Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 15, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants: Better Late than Never May 15, 2007 This carnival is a day late, unfortunately. It makes sense that can make a difference in how people respond to appeals.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 16, 2008

But this seems very low, considering that probably 5,000+ people saw the announcement (adding up the totals for the varied list subscriptions.) In the past, people cared much more about whether or not something was free (as in beer) or cheap, and whether or not it was open source wasn’t on the radar. 3 Beth Kanter 01.20.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2007

July 6, 2007 Deborah, is, as per usual, diplomatic in her discussion of the site " Sustainable Nonprofit ", which is a new(?) I think the time has come to think differently. I am still a novice in the world of nonprofits, but certainly not in helping people. Throw a website at it! at 11:51 am Sadly, you’re right.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 2, 2008

In some ways, it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there are. So how did people like these? There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM systems and Donor Management Systems. Many of the CRMs also show up here, although there are quite a number of packages that did not show up in the earlier survey.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 21, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Book Reviews October 21, 2007 I read three books recently that I thought would be worth reviewing here. A very different context than I, or most people reading this work in, for sure.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 15, 2007

July 15, 2007 As you will have undoubtedly figured out – this blog moved! To recap, I took the following steps: Set up my blog on a different domain (in this case, it was zenofnptech.com.) Letting people know Changing the DNS of the old site (and changing the site on wordpress.) I’d recommend it to anyone.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 19, 2007

I got to be a geek, and feel like I was really making a difference in the workings of organizations, and, hopefully, in people’s lives. Although it certainly could be argued that would have just involved different demons. I want to see people’s real faces, and hear their real voices. And, I think I did that.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 6, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tagging Discussion January 6, 2007 Beth started a cross-blog discussion about tagging and folksonomies, and I thought I’d weigh in. But is efficiency the most important thing?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Consolidation among vendors means that some customers will be dealing with different (and larger, potentially less friendly) entities. But a few more people will have a lot more money in their bank accounts. It also means fewer options. And this, I think, is one really important thing to think hard about.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Consolidation among vendors means that some customers will be dealing with different (and larger, potentially less friendly) entities. But a few more people will have a lot more money in their bank accounts. It also means fewer options. And this, I think, is one really important thing to think hard about.

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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 What OpenSocial Means November 1, 2007 The buzz of the blogosphere is the announcement of Google’s OpenSocial. Friendster, Orkut, Hi5 and LinkedIn have very different demographic and geographic reaches.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 10, 2008

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). It is made up of people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

The thing that is prompting this post is the little storm about the security metric that we used to try and get a handle on the security of the 4 different systems we reviewed. You might think that comparing four different open source packages that, in essence, do pretty the same thing (in a broad sense) would be a cakc walk.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

August 7, 2007 I’ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. and our own Social Source Commons , are a different animal.) Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens&#. The content centered ones, like flickr, del.icio.us

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

It’s going to take some real elbow grease of reaching out to people who might begin to form the kernel of a development community to get that going. At the same time, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference to the customer that was going to hire Mpower anyway. So my hope is that they really begin to use the platform.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

Experiments, snafus and stumbles December 17, 2007 I seem to have lost my head. 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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 29, 2006

So in comes IPv6, a different kind of addressing protocol. One of my favorite people who makes geeky stuff understandable is Carla Schroeder. Which, on one hand, seems like a lot, but it’s not, when every cell phone, PC, router, cable set top box and toaster has one. It will likely even manage to make it into space, I think.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Spirituality and Technology January 19, 2007 A number of people have written me, and said that they appreciate that there is a blog with a spiritual take on technology. Spirituality is in creation.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

April 15, 2007 At NTC , there was a lot of talk about the “big three&# open source CMS packages that most people these days in our sector are using: Drupal , Plone , and Joomla. It’s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. I guess that’s where it gets interesting when you work with a CMS, right?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Social Networks and Digital Sharecropping October 1, 2007 I was reading Deborah Finn’s curmugeonly post about Facebook. I have been having curmudgeonly thoughts about social networks in general.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

Chapter 3 is a discussion on Peer production – it talks about how it is that people have come together to collaboratively create software and content – basically, knowledge production. Watching the collaboration of people across time zones developing these proposals has really been inspiring to me. Thanks for the comments!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Speaking too soon April 15, 2007 I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks ago , saying I was done with technology consulting. It just wasn’t happening very well.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

I think that for a while, at least, Linux won’t be a good desktop option this broad group of people. Because most people will only use what they are familiar with. it is particularly sad because its still virtually impossible to spend grant money on GNU/Linux support, people like to fund shiny hologram boxes.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

Think about how powerful the use of the metaphors around the "war on terror" are, and how differently we’d think about our world and our life if the prevailing metaphor were one of "catching criminals who use terrorist tactics." Human beings use metaphors all the time to understand the world, and to frame it.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 10, 2010

Note From Beth: Since 2007, I've been using, adapting, and remixing the Social Media Game social media workshops for nonprofits. The big challenge with training is the challenge of transfer - after people go through a training - do they actually put the knowledge and skills into practice? People were extremely engaged.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

DECEMBER 2, 2009

MySpace is not just a community of poor people! In fact, I think MySpace is probably the best online representative of our society in terms of race and class that exists on the Web today, but it is incorrect to assume that MySpace is only a community of poor people. Facebook is mostly used to stay connected to people you know.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

I have pretty much always understood the difference between blogs and websites – but I recently got a better feeling as I was redoing my own website. Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations don’t need blogs. All of these are good questions, and will be totally different for different organizations.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds. The challenge is to design a template that travels well and can be easily and consistently updated (when our organization moved, I had 5 different footers to update). Some take internal staff resources (especially the Manual strategy.) 13 Eoin 06.25.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I think those are better ideas than community blogs – and it’s so easy for people to get involved. And even if they were, they might not integrate well (For example, I use three different Basecamp accounts – which don’t integrate with each other.) Hint to NTEN : Affinity Group Planets!) Second, is bookmarking.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2007

At least in Massachusetts, the majority of nonprofits work with network support people who don’t focus totally on nonprofit organizations (there are some wonderful exceptions, however, of companies that focus on the sector.) Which, of course, is why most people buy Red Hat, instead of installing Fedora or Debian, etc.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The search for good web conferencing August 17, 2007 I decided, perhaps rashly, that one way of exposing people to, and training people on, open source software, was by doing web conferencing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Source Database solutions part I January 1, 2007 I’m throwing up my hands. Y’all will just have to live with overlapping series. I have too many ideas be sequential. I promise (!)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Source Database solutions part I January 1, 2007 I’m throwing up my hands. Y’all will just have to live with overlapping series. I have too many ideas be sequential. I promise (!)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

But what about sites people who do the same kinds of work that you do, or like the same kinds of things that you do? You could google for them, but wouldn’t it be great to see other people’s links – things they found organically? Does it really connect me to people? to Ma.gnolia. Sometimes, but not generally.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

September 17, 2007 There is an interesting discussion happening between Holly Ross, soon to be ED of NTEN, and Allan Benamer , about web statistics, and whether or not nonprofits should be “transparent&# and publish their web statistics. It’s been there since 9/7/2007, two days after my call for getting people on Quantcast.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

MARCH 21, 2010

Somewhere around 2006 or 2007, I got a call from Michaela asking for advice on a career path for Nonprofit Technology. During a panel on fundraising, Donors Choose raised enough money to fund a music classroom project in Austin. I am ready to do big things, help people, and make some real strides this year.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

AUGUST 11, 2010

Note from Beth: Last month I had the pleasure of presenting on a panel at Association of California Orchestras with Marc van Bree , an arts and social media blogger I met in 2007. Kicking off the effort was paired with an e-mail to a list of about 30 classical music bloggers. One donor was a friend of a friend. The positives.

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