Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

Now, it’s one of a very few choices that work on Linux – and it’s the best by far. And if you’ve been used to the Photoshop workflow, it will take a lot to get used to the very different GIMP workflow. GIMP is a very full-featured image manipulation program. Just about all of what Photoshop does, it does.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 26, 2008

Idealware has a great article on CRMs, and how they are different, and how you can begin to figure out what might work best. Of course, all nonprofits already have a CRM (even if it is a spreadsheet) – the issue is, generally, migration to a new system, or integration with what they already have to add new features.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 9, 2007

Mark, of Sea Change Strategies , talks about five mistakes he’s made in working with clients, includes things such as ignoring internal organizational dynamics, and getting too involved, or not involved enough. He has some really good thoughts worth considering as we work with clients over time.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2007

"If we build it they will come" only works in the movies. I think the time has come to think differently. The point of a nonprofit – the point of working to help others in any fashion really – is that if you have helped one or two people, the plight was worthwhile. at 11:51 am Sadly, you’re right.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 16, 2008

Anyway, they were looking for a different article – one that was more about the advantages of FOSS, not about the broad category of free (as in beer) and low cost software, which includes FOSS, proprietary, and SaaS. at 4:01 pm I think there’s also some difficulty with different parts of the audience being at different places.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 30, 2007

As one of those monolingual American types, I’m learning a huge amount about what it takes to create open content in different languages. at 2:31 pm There was an effort by some folks from Debian (not officially Debian) to work on a distro for Bhutan which uses a language similar to Tibetan. The event itself has been fab.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

Although I’m sure that we differ in our perspectives on some issues, I very much look forward to working with the rest of the board to keep NTEN the vibrant organization that it has developed into, and to continue to speak to, listen to, and provide for its constituencies. { at 3:50 pm That seem like a great match.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 15, 2007

To recap, I took the following steps: Set up my blog on a different domain (in this case, it was zenofnptech.com.) If, for some reason, yours stops working, try this feed. { If, for some reason, yours stops working, try this feed. { I’d recommend it to anyone. Getting the varied blogrolls and badges, etc. copied over.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 4, 2007

I use Wrike; it’s built differently and seems to work better for me. Almost all of our development work goes into the community version. I couldn’t figure out whether the project was dead or not. Now I know. 2 Sterry 10.12.07 at 3:45 am I don’t like the way Basecamp is set up. Check it out [link]. 3 Dustin J.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

and our own Social Source Commons , are a different animal.) It has been fun, in many ways, but I’ve not figured out the utility for me in terms of my work, although others have had a better time of it. I guess if you want privacy from casual observers, then a “walled garden&# works. 2 admin 08.08.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

OpenSocial is a set of APIs that handle three different kinds of user data: profiles, social graph (who your friends are) and activities (the stuff of the Facebook news feeds.) Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container&#.

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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. And it’s open source – so someone who really cares can port it to work with MySQL, etc. How cool is that? 2 Josiah Ritchie 04.16.08

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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. And aren’t those different that the issues other groups of people face? Right, right, right.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

“If we build it they will come&# only works in the movies. { At the same time, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference to the customer that was going to hire Mpower anyway. 1 trackback } Bookmarks about News 11.09.08 at 3:45 am { 4 comments… read them below or add one } 1 David Geilhufe 07.07.08

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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.) If you are a provider, please feel free to email me if you want more info or help and support in moving forward.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds. We worked with Ianncomm for the Drupal development and Frazny for the Salesforce work. It’s definitely been a lot of work for both the developers and us as a client, but we’re pretty happy with the result so far. 7 Jon Stahl 01.20.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

Understandably, it has come to be somewhat different than I designed it back then, but it still feels good that something that I worked hard on is still serving people. I sat for hours (or days) at a time in front of my screen without contact with the folks I was doing the work for.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Consolidation among vendors means that some customers will be dealing with different (and larger, potentially less friendly) entities. I am rather pained by the thought that the technologies to which I have dedicated my career have done so much to create precisely the horrors that we profess to work against.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Consolidation among vendors means that some customers will be dealing with different (and larger, potentially less friendly) entities. I am rather pained by the thought that the technologies to which I have dedicated my career have done so much to create precisely the horrors that we profess to work against.

Open Source 100

Open Source Convio Nonprofit Hype 100

Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

I’m reading this book at the same time as I’ve been working on the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative. The middle way isn’t splitting the difference. Or given up? It gets chewy, for sure, but it feels like every chew is worth it. So here’s the summary for Chapter 3. 2 Michelle Murrain 11.16.06

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

The thing that is prompting this post is the little storm about the security metric that we used to try and get a handle on the security of the 4 different systems we reviewed. 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.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 10, 2008

I think that Twitter is, in many ways, a harbinger of the future – I think eventually, a lot of things that happen between people over the net will work a lot like twitter, even if it’s not actually twitter – social networks carrying short snippets of people’s thoughts, ideas and events. Keep up the great work.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

I’ve basically switched to using my Mac mini for just about everything except the bit of systems admin and coding I do, because it’s just so much easier to set up things on Linux for that type of work. And, of course, there are plenty of peripherals that don’t work with Macs.) And, of course, always, for developers.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

I guess that’s where it gets interesting when you work with a CMS, right? It’s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. And we use plone for a lot of things in the organization I work for now. Um, sorta. CMSs do share that pretty serious learning curve – but I’m getting over it, slowly.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

at 4:57 pm Hi – just one point, I see in nptech world the bend/promotion towards Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla alot which is no bad thing I work successfully with all of them, they are all good and great, and fairly easy to use for the end user. 3 Laura Whitehead 02.05.08 4 admin 02.05.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

I really could have skipped the pictures of two of my work colleagues necking. :) Kinda fun though. at 12:39 am Spokeo connects people from different networks together, just like how RSS readers connect disjoint blogs into one united Blogosphere. I hope this will help in understanding how it works. 2 Beth Kanter 12.18.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 1, 2007

To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. at 12:33 pm I think digital sharecropping works better as an analogy than as an actual analytical insight. When all of those happen, I’ll be the first to sign up. { at 9:46 am Web 2.0

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

I have pretty much always understood the difference between blogs and websites – but I recently got a better feeling as I was redoing my own website. And the major engine that makes these three types of ephemeral media really work, is RSS, which is the subject of the next post. Should staff of a nonprofit blog?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

Although I’ve been using databases for a while, I’ve decided that I’m going to focus specifically on open source databases for the next while, and, in particular, the different kinds of open source solutions that are possible for desktop database systems, or systems that might be server-based, but need a desktop front end.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

Although I’ve been using databases for a while, I’ve decided that I’m going to focus specifically on open source databases for the next while, and, in particular, the different kinds of open source solutions that are possible for desktop database systems, or systems that might be server-based, but need a desktop front end.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I am working on several projects, both collective and personal. And, of course, not everyone I work with is choosing the same to do list or project manager. And even if they were, they might not integrate well (For example, I use three different Basecamp accounts – which don’t integrate with each other.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

And, like the tradition that the name of this blog comes from, I want to look at technology without attachment or aversion – with an openness to different ways of thinking about, or doing technology in the nonprofit sector. How do I help people to dig deeper into the core of issues when we usually spend a lot of time on the surface?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

But what about sites people who do the same kinds of work that you do, or like the same kinds of things that you do? I have to admit I’m tempted to write a proof of concept app that will send the same bookmark to as many different social bookmarking tools as you want. link] There is also a FireFox toolbar to go with it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

In my tests it was buggy (some parts of it just didn’t work), and the interface was still a bit crude. Here at ReadyTalk, I am the Account Manager who works with our Nonprofit Customers helping them save money increase their efficiency through using our audio and web conferencing services. Audio works fine for all platforms.

Search 100

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

It is an internal assessment tool which helps organizations figure out what parts of their online strategy are working, and what parts might need tweaking. to care a whole lot about how many hits they got in comparison to similar (or different) organizations. And, I actually hope that doesn’t change. 3 David Zeidman 09.18.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

The approaches are similar and different to each other. For now, unless something strange happens, I’ll settle on Cake – although I’ll not be spending too much time on it, since I’m working hard to grok Drupal. I’ve really liked working with it for small to mid sized projects. 7 teknoid 01.31.09

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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. But as long as folks want to fund it/ work on it, there will always be a good solution. 2 Jon Stahl 05.01.09

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