Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Wiki Syntax madness November 26, 2007 As most people deeply imbedded in Web 2.0, And none of these have the same syntax – they are similar, but slightly different. I am an avid Wiki user.

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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? In that trio was Organizer’s Database, the desktop open source DMS. What can we say about the open source packages? And Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations. 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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

My theory of practice is different than my consulting philosophy. Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology My Theory of Practice July 10, 2008 I finally had the reason to begin to more completely articulate my theory of practice. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

I’m reading this book at the same time as I’ve been working on the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. I’m realizing that all of the justifications for why I am so into open source and free software is right here in this book! But peer production also scares people silly. Thanks for the comments!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 9, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Getting Naked: Being human and transparent October 9, 2007 If you are new to this site, you might want to read more , and subscribe to my feed. Sorry it’s a day late. Be Helpful.

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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

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. So I like Joomla. Do I like it better than Drupal? I’m not yet sure.

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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

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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Amy Sample Ward

JANUARY 20, 2011

I describe Social Actions as an aggregation of actions people can take on any issue that’s built to be highly distributable across the social web. We pull in donation opportunities, volunteer positions, petitions, event, and other actions from 60+ different sources. That’s today. Originally, adding actions manually.

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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

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.

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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.

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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

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

JUNE 24, 2008

On the Windows side the hardware manufacturers make proprietary drivers for Windows, and very few make drivers for Linux, or open source their drivers so that Linux developers can use them. And, of course, designers need software that just don’t have high enough quality open source alternatives yet.

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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

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

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. This breaks the whole thing open. I’m not so clear about how this helps users.

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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. I know that’s one more thing in a long list of considerations (and it’s generally more important to think about for the CRM – the CMS, if it is modern, and especially if it is open source, will provide few barriers to integration.)

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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

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

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&#.

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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

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

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

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

Unfortunately, the nptech world hasn’t yet caught on to the “Planet&# phenomenon of the open source world (see Planet Ubuntu Women.) These are sites that are simply aggregators of the blogs of those involved in a particular open source project (like, in this case, women involved in Ubuntu ). Be Helpful.

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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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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

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

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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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

JULY 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The “Open Source Software is Free&# myth July 14, 2008 I had a startling realization a few days ago. No one would think that anyone thought that implementing open source software was without cost.

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Wild Apricot

JUNE 27, 2008

In defining your target audience, too, keep the intended outcome in mind: Which people are actually in a position to act on your information? While celebrity endorsements have power in marketing, studies suggest that most people are more open to a transfer or exchange of knowledge with a respected peer. open source.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 30, 2007

Cambodian young people are joining the global conversation in the blogosphere and sharing their perspectives through different forms of grassroots citizen's media thanks to the efforts of a dedicated team of Cambodian bloggers. at 14 different universities in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap with more than 1700 students participating.

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