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 Why I won’t be buying a Kindle November 26, 2007 I think I might need a new blog category: why I won’t be buying … First Leopard, now, Kindle. Allows me to upload any open document format (.odt,

Open Source 100

Open Source Amazon Sound RSS 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

It took me a couple of frustrating hours or so to configure samba (editing the samba.conf file and testing) so that I could share my home directory, with music and video, with my other computers, and share my printer. If pretty much all I did was documents, email and the web, like many people, I wouldn’t be having these issues.

Open Source 111

Open Source Ubuntu Music Course 111

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

That includes applications from Google Documents, to Salesforce.com, to Gliffy.com , (the service I used to create that graphic.) What you should do Make an assessment – will using this online tool really save money or time, or facilitate collaboration in ways that is not possible with local apps?

AJAX 134

AJAX Application Open Source Plugin 134

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 10, 2007

I’ve been reading Matt Asay’s blog on open source business models, and he has an interesting post which suggests that writing documentation is a good marketing strategy ! Although the breaks I take during my work day don’t look like this, I liked this cartoon.

Open Source 100

Open Source Comment Second Life RSS 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I do a ton of technical writing, and I have become the “documentation facilitator&# of the OpenMRS project – it is an open source medical records system, designed to serve clinics in low-resource areas (such as sub-sarahan Africa) that treat patients with HIV/AIDS.

Consultant 111

Consultant Open Source Database Tech 111

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 Michele Martin 07.11.08 at 6:06 am Michelle, I love this! Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

Practice 100

Practice Open Source Consultant Articulate 100

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. :-) { 2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 Devdas Bhagat 11.22.07

Open Source 100

Open Source Open Social Social Network 100

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. A large chunk (the majority?)

Ubuntu 100

Ubuntu Open Source RSS Tech 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

See if they have good documentation. 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? Check out the website. Make sure that the features that it outlines there match your requirements. How busy is it?

Open Source 100

Open Source Software Open Free 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 15, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Kintera Connect August 15, 2007 I listened in on the call with Kintera folks about their new platform, called Connect. I have become fascinated by the ways the CRM/Fundraising space is changing so rapidly.

Kintera 100

Kintera Open Source API Platform 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

One of the most important things to understand is that SaaS is primarily built upon open source tools such as Apache, MySQL, and MySQL. But it is annoying when something is trumpeted as open source but hasn’t been architected or documented in a way that would allow others to make practical use of the code). 5 friarminor 09.30.08

Open Source 100

Open Source Open API Software 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

at 8:54 pm Most of the programming problems are misuse of the well documented abstract layers. Even though the documents online explains it well, people still use the T() and the DB_QUERY() functions incorrectly. at 4:26 pm Dave Keays wrote: Most of the programming problems are misuse of the well documented abstract layers.

Drupal 100

Drupal Comment Report Metrics 100

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. One of my favorite quotes in the Connect documentation is this one: “As long as you can invoke the API over HTTP, your application can be Microsoft, HP, IBM, Novell, Oracle, even Sun-based. The API is SOAP. apps out there.

Open 100

Open Platform Kintera API 100

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 31, 2007

I had been thinking it was an isolated moment of geekily recursive silliness, but today I got a ping from Lucy Hooberman , also from the UK, about a post she wrote that observes that so many people are live blogging conferences that it produces a lot of documentation of the event. Davos 2007.??? At this rate, we???ll

Social Media 50

Social Media Conversation Tools Switzerland 50

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology This guy is right on April 18, 2007 A blog reader introduced me to a new blog by a guy named Phil Jones. The ED wants file sharing or VNC but won’t even try to use MediaWiki to maintain basic documents.

Open Source 100

Open Source Mediawiki Files Open 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

Part IIa: Social Bookmarking September 24, 2006 After writing my post on tagging , I got sidetracked by Marnie Webb’s mention of ma.gnolia , and then went off to investigate, then decided to write about social bookmarking tools. Ma.gnolia is a new(ish) social bookmarking tool. It should be interesting to see how this plays out.

Bookmarking 100

Bookmarking Web Social API 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 20, 2006

Also, basically, what made an API "open" was that it was free to use, and well documented. It seemed that only Blackbaud had APIs you have to pay for. The other vendors either supply their paying customers with APIs, or, in the case of civicspace, the APIs are, well, free and open, like everything else about open source.

Web 100

Web API Open Source NTEN 100

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. It’s $.24

Search 100

Search Web Open Source Audio 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 16, 2009

Also, we posted the slides from our talk on the integration here: [link] We’re working on some additional documentation and screencasts as well as a distribution of Plone that includes the salesforce.com integration ready to go! 3 Christopher Johnson 05.05.09 Look for that shortly.

Integration 100

Integration Drupal Module Open Source 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

They both have good documentation and active communities. Not to mention the excellent console tools. I can imagine, though, that the Symfony approach can be powerful. Looking at Ohloh , Cake is more popular than Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot more developers (81 vs 17).

Open Source 100

Open Source Database Model AJAX 100

Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JULY 6, 2009

However I wanted to record, primarily for my own sake, while fresh in my mind a recap of the social media tools we used (and other related factors) for our conference. Most of this follows what we provided for attendees as our “conference tech tools”. I resisted using the title of “report card”. Previously, On NMC….

Social Media 81

Social Media Media Social Flickr 81

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

What do these tools allow you to do? It’s definitely a new project, and a very new community (with some huge warts) but it is promising for organizations that want to create private (or public, perhaps) social networks that include groups, discussions, document sharing, bookmarking, blogs and other things. 3 Takeo 04.28.09

Social Network 100

Social Network System Network Management 100

Have Fun - Do Good

NOVEMBER 28, 2007

I've now documented women's lives in 40 countries, over the past 10 or 12 years, and everywhere I went, I found women who were helping each other, local women. They were using music, dance, poetry, and storytelling, and they were succeeding. Can you talk a little bit about why they used arts, and why it was an effective tool?

Photography 40

Photography Interview Zimbabwe Change 40