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

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.&# No freaking way.

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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

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 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

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

AUGUST 5, 2008

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? For me/my organization, it’s not critical that anyone be way out on that bleeding edge. How do you keep up? How bleeding edge do we need to be? { We’re just not there yet.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 21, 2008

which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality. CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need CRM functionality. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0, CiviCRM ranked #1 in satisfaction in the recent NTEN CRM satisfaction survey. {

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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

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

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

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

MARCH 27, 2008

I’ve been hearing good things about SugarCRM from organizations that use it. That’s the one I’ve been using. They also have a newer on-demand version (that is, software as a service, like salesforce.) It also gets kudos from NTEN’s satisfaction survey (it came in third, after CiviCRM and Salesforce.)

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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. I’m glad to see that. After the webinar, I’ll be putting the slides up in varied places, and NTEN will have a recording of the webinar. {

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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

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. 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?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

I was a professor at the time, and a nonprofit organization wanted to get on the web, and give some of their staff email, and at the time, colleges and universities were the only organizations that had easy access to the internet, and virtual hosting companies cost a fortune, way beyond what a nonprofit could afford. So here goes.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 24, 2008

It was incredibly well organized and smooth running, the food and snacks were great, and the parties rocked. And I’m already looking forward to NTC in San Francisco in 2009! { I want to give huge props to Holly and all of the NTEN crew for putting on a fabulous conference. at 12:00 pm Thanks Michelle – and thanks to you!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 12, 2007

Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access). CiviCRM was first in satisfaction, SugarCRM, Organizer’s Database, and Democracy in Action were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. 201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. That’s pretty impressive.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 10, 2008

If your organization’s mission will be greatly benefited by making connections with the twitter demographic then, yeah, twitter makes tons of sense. But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy&# ? at 12:14 am I’m curious about how organizations can use Twitter. Sure, why not.

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Twitter Nonprofit Demographics Open Source 100

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 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. { 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

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

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. 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

NOVEMBER 13, 2007

A company (or organization, or individual) can set up a public page (so it does not require a Facebook account to see it). Individuals can become “fans&# of that product or organization. If a friend of mine becomes a fan of an organization or company I happen to like, I might then become fans of them as well.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

They expect to make up the difference in revenue that they got from licenses from services sold to a greater number of organizations that would not have been customers otherwise. It’s open source, and it is yet another option for organizations – and it is an open source replacement for Raiser’s Edge. How cool is that?

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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

JANUARY 29, 2008

The other 1/2 of my time I’m doing consulting work , focusing exclusively on helping organizations without a lot of technical expertise navigate their way through the maze of creating and getting through technology projects. I love this work.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

NTEN is, to my mind, a critically important organization in the ecosystem that is the Nonprofit Technology field, as the convener of the gathering that anchors the community, as well as a unique and necessary multi-dimensional resource at the regional and national levels for all sorts of constituents in the nptech world.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

The client is quite knowledgeable about their organization, mission, and goals for a project, but often not knowledgeable about technology. The role I play most often currently is providing a clear and understandable avenue between the client and a technology vendor (such as web or database development shop).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

I happen to think that unless an organization has deeply invested in developing custom Access databases, there aren’t too many reasons left not to switch to OpenOffice.org. and pretty good, and improving fast.) that will be published in Linux Identity Magazine. I hope to start doing OpenOffice.org training soon.

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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

JUNE 19, 2008

But in the nonprofit realm, my perspective on helping nonprofit organizations with technology issues has a lot to do with client empowerment, learning based on what’s needed at the moment, and active collaboration. Sounds a lot like Edupunk, doesn’t it? Thanks for your inspirational commitment to learning of all types.

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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

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

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.) But there still isn’t a lot out there. But I think more is needed.

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