we work with.

Those of you steeped deeply in Web 2.0 know danah boyd. She’s a brilliant academic who studies social networks. A couple of days ago, she made a call on her blog for academics to stop publishing articles in closed journals.

On one hand, I’m excited to announce that my article “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck: Exposure, Invasion, and Social Convergence” has been published in Convergence 14(1) (special issue edited by Henry Jenkins and Mark Deuze). On the other hand, I’m deeply depressed because I know that most of you will never read it. It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. Even if you read an early draft of my article in essay form, you’ll probably never get to read the cleaned up version. Nor will you get to see the cool articles on alternate reality gaming, crowd-sourcing, convergent mobile media, and video game modding that are also in this issue. That’s super depressing. I agreed to publish my piece at Sage for complicated reasons, but…

I vow that this is the last article that I will publish to which the public cannot get access. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.

It’s really worth a read. If I were still an academic, I’d totally take her up on it. She is also realistic - she describes in detail in the post what people can do, whether they are tenured or not.

I agree with her that open journals are the future. She says, at the end of her long entry:

Making systemic change like this is hard and it will require every invested party to stand up for what they know is right and chip away at the old system. I don’t have tenure (and at this rate, no one will ever let me). I am a young punk scholar and I strongly believe that we have a responsibility to stand up for what’s right. Open-access is right. Heavy metal gates and expensive gatekeepers isn’t. It’s time for change to happen! To all of the academics out there, I beg you to help me make this change reality. Let’s stop being silenced by academic publishers.

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 spent too much time watching demos from DEMO, which is this twice yearly event that showcases the most bleeding edge internet technology. It looked quite like it might be a fun event to be at, but the hefty $3000 price tag for admission wasn’t something that I could possibly stomach, so I sat in front of my laptop, watching people describe new tools.

There weren’t a whole lot of new tools that looked especially useful in the short term for nonprofits, but I’ll highlight a few that I think might be.

• Of course, there is a lot of buzz about Sprout.  Sproutbuilder is this amazing drag-and-drop widget maker you’ve just gotta try (invite here - just start, and it will prompt you to create an account when you want to save your sprout.)  Carnet Williams, of nptech fame, did a demo of Sprout at Demo.
• Another really amazing tool is Blist. Think of Blist as a really interesting combination of really pretty Excel, with some very cool features thrown in from FileMakerPro, in a sweet looking interface, that works in any web browser. It’s being billed as the “easiest database” and I pretty much have to agree.  Have a look at the demo. It’s still in “private” beta (ask for an invite, you’ll probably get one - I did.) There are a lot of features that are unfinished, but what’s done is polished, and pretty smooth. You can share these Blists. So this is definitely a tool to watch.
• good2gether is an interesting concept. Watch the demo. Basically, they partner with localized web media outlets, and provide widgets that contain information about local nonprofits that are connected to content. So if the article is about a fire, you might see on the widget information about the American Red Cross, or other local nonprofits that address the needs of victims of fire. Corporations sponsor the widget, so there is a brand showing. As a nonprofit, what you would do is set up a profile, and I imagine tags or keywords would indicate where your link would show up.
• Seesmic is also getting a lot of buzz, certainly in the “twitterverse,” but also elsewhere. Seesmic is a video conversation site. It’s an interesting concept. I think like a lot of Web 2.0 stuff, I think it will take a while to figure out how nonprofits can use it. I am, of course, waiting for Beth to tell us.

There were a bunch of other tools, and I look forward to seeing which of them emerges to become more mainstream.

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?

Some interesting things are happening in Web2.0 land. There has been quite the dustup, started by Facebook kicking Richard Scoble off, because he’d violated the Facebook terms of service. As a result, Scoble joined the group dataportability.org, which I’ve been monitoring for a few months now. Why did Scoble get booted (he has since been reinstated)? Because of a script that scraped names and email addresses from Facebook, called Plaxo Pulse.

I think people are finally realizing that the current state of affairs - where we can pump data into Facebook and other social networks, but not get data out of them, is untenable. There’s a poll on mashable.com, where the sentiment is most certainly heavily in favor of Facebook opening up the social graph.

So after my brief lapse, I’m going back to my promise: no more social networks until the data flows both ways, and I can take my social graph with me.

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.

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.)