Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2008

I think one of the biggest mistakes that an organization can make with its website is to promise more than it can deliver – make sure that the resources to create that blog, or podcast, or photo gallery, or whatever bells and whistles that you promise on your website, are there when the website goes live.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 12, 2007

My favorite quote: “A mutual understanding between the nonprofit organization and the database implementer that converting a database involves organizational change, and this can be stressful and threatening for employees. I wish all nonprofits understood this! I wish all nonprofits understood this!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 12, 2007

My favorite quote: “A mutual understanding between the nonprofit organization and the database implementer that converting a database involves organizational change, and this can be stressful and threatening for employees. I wish all nonprofits understood this! I wish all nonprofits understood this!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

Also, to be fair, SourceForge supplies a lot more “raw resources&# to its projects — web space, databases, login servers, compile farms, and so on. It’s not intended to scale up to the proportions one would need for a major project like Python or Amanda. Depending on the project, those can be really useful.

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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 27, 2007

The first article, on Mac database options , just got published last week. It’s enjoyable writing them, and also writing them for a non-US audience (although I’m sure plenty of US folks take advantage of their amazing resource.) I’ve been writing a series of articles for LASA’s ICT Knowledgebase.

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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. Plugged it in, and it just worked. Of course with my mac, I opened up the system preferences, checked a button, and, voila!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

On the other hand, perhaps it means that these new, larger entities can provide services and resources that the smaller ones could not. And, it’s still clear that CRM/Fundraising software is where the money and resources are going in nonprofit software development. It doesn’t really change anything.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

On the other hand, perhaps it means that these new, larger entities can provide services and resources that the smaller ones could not. And, it’s still clear that CRM/Fundraising software is where the money and resources are going in nonprofit software development. It doesn’t really change anything.

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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 An interesting conversation ensued on the list – with some arguing that this was a problematic thing. But that’s not the point of this post.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 11, 2007

I think part of the answer has to be to provide the resources for people to become better providers – whether it be to help budding accidental techies get off the ground to become great IT staff or independent consultants, or helping individual and small consulting firms learn what makes really good nonprofit support.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Toward the end, a young man, who worked with urban kids of color on media and music, commented that he didn’t really know how to get access to the kinds of things available, and he noticed how few people of color were in the room. It’s not just about access to resources in an economic sense. But it needs addressing. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 19, 2007

We were talking about whether or not this certain nonprofit, who had mondo resources, should help facilitate web development for their client organizations. at 5:14 pm That’s a pretty sad story, Michelle, and interesting that it was coming from a nonprofit that based on resources shouldn’t have been thinking that way.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

For example, we (DonorPerfect Online), use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for the database engine. I believe eTapestry runs on a database package called Versant. In the end, the vast majority of non profits simply do not have the technology resources to use most open source solutions. Other companies in the NP space are similar.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

It leveled the playing field, so that an organization without many resources could do what at that time, required a lot of resources. 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

MARCH 13, 2007

It will use up server resources at some server farm which uses electricity (which means, probably burning dirty coal, or natural gas). But, for the most part, I really don’t want to know what they are doing right now. I need less, and better data, not more. And there is more: it might keep me at my computer longer.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 20, 2006

One vendor said that very few nonprofits have the resources to take advantage of APIs. Someone (I think it was Nick or Peter) said that nonprofits can do more than vendors think they can – so providing the resources is important.

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Nonprofit Tech for Good

JANUARY 3, 2012

I make sure that music on Pandora is on the agenda for at least half the day. They usually have the staff, passion, resources, and training necessary to make a new tool succeed if it has any possibility of succeeding. Since I have returned from Asia I have cut my consumption of broadcast news by 95%. Silence is also good.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 2, 2007

I like the wide variety of resources he brings to bear – he’s introduced me to a lot of great writers and thinkers in varied areas. What I like: I like reading Ed’s perspectives on organizations, how they work, and the kinds of strategies and approaches that are around to work within organizations.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

This is what I call “commons-based peer production.&# He talks about three examples which have become classic – free/open source software, SETI@Home , and Wikipedia. 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

APRIL 10, 2008

But should the organization as a whole put resources into a “twitter strategy&# ? I’d be really hard pressed to suggest that they spend much of their meager resources on that. Should they spend a bit of time tying their RSS feed (if they have one) to a twitter account? Sure, why not. Or even a social network strategy?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

Forms sent go to email, or a separate database, and someone manually enters that data into the CRM. Even if they do, it takes developer time to write the code to do the integration, and that may be resources that a nonprofit doesn’t have. All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2007

Its focus is on servers, and Fedora , it’s “community version&# does certainly benefit from Red Hat’s development expertise and resources, but it doesn’t have as vibrant a community as Ubuntu, for instance. It was the first Linux distribution to make it big in the business world.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

Just because organization 1 gets 45,000 unique visits per month, and organization 2 gets 3,000 means nothing in relationship to the impact that organization has in the world, or in relationship to how it uses its resources. And the mission of the organization matters too. to help us be a sustainable and healthy organization.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

at 3:31 pm The best resource on the web for finding the right web conferencing vendor, solution, or product is the annual product reviews and Top Ten list from the Web Conferencing Council. If also features a cool mode that allows the user to join with just a browser — no download. Check out the appliance at [link] 15 Brian 04.10.09

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Have Fun - Do Good

JANUARY 8, 2010

Below is an edited transcript of the interview, which you can also listen to on the Big Vision Podcast site , or through the iTunes Music Store. Well, the facility is a super great resource in the community. There are actually a lot of resources out there. There are places like La Cocina. That's totally exciting.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 16, 2009

There is a Plone/Salesforce.com Integration group , that keeps working on this, and a number of organization, including ONE/Northwest , have invested huge amounts of time and resources to working on this integration. 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

FEBRUARY 18, 2008

This isn’t the case for a couple of reasons: 1) The more popular these CMS get, the more people need migration help, and the more resources are available for them (just google “ joomla drupal migration “ ) 2) More people than just the person who set the CMS up can help do the migration.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

As for open solutions, Charlie is correct- the majority of non profits do not have the dedicated resources to implement an open source solution or even something ‘low-cost’ such as Access or Excel. It all depends on the individual set of needs and resources available to an organization.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 1, 2007

It’s not at all about doing something “for free&# – it’s about leveraging resources in such a way as to maximize benefit for everyone, not just a few. 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

APRIL 7, 2007

The new journal, the Journal of Information Technology in Social Change , is, I think, a needed part of our landscape of resources for the sector. These resources and tools thus improve equality of opportunity. Those are generally the larger nonprofits – the ones that have some resources to spend. But then I looked deeper.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

A nonrival good is something that both of us can have at the same time, without any additional labor or resources. A rival good is something that if you have it, I can’t – if I want one, someone has to work to get/make it. Food items are rival. Cars are rival.

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