Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 7, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Please take the NOSI survey January 7, 2008 In my work with NOSI (the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative,) I’ve become really interested in how FOSS is used in nonprofit organizations.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 12, 2007

December 12, 2007 I had a good look at NTEN’s CRM Satisfaction Survey (yippee for data!), Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access). 3 trackbacks } Product Blogs » Blog Archive » CiviCRM comes out on top in NTEN Survey 12.14.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 26, 2008

The lesson here, I think, is that CRM, even for large organizations, is changing rapidly, and the days are numbered where systems that are expensive, proprietary, and closed rule. After the webinar, I’ll be putting the slides up in varied places, and NTEN will have a recording of the webinar. { I’m glad to see that.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

That’s an interesting model, and, if the software is decent, sounds like it could be a good option for some organizations. There are some fabulous sessions proposed for the 2009 NTC , running the whole gamut of nonprofit technology, from planning to Web 2.0, But, of course, as with anything, look (a lot) before you leap.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 2, 2008

As a 10,000 footer, NTEN’s new Donor Management System Survey is of keen interest. In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise – donor management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits, and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on their donor management packages.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 9, 2006

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology APIs – what, how, whither, and writing November 9, 2006 I’ve been asked by NTEN to write a whitepaper on APIs, following their Open API debate.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 20, 2008

Google says: “Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.&#

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2008

He has some good ideas and suggestions about how to be transparent as an organization through the website. I do think the biggest mistake an organization can make in the re/creation of its website is to go with the vendor with the lowest bid. Check This List 07.28.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 6, 2008

Dataportability.org – the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 So, I’m evangelizing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

What can an organization use a LMS for? Well, that depends of course, on the organization. Many organizations provide trainings, courses, and varied sorts of learning activities to their constituents. An LMS, or learning platform, is a system that is designed to facilitate some sort of learning process over the web.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Send queries to nonprofit tech lists for experiences and information, like nosi-discussion , nten-discuss , riders-tech , and others. Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. Google it – you might find articles and reviews that might be helpful Try it out.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology WeAreMedia Project August 13, 2008 Yet another great NTEN project is happening, spearheaded by Beth Kanter, to develop a Social Media toolkit for Nonprofits.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

They have released two studies, one on the “wired wealthy&# and another which is a “nonprofit benchmark index&# study – basically providing some benchmarks for organizations to measure themselves against, traffic, email newsletter click through rates, etc. It’s actually a pretty interesting resource, and worth a read.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

So what does this mean for you, o struggling nonprofit organization? OpenAds , an open source ad server (very cool) just got tons of $ in financing. A company that provides services for Ruby on Rails got a bunch of funding. 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

JANUARY 4, 2008

Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { The surveys could stand some graphic design help, but you can design templates for it. It’s a LAMP stack application.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

at 4:17 pm We are finding that to stand out there has to be something that provides and opportunity for the organization to be remembered. Recently, in working with a number of our domestic violence organizations we came up with a logo for the message. at 12:13 pm { 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 robert guinto 04.19.08

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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. It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very similar needs in terms of kinds of applications. Anyone interested?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2007

It will be given under the auspices of Linuxchix , an organization I’ve been a part of since 2000. The course is a 12 week course, starting on November 19th (with time off for the holidaze.) Check out our Moodle page for more details (the outline, and information on how to participate is there.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

Earlier this week, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, rejected Microsoft’s bid to fast-track OOXML ( Office Open XML ) to standard status. What this means is that MS will have to take all of the varied input from the ISO bodies, and go through a second vote early next year. I’ll keep you posted. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 15, 2008

The next version of Azureus, called Vuze , which I haven’t yet used, looks like it incorporates a media player and channels and such. Basically, becoming a serious competitor for Miro , which I’ll talk about in the next post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 17, 2008

They are starting with a “charter&# program – a few nonprofit organizations, to iron out all of the varied issues, both technical and logistical, I imagine. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding – we’ll find out over time how this app works, and whether organizations like it. And make it reasonably priced.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 16, 2007

Most of the 10 are applicable to nonprofit organizations (I’d skip the “Offshore work&# tip.) He has a recent article in “ Director Magazine &# which is a UK-based business magazine (no, I don’t read it, I just got the link from his blog,) entitled 10 tips for reducing burgeoning IT costs.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

So I’m going to try and lay out the details of what cloud computing is, and how it’s useful for nonprofit organizations. As the bandwidth available increases (via FiOS , and other methods) cloud computing will get even more attractive to organizations and people. at 5:17 am TechSoup Blog 09.16.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1] These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1] These aren’t half-baked, buggy tools that are not ready for everyday use in organizations. [1]

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 19, 2008

To their credit Convio asks this question on their blog : “Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply self-serving marketing fluff?&# What do you think? Time will tell. { Time will tell. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 20, 2006

Part Vb:APIs October 20, 2006 This morning, I sat in on the " Great Open API Debate " hosted by NTEN. First off, a tip o’ the hat to NTEN for organizing this, the participants of the panel for an interesting conversation, and Mark Bolgiano from the Council on Foundations for awesome moderation.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 13, 2007

So here’s another good option for organizations that want powerful blogging software to use on a generic (read: cheap) hosting environment. 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

DECEMBER 1, 2007

The thing we have actually done the most of is write the primer , and I’ve got more ideas for types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these suggestions for business models are quite welcome. { 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

JANUARY 31, 2008

at 2:51 pm There’s a great free Firefox plugin for students & researchers who need to manage citations and bibliographies, not to mention organize all those PDFs…Zotero is wonderful, and works perfectly with Word (for those of us still hooked on some Microsoft programs). I’ll be using it long after I graduate.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 24, 2008

But if your organization decides to blog, and you want to make it easy on yourself, install Wordpress on your hosting account, or go to WordPress.com and set up a free blog. Because WordPress is so easy to use, people have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. I doubt you’ll look back. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 3, 2008

Thunderbird is in the process of being spun out of the Mozilla Foundation into it’s own organization, dubbed “MailCo.&# And its secure, makes doing GPG signatures and encryption easy (although I haven’t gotten around to doing them, though. Shame on me.) I don’t know if that name will stick.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 10, 2008

I actually thought this could be quite useful for organizations to figure out how to allocate sparse resources in the Web 2.0 I realized that one of the most important things that we can do is educate the organizations we work with (as well as individuals) about privacy issues and data. But that’s not the point of this post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 12, 2007

We’d love to get more women involved in nonprofit open source – women from the nptech world who might not be thinking a lot about open source, and women from the open source community who might not be thinking a lot about nonprofit organizations. Let’s get together! at 2:50 pm Thanks for shout out.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

Sure, some very savvy organizations will do well if they have to develop only two (or one) app for social networks. O’Reilly doesn’t really have an answer for that one. I don’t really have an answer to that one either, but for our sector, that’s really where the power is going to lie.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

I’ll be watching the Open Handset Alliance, and wondering when I can replace my Blackberry with an open phone. { 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

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

But it’s only been in the last few years that mega storage, and mega processing power were available to organizations to power big web applications and the like. If a nonprofit organization has a server, it’s actually not so unlikely that it is running RHEL. They started out with their S3 – simple storage service.

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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. Freelance Switch Gavin’s Digital Diner Idealware Jon Stahl’s Journal Lifehacker LinuxChix – Be Polite.

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