Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

Mostly, because I get to read blogs by people that aren’t on my list of feeds I read regularly. And Katya tells us why Seth Godin is right about people being lazy and in a hurry, and gives us some tips on how to use that. And I get to highlight the work of some of my favorite bloggers, too.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

I come across a lot in my varied net wanderings, and people send me stuff, so it’s a nice way to talk about some of it, without having to go into too much detail. I was profiled on Linux.com. That’s kinda fun! I “live the open source lifestyle.&# That must have been before the iPhone.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 4, 2008

But, a very nice soul at MayFirst/people-link, where we house the NOSI site, set up Limesurvey for us, so we’re using that. I had originally done the survey in Surveymonkey , which is a slick on-line survey tool. Limesurvey is actually quite powerful. Worth a look if your organization does surveys. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

As a funder, you can put up RFPs (at a cost), and people can apply directly online. I started a little Twitter conversation about it, and people seemed intrigued. Zoomgrants looks like it is trying to be some sort of one-stop-shop for grantors and grantees. It looks interesting, and potentially useful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 14, 2008

Like all social networks, they are only as usable as people in your social graph use it, and it’s pretty sparse for me right now. There are an increasing number of third party apps that can use it (it supports the Twitter API.) So I’m on identi.ca now ( follow pearlbear ). But hopefully that will change. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

Open source is becoming mainstream, and people (that is, people with money) are starting to throw big bucks in the direction of open source projects, and companies that provide services for open source projects. A company that provides services for Ruby on Rails got a bunch of funding.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

1 trackback } Boy in the Bands » Blog Archive » Because the power of the Internet increases as people get connected. Update: I’ve been using it now as my default browser for the last day or so, and it is really growing on me. { at 9:01 am { 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 Robin 03.16.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 30, 2007

Jobs understands that DRM doesn’t work, and doesn’t help sell music. There are better sites for music and there are adequate players for 1/5th the price. What Apple did do correctly is allow users to submit their own podcast and homemade music on the itunes website. The iPod is a rip off.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Lots of people were there (I ran out of handouts – I was surprised to see how many people showed up.) There were a very wide range of people there, from folks who didn’t know a whole lot about open source, to those who were developing open source apps. That speaks volumes to me.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 24, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Making a better, more findable blog October 24, 2007 I’ve gotten some nice kudos for my blog in the past few days, and it feels nice to know that people read the blog, and get something out of it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

I know that for people who work in real offices, with real other people, IRC is a difficult tool to use – because it takes you away from the environment you are in, and makes it hard to be a part of multiple conversations. On the other hand, a lot of people are IMing, and tweeting, etc. It’s also scriptable.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 8, 2008

I think that people are getting wary of social networks where they have no control over their own data. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, everyone’s social graph and data will become portable, but it’s a very good sign that perhaps, after all, things are moving in that direction.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 1, 2007

NTEN is trying to get a handle on all of this, and find out what people use, and how much they like what they use. It’s such an interesting space, and there are some really intriguing things happening with software in that space. I can’t wait to get my grubby little fingers on the data on CiviCRM and Salesforce.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 18, 2007

June 18, 2007 OK, so I finally drank the Facebook coolaid – and although it took me a long time to get around to, I have now realized how many people in the nptech field have already been on facebook for a while. I decided to try out facebook when I kept hearing about the integration of other social networking sites into facebook.

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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, I am an avid Wiki user.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I kinda thought that was surprising, but in thinking about what I write, I realize that people could get the wrong idea (or, more accurately, fail to get the right idea.) For one client, I am their technology go-to person, since they are really small, and have no tech staff. Gotta work on that. So, what do I do?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 10, 2007

It all sounds like LinkedIn wants to pull all of those people who have been migrating to Facebook back into their fold, with the idea that LinkedIn is serious about business. Also, they have a partnership with Business Week – so you can see how you are connected to companies and indivuals covered by clicking on links.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 15, 2008

People have written all sorts of cool plug-ins for it. Bittorrent is a bit of an arcane art (and, of course, getting a bit of a bad rep, since it’s the major avenue for P2P pirating.) It is cross-platform and written in Java (and, I think, shows off the strength of the Java framework.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 10, 2008

But I have really come to believe that the way that we work with people is as important as the “final&# outcome. Hopefully the fact that you asked gets people to realize that it’s something important to do. This got me thinking that all people, not just scientists and students could use this method.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 20, 2007

First, links for the day: High Tech Trash – it’s an in depth photo essay and interactive feature on the National Geographic website. I wish all a holiday season full of fun, quality time with family (chosen or otherwise), and joy. {

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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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 4, 2008

I think people are finally realizing that the current state of affairs – where we can pump data into Facebook and other social networks, but not get data out of them, is untenable. As a result, Scoble joined the group dataportability.org , which I’ve been monitoring for a few months now.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2006

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Ubuntu open week November 26, 2006 Next week is Ubuntu Open Week , a series of events and classes about Ubuntu Linux , and for people interested in getting involved in Ubuntu.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 5, 2008

I’ve been helping a client hire a temporary project manager, and so in the interview process one of the questions I ask is how people keep up with change in the field. And, in a bigger picture way, how important do you think it is for people who work with nonprofit organizations on technology issues to keep up?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 7, 2007

There seemed (to me) to finally enough interesting people and things to follow on twitter – it began to seem like microblogging was more that just about what kind of tuna sandwich someone was eating (although it sometimes still is that.) I’ve critiqued Twitter and social networks in general. So what’s the story?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

A note : Most people will notice that I have pretty much lost my curmudgeonly approach to social media. No, I didn’t go soft in the head (well, some people might think so.) Not only are Gen Y and Millenials engaged in these social networks, but a wider and broader range of people are.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 24, 2008

Because WordPress is so easy to use, people have twisted and turned it to make regular websites. The best one, by the way, is Akismet , which is also made by Automattic. It basically eliminates comment spam, which, as you probably know, is the bane of bloggers everywhere.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 19, 2008

So the model that I am coming up with is a combination of that model, and what I would call an “inquiry based&# model – helping people in a more structured way come up with specific questions and problems before the event, and then use the event to collaboratively answer those questions, and solve those problems.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 7, 2007

The topic is “Nonprofit Data Management: from slips of paper to CRM&# As you all know, I’ve been thinking about data management issues for years, and it would be great for people to share their ideas and knowledge. So, submit those posts by Sunday evening!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 2, 2008

So how did people like these? I also have to wonder (shudder) how many home grown Access and Filemaker databases fall into the “Other&# category of the survey, almost 20% of the total. They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a package. And Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 10, 2008

as well as newsgroups, commerce sites (like Amazon), review sites, forums, and news groups, and even searches the general Web to find out where your people are and what they’re doing online. It is important to understand that Rapleaf is just gathering public information on people, based on their email addresses. How do we know?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

As the bandwidth available increases (via FiOS , and other methods) cloud computing will get even more attractive to organizations and people. Cloud computing just doesn’t make any sense, or work in any reasonable way without it (have you ever tried to use Gmail on dial up?)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 6, 2007

As a full-time user of both Firefox and Thunderbird, I’m really enjoying the benefits of these open platforms, and the immense creativity of people who create add-ons. And it’s all free! A few Firefox extensions that I can’t live without include a new one I discovered recently, called “ AdBlock Plus.&# I love it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

Can’t share books – I like to loan out my books to people. I want something like a Kindle that: Has wifi (EVDO would be a nice addition, but some of us live in areas where the EVDO network does not go) Allows me to share books with people. Allows me to upload any open document format (.odt,

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 9, 2007

The topic I chose was a tough one, too: I asked people to talk about mistakes they make with clients, and how they deal with them. Photo by rob_pym ) I’m hosting this week’s Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants ! Sorry it’s a day late. at 3:04 pm Last minute tidbits » Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology 12.20.07

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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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 15, 2007

Letting people know Changing the DNS of the old site (and changing the site on wordpress.) All importing requires now is just going to the Wordpress import tool and specifying the file. That’s all. You don’t have to worry about using mod_rewrite at all. Getting the varied blogrolls and badges, etc. copied over.

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