Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 26, 2008

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. In the process of going deep into those CRMs, I’ve been thinking about how nonprofits might choose CRMs to begin with.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

Now, of course, as a techie, and someone with a home network, and multiple computers, and varied projects, there is always a list like this. Of course with my mac, I opened up the system preferences, checked a button, and, voila! There are several issues here, of course. Needless to say, I’m doing that right now.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Why I won’t be buying Leopard November 1, 2007 As many of you know, Apple’s newest version of the Mac OS, 10.5 , shipped just a few days ago. The only thing that will be left is games.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 30, 2008

Beth is, of course, THE web 2.0 Amy is a great source for nptech tips of all types. Beth Kanter asks whether or not we can add some more steps to Chris Brogan’s fabulous 50 steps to create a social media presence. and social network guru for the nptech community. Allan Benamer talks about Convio’s new big client, Susan G.

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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. I have found this invaluable as a way to move forward in my course of study.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

Of course, it’s only a study of Convio’s clients – but it’s interesting nonetheless. { It’s actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read. 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 Tim Shih 04.22.08 at 11:06 am Hi Michelle, Thank you for your review of ReviewBasics!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 19, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology NPTECH Punk June 19, 2008 Beth, of course, suggested this , and I’m jumping on her bandwagon. I realized, in being introduced to Edupunk , that I have been doing it for, oh, almost 20 years now.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 24, 2008

There are, of course, some tweaks we can make to make sure that everyone really can gain value from NTC, and we can sustain the richness that it contains. The conference was rich with great speakers and content, and it’s great to see how far things have come. And I’m already looking forward to NTC in San Francisco in 2009!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 15, 2008

Bittorrent is a bit of an arcane art (and, of course, getting a bit of a bad rep, since it’s the major avenue for P2P pirating.) Way more than I could even talk about intelligently. But that is great – if you know your stuff, you can get a lot of performance out of Azureus.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 29, 2008

And, of course there is still Salesforce.com, as well as the developing realm of free and open source options, like CiviCRM. Blackbaud’s other recent acquisition, eTapestry, did open up their APIs recently, although they leave much to be desired. And how will Convio react? It’s going to get interesting, for sure.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

She suggests not to panic, and not to change course – keep steady, and keep communicating. Joanne Fritz asks the question that is probably on the minds of lots of folks in the nonprofit sector: what are we going to do in facing the current problematic economic climate?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Gender, Race and Open Source June 29, 2007 My session on Free and Open Source software and the US Social Forum went great yesterday. And aren’t those different that the issues other groups of people face?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 17, 2008

Of course, the proof will be in the pudding – we’ll find out over time how this app works, and whether organizations like it. This ups the ante major league for Blackbaud, for sure, as well as other long time desktop donor database providers. It may, depending on pricing, even give the open source CiviCRM a bit of competition.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 9, 2007

July 9, 2007 So I talk a lot about both open source software, and the preciousness of one’s own data. One big one was my address book. First problem: Linux address books … suck. It’s not as bad as Thunderbird, except, of course, it doesn’t integrate with Thunderbird. It sometimes tastes yucky.

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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. Which, of course, kinda defeats the purpose of an open standard.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

Of course, there is a lot of buzz about Sprout. I am, of course, waiting for Beth to tell us. 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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Giving up, a little August 6, 2007 As you might know, I migrated from using a MacBook Pro laptop as my primary desktop, to eating my own dogfood, as it were, and using Ubuntu Linux as my primary desktop.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

Of course, the bottom line is that this makes it more likely that Google can get their ad platform onto phones. This means that anyone can hack their phones – and a raft of developers can create really interesting kinds of software for phones. The SDK will be available later this month.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 13, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Facebook Ad Platform November 13, 2007 It always takes me a bit to digest new Web 2.0 That, of course, can spread virally. The platform contains two parts, which I’ll talk about individually.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 18, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology More FUD from Redmond May 18, 2007 I hear, in my head, the famed quote from Rodney King: “why can’t we all just get along?&# It’s “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt&# all over again.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

Actually, a client had a grant proposal, and it included the consultant’s “theory of practice&# which of course is something that most organizational development/effectiveness type consultants have, but rather few technology consultants have. This is a really interesting professional development activity, I think.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

Of course, OpenSocial has blown the doors off of all of this, and what’s come out of it is quite interesting. Jon Stahl pointed me to a great article , also about opening up the social graph. There is a Google group (called Social Network Portability), that you should definitely join if you are at all interested in these issues.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 18, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Platforms break open, part II October 18, 2007 The dust is settling. Of course, the API was only one part of Convio’s initiative, so I do still think they come out ahead, a bit.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

But first, of course, you must be “verified&# as a Kintera Connect partner. Developers who code solutions that integrate with Kintera using their open API platform, Connect , can win $15,000 or $5,000 (not the $25 K their big logo seems to suggest – that’s just the total they will award.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

Of course, I’ve been a wiki fan since the very beginning, and I haven’t lost the desire for true data portability , and open source alternatives to the current social networks. 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 13, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Back Channels, Workflow, Data, Twitter, and me March 13, 2007 I read Beth’s recent blog entry on Twitter , and of course, the neo-luddite in me said “waste of time!&#

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology OpenOffice.org to get a boost September 13, 2007 I’ve been spending a lot of time with OpenOffice.org lately.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 30, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Varied and sundry before a brief break August 30, 2007 I’m taking a brief 4 day weekend – not that it would be that noticeable on this blog, since I don’t always post consistently.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

I’ve learned a lot about FOSS since then, of course, and the other aspects of FOSS have also come to be very important to me. I do agree, fundamentally, with the four freedoms laid out by the Free Software Foundation : The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

So running RHEL on Amazon E2 is a potentially low-cost, low-pain way for nonprofits (with appropriate levels of tech staff, of course) to dip their toes into hosting complex applications on Linux, without having that noisy box in the corner. { 2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 me_just_me 11.12.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 14, 2007

December 14, 2007 I feel misunderstood. And of course, my problem here is that my background is in science, not marketing – so I find it impossible to look at data and not see its weak points. Earlier this week, I wrote a post on about the NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. 3 Christopher Scott 12.17.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2007

In a sense, of course, if you are a technology provider and you install Linux on some servers or desktops in an organization, you are “reselling&# Linux. Which, of course, is why most people buy Red Hat, instead of installing Fedora or Debian, etc. So they take RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and repackage it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 16, 2008

In a sense, we are, of course quite biased. Of course, one can’t base anything on two forum comments, but I wonder if we haven’t turned a corner in the conversation. But this seems very low, considering that probably 5,000+ people saw the announcement (adding up the totals for the varied list subscriptions.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 19, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The scarcity mentality March 19, 2007 Kudos to Michele Martin who brings up a sticky issue: the scarcity mentality. So, guess what? No web development help.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Vendorspeak August 24, 2007 One of the things I’ve noticed recently is that my blog is getting the attention of software vendors. I guess that’s a good thing. Maybe it means I have “arrived&#.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 15, 2007

October 15, 2007 If you are new to this site, you might want to read more , and subscribe to my feed. Deliver, don’t just hype - of course, marketing is important, but when the rubber really has to meet the road, be there with more than vaporware. What’s to lose?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

Part III: Blogs, Podcasting and Vlogs September 27, 2006 When I start out these series, I seem to have an idea in hand about how to organize them, which, invariably, gets rearranged in the course of writing. Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations don’t need blogs. Such is life. That’s part of the point.

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