Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 21, 2007

More lately, I’ve been working to focusing my advising practice on helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in their organizations, providing advice and training. And, for all of that time, the Macintosh has been my primary desktop. This is the 6th, and last time I will do this.

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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. I tout the benefits of open source software. First problem: Linux address books … suck. But the last time I tried Evolution, it was a horrible experience. Open source projects do get better.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology My iPhone 3G August 12, 2008 I once joined the “iPhone non-buyers&# group on Facebook. I swore up and down I wouldn’t get one. comes out. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 29, 2008

February 29, 2008 OK, so we all know that I have been eating my own dogfood (that is, using Linux on the desktop) for a while now. At this point, I still have to futz with the configs every time I start up, and it still isn’t right. We are trying to eat our own dog food re: transparency and openness in social media.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 14, 2007

I’ve now seen two posts (one from David Gielhufe , and one from Lobo of CiviCRM ) suggesting that I dismissed the extremely positive results for the open source CRM tools (particularly CiviCRM) because the sample wasn’t large, or representative of the sector. To my mind, it bodes well for the open source tools.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tidbits February 14, 2008 These are tidbits of things I’ve gotten recently from vendors, or gotten via feeds or twitter. Kintera opens a Developers Challenge. Setup of all three has a one time fee.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

August 11, 2008 You’ve likely heard a lot about “ cloud computing “ And what’s true is that the sales-talk about computing in the cloud certainly makes the conceptual issues behind it, honestly, well, cloudy. Changes in the application happen without your knowledge or consent. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 10, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Reflection and Evaluation March 10, 2008 Michele Martin, one of my fave bloggers, has a great post today on Reflective Practice. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 30, 2007

Not because I don’t want my blog to be better, it’s just that I don’t have the time right now. I figured it was a good time to think about and articulate mine. But my role in that context is much more around helping to solve specific problems, or educate in specific ways about technology options. { Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 9, 2007

I figured it was time to give my final assessment. Here are the good things: Even macs get weird sometimes, especially if they’ve been on for a long time. The only time I shut down this laptop is when I’m taking it somewhere, which is relatively rarely. I love apt-get/aptitude.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

June 24, 2008 I’m doing a webinar on Linux Desktops next month, and it’s making me think a lot about my own experience using Linux on the desktop, and where I think things are going. I have had varied problems , from issues of software integration, video problems, wireless issues … The list is getting very long.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 19, 2013

Majora Carter is on a quest to save the world one community at a time. She founded the nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx , was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and today leads the Majora Carter Group , an economic consulting firm she formed in 2008 to bring her approach to underserved communities across the country.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

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. As a quick comparative look between a small number of open source systems, it’s hard to argue that it contributes no information. More on that in a bit.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

It’s the standard “if I have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.&# I wanted to figure out how to make my product solve every problem that my clients had – or, if I couldn’t, I wanted to figure out how to build/install/integrate something that could. . But, I was myopic anyway. you the picture.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

I think one of the problems here is that people see spreadsheets as *just* one component of an office suite. So someone like Sun think that they need to give equal time to making their PowerPoint clone and their Access clone. Phil: I agree – with time and effort, OO or any open source spreadsheet could out Excel Excel.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 5, 2007

I spent lots of time reading the reviews (many of which were BAD), but we decided to plunk down the dough (lots of it) and go for it. Shell sessions are basically not doable, unless I am amazingly patient – the 4 second latency is definitely a problem in that case. It bounced back up a couple of times. We got Hughesnet.

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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

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I don’t get paid to blog, so I don’t really want to spend my time doing that. Unfortunately, the nptech world hasn’t yet caught on to the “Planet&# phenomenon of the open source world (see Planet Ubuntu Women.) I’m getting tired of wasting more time in front of my computer. That is so cool.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

I’m someone who has, since day one, tried my damnedest (and succeeded 96% of the time) to only say by email, or put up, what I would say in a room full of people. Maybe it’s time to go back to being a curmudgeon. { I happen to be someone who has had a relatively high online presence since before the web (remember Usenet?)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

Human beings use metaphors all the time to understand the world, and to frame it. " Software uses metaphors all the time as well. at 7:57 pm Interesting that you and Jamie are thinking similar things at the same time: [link] 2 Katrin 10.11.06 Metaphors are powerful in terms of the way we think about things.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

First, the major problem is that there are, at this point, so many of them, and although many (most?) of them have open APIs (that is, they allow other software to interact with them, and grab data, or add data,) they aren’t really interoperable (see Marshall Kirkpatricks excellent post on issues regarding Yahoo and del.icio.us

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Tech Soup

MARCH 29, 2017

Ushahidi has been developing open-source crisis mapping software for over eight years now. The organization got started when a group of Kenyan bloggers led by Erik Hersman began doing online mapping of violence reports after the 2008 Kenyan election. These folks do astonishing work. So much innovation.

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Amy Sample Ward

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

Problems were that many survivors had no internet access, let alone electrical power, let alone computers or even computer literacy. Another problem in theory is fraud, and another problem is that many sites only included last and first names which in a mass of several hundred thousand displaced persons obviously included many duplicates.

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Disaster Social Media Haiti Media 206

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. 1 trackback } Wild Apricot Blog : Tech Support for Free and Open-Source Software 08.20.08

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Tech Soup

FEBRUARY 14, 2013

She is a favorite on TechSoup for Libraries because she is always open to new technology. For instance La Conner has been using thin clients since 2008, and recently installed an open-source integrated library system. Over time we refined our instructions. Firefox didn't have this problem.

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Tech Soup

FEBRUARY 14, 2013

She is a favorite on TechSoup for Libraries because she is always open to new technology. For instance La Conner has been using thin clients since 2008, and recently installed an open-source integrated library system. Over time we refined our instructions. Firefox didn't have this problem.

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Library Case Study Studies Instruction 40

Forj

DECEMBER 29, 2017

In eLearning, we are at the very start of the hype curve with distributed ledgers: we can imagine the technology solving one of our recurring problems. When a learner accumulates a sufficient balance of CE credits over a certain span of time, she achieves maintenance of certification.

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Forum One

MARCH 25, 2009

s focused on an important problem ? s very innovative in its open-source and collaborative approach, it?s Global Energy Observatory ? We think GEO should be funded because: it?s how we generate and use energy, it?s s highly scalable and could be used by many around the globe, and it already has a well developed ?alpha?

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Forum One

MARCH 25, 2009

s focused on an important problem ? s very innovative in its open-source and collaborative approach, it?s Rajan got in touch with us at Forum One in 2008 because of our prior online data/map/API work for " Carbon Monitoring for Action " - and we've discussed his project several times, but not worked for him.).

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Tech Soup

DECEMBER 16, 2015

We also shine the light on the potential security problems of smart toys, predict the end of the digital divide, and discuss a health-related wearable that can't get here fast enough and some intriguing 10 year-old predictions that just happened to come true. This has been a steady upward trend since 2008. This past year, U.S.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Well, I just got my first one out in 2008! Benetech Update: Summer 2008 I'm thrilled to be writing you this update, because this year is unusually exciting even by Benetech standards. You can imagine the impact of Bookshare.org going from a $1 million per year enterprise in 2006 to over $7 million in 2008.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 24, 2007

As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation, planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to practice when I’ve been in a place of providing technology support. All technology providers have to deal at some level with support.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 8, 2007

They struggle mightily with software, no matter whether it’s free/open source or proprietary, shrink-wrapped or custom-built, on their desktops or web-hosted, which they generally spend extraordinary amounts of time and/or money on. is it a problem that can be solved in any other ways? Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 19, 2006

So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard. So you’d still have the same problem. So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard Is this referring to activation? Get Ubuntu , and have done already. If so, this is FUD.

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Amy Sample Ward

APRIL 20, 2011

Building programs and services to support a community means not just learning about the problems they face, but understanding how technologies can help make a difference. WordPress is an open source blogging platform that lets you have any number of authors. The tool to try: Just communicate by email, privately.

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Tech Soup

APRIL 21, 2014

This time we’ll report on some climate change news, the TrashOut app, the difference between cloud backup and cloud storage, the heartbleed bug, a green energy innovation in Latin America that works – and another one that doesn’t, and the epic digital inclusion drone wars being waged by Google and Facebook.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

NOVEMBER 30, 2007

In response to the Facebook flip, Doc Searles, in this post and a follow-up argues that we should "stop petitioning Facebook and Google to solve our problems for us." " and that it's "time to comeup with some new rules of engagement - ones that work for us as well as them." Lee LeFever as done it again.

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