Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

What can an organization use a LMS for? Well, that depends of course, on the organization. Many organizations provide trainings, courses, and varied sorts of learning activities to their constituents. An LMS, or learning platform, is a system that is designed to facilitate some sort of learning process over the web.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 6, 2008

Dataportability.org – the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 So, I’m evangelizing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

They have released two studies, one on the “wired wealthy&# and another which is a “nonprofit benchmark index&# study – basically providing some benchmarks for organizations to measure themselves against, traffic, email newsletter click through rates, etc. It’s actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

at 4:17 pm We are finding that to stand out there has to be something that provides and opportunity for the organization to be remembered. Recently, in working with a number of our domestic violence organizations we came up with a logo for the message. at 12:13 pm { 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 robert guinto 04.19.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 21, 2008

which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality. CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need CRM functionality. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0, CiviCRM ranked #1 in satisfaction in the recent NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 26, 2008

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

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 17, 2008

They are starting with a “charter&# program – a few nonprofit organizations, to iron out all of the varied issues, both technical and logistical, I imagine. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding – we’ll find out over time how this app works, and whether organizations like it. And make it reasonably priced.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 24, 2008

It was incredibly well organized and smooth running, the food and snacks were great, and the parties rocked. And I’m already looking forward to NTC in San Francisco in 2009! { I want to give huge props to Holly and all of the NTEN crew for putting on a fabulous conference. at 12:00 pm Thanks Michelle – and thanks to you!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

So what does this mean for you, o struggling nonprofit organization? 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. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I’ve been hearing good things about SugarCRM from organizations that use it. That’s the one I’ve been using. They also have a newer on-demand version (that is, software as a service, like salesforce.) It also gets kudos from NTEN’s satisfaction survey (it came in third, after CiviCRM and Salesforce.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2007

November 21, 2007 Beth’s wonderful post about a decision tree for whether or not an organization should get into the social networking business had a link to a comment about OpenSocial. It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very similar needs in terms of kinds of applications.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 4, 2008

Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 19, 2008

To their credit Convio asks this question on their blog : “Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply self-serving marketing fluff?&# What do you think? Time will tell. { Time will tell. { Time will tell. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 5, 2008

And, in a bigger picture way, how important do you think it is for people who work with nonprofit organizations on technology issues to keep up? For me/my organization, it’s not critical that anyone be way out on that bleeding edge. How do you keep up? How bleeding edge do we need to be? { We’re just not there yet.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 15, 2008

The next version of Azureus, called Vuze , which I haven’t yet used, looks like it incorporates a media player and channels and such. Basically, becoming a serious competitor for Miro , which I’ll talk about in the next post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Microsoft Fails to get ISO fast-track for OOXML September 7, 2007 For those of you that pay attention to open standards, this is old(ish) news. In fact, that is far from the case.) I’ll keep you posted. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Online Courses November 6, 2007 I’ve been thinking a lot about giving online courses in the use of open source software.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1] These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1] These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1]

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 13, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Movable Type goes Open Source December 13, 2007 This is old news, sort of. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open content business models December 1, 2007 I’m at the Open Translation event, and we’ve just had a great session on open content business models.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 16, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tips for reducing IT costs August 16, 2007 Nicholas Carr, who writes the blog Rough Type , is a smart dude. The one I love the best: Procrastinate.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 10, 2008

I actually thought this could be quite useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources in the Web 2.0 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. But that’s not the point of this post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 31, 2008

at 2:51 pm There’s a great free Firefox plugin for students & researchers who need to manage citations and bibliographies, not to mention organize all those PDFs…Zotero is wonderful, and works perfectly with Word (for those of us still hooked on some Microsoft programs). I’ll be using it long after I graduate.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 24, 2008

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. Because WordPress is so easy to use, people have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. I doubt you’ll look back. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 10, 2008

In the last few months, I was involved in helping three organizations choose vendors for varied technology projects, and in the course of that time, I talked with almost a dozen technology vendors of one type or another. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 3, 2008

Thunderbird is in the process of being spun out of the Mozilla Foundation into it’s own organization, dubbed “MailCo.&# And its secure, makes doing GPG signatures and encryption easy (although I haven’t gotten around to doing them, though. Shame on me.) I don’t know if that name will stick.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

The client is quite knowledgeable about their organization, mission, and goals for a project, but often not knowledgeable about technology. The role I play most often currently is providing a clear and understandable avenue between the client and a technology vendor (such as web or database development shop).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Joining the NTEN Board August 7, 2007 Katrin, the Executive Director of NTEN, announced today that I’m joining the Board. (So So now’s my chance to blog about it!)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

But it’s only been in the last few years that mega storage, and mega processing power were available to organizations to power big web applications and the like. If a nonprofit organization has a server, it’s actually not so unlikely that it is running RHEL. They started out with their S3 – simple storage service.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. How do you go about finding out whether it’s the right software, and whether the project has a healthy community, since you don’t want to adopt a project that doesn’t?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 19, 2008

But in the nonprofit realm, my perspective on helping nonprofit organizations with technology issues has a lot to do with client empowerment, learning based on what’s needed at the moment, and active collaboration. Sounds a lot like Edupunk, doesn’t it?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 12, 2007

December 12, 2007 I had a good look at NTEN’s CRM Satisfaction Survey (yippee for data!), Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access). 201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. That’s pretty impressive.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

Open Data November 8, 2007 As the hype (which, I agree I have contributed to ) around OpenSocial dies down, the reality behind OpenSocial becomes clear. Sure, some very savvy organizations will do well if they have to develop only two (or one) app for social networks. O’Reilly doesn’t really have an answer for that one.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

I’ll be watching the Open Handset Alliance, and wondering when I can replace my Blackberry with an open phone. { Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

The first module is a “don’t drink the koolaid&# module – another words – how to identify when social media isn’t right for your organization. I’d love your thoughts on this – particularly looking at the questions that folks suggested [link] 2 admin 08.14.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Linux Desktop Migration November 16, 2007 Linux has proven itself as a server platform – no one really questions it. But can it really be a desktop platform for nonprofit organizations?

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