Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

Many organizations provide trainings, courses, and varied sorts of learning activities to their constituents. If your organization does this at all, and you are interested in investigating how to enhance or deliver those learning activities through the web, an LMS is for you. Well, that depends of course, on the organization.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 4, 2007

I had hoped to more actively use it once the new version came out. They have had an active user community, many of which, I imagine, are going elsewhere. It’s designed as a basecamp clone. It has some things missing, for sure, but it has been useful to me. However, that won’t happen. activeCollab is going commercial.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 12, 2007

April 12, 2007 Beth Kanter, as always, has a great, informative summary of the Penguin Day activities last Saturday in DC. Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Source Feminism?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 31, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The search for good web conferencing, take 2 January 31, 2008 Back in August, I did a review of web conferencing tools, with a decidedly unusual slant – as a presenter, I had to be able to share my Linux desktop.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 19, 2008

From their website: Some of the features that distinguish Hampshire from more traditional liberal arts colleges include student-designed academic concentrations; an active, collaborative, inquiry-based pedagogy; an interdisciplinary curriculum; and a narrative evaluation system. Sounds a lot like Edupunk, doesn’t it? I learned a lot.

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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.) But the path to truly portable (with adequate privacy controls) profile, social graph and activity data is still not entirely clear.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Look at ohloh.net – they have great info on most projects – how many developers, lines of code, how active development activity is. Rule of thumb: projects that haven’t had minor releases in a year or more are definitely in danger of becoming projects that are no longer under development.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 13, 2007

Social Ads are sponsored advertisements that are linked to users profile data, social graph, and activities. Also, if a friend agrees, their activities around a particular product (like, say, a movie rental) will show up on their news feeds. Ads can be targeted by profile data.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 5, 2008

There are times when I couldn’t tell you the last time I sent a tweet, and there are other days when I tweet quite actively. I’m in an active phase right now (hence, the comment)! When I’m making my best efforts to try to keep up, I do it in waves, like so many other things I do.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

My one request is that vendors who comment on this blog take a moment to step back a bit from their myopia, and look at the ways in which they can contribute to a vibrant, active ecology of choices, rather than fight for their own little piece of the pie. { I hope that sheds some more light on how we are actively contributing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

But I still haven’t seen much activity on the sourceforge page, nor does it seem that the code for these new projects is available. But, anyway, I’m not putting the silly badge in the sidebar, sorry. MPower has started to generate some community-driven development. These look like pretty interesting, and useful applications.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

The next set of modules, that are more tool based (with case studies) are next to be developed. BTW, do you know of or have an example from your clients where they have thoughtfully considered a facebook strategy or using these tools and it really wasn’t the right fit? however, as you all know so well, I’m a realist. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

This is a really interesting professional development activity, I think. 2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 Michele Martin 07.11.08 at 6:06 am Michelle, I love this! What made you decide to write a theory of practice? 2 admin 07.11.08 at 10:26 am Thanks, Michele.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 1, 2007

There’s been some interesting activity in the realm of women in open source. I also have a document nightmare – I have documents on the desktop, documents on my laptop, documents on external hard drives, aiii. I need to figure out a good network configuration. It’s definitely worth a listen.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

One of the most important things to understand is that SaaS is primarily built upon open source tools such as Apache, MySQL, and MySQL. From my perspective, it’s all about balance, and having an active ecosystem, with healthy open source options present. From my perspective, the key is openness. 3 Jon Biedermann 09.25.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

So far, there is basically no activity in the forums and mailing list. “I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations. So my hope is that they really begin to use the platform. 1 trackback } Bookmarks about News 11.09.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 9, 2007

Open Office works better on Linux than on the mac, as does thunderbird and firefox For a few things (mostly system/network tools) there are some incredibly awesome options, amazingly good for free (as in beer) software, and better than software you’d pay for. In general, installation and configuration of software has become much easier.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 21, 2007

(I might regret hosing the recovery media w/o getting them on CD later, but I hope not – I was in a purist mood – I would have had to have agreed to the license agreement for Vista and activated the product in order to burn the media, and I wasn’t about to do that.) The next step was to get online. That was annoying.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I keep 2 blogs of my own, and contribute actively to one community blog (at nosi.net ) and could, potentially, contribute to quite a number of others. Wikis are another great collective to do list/project management tool, but they don’t integrate, either. First, there’s the blogging issue.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

Trade-off – you don’t get best of breed tools for both. I’ll have follow up posts on specific examples of this integration using open source tools (on one end or the other, or both.) Are there any tools that you know of that combine CMS and CRM (rather than pasting a web form html snippet on to another website)?

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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. If a website is the hub or an organization’s activity (a big if) then does it necessarily follow that just because the masses go there the organization best serves my needs?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 21, 2007

Considering that nonprofits are increasingly being held responsible for outcomes, not just activities, it makes sense that their consultants would move in this direction, too. I also think that when you bill based on time, you get away from the “results&# piece of it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

Organization 2 is a small pro-choice membership organization that depends upon outside funding, has many stakeholders in many different communities, and provides advocacy and activism nationally. Should this ED, and/or this organization have a blog?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2007

This community is one of Ubuntu’s great strengths, in terms of the ability to find helpful and sometimes instant support (via an incredibly active set of IRC channels.) They have mentorship programs, they are building regional networks, they have almost unparalleled bulletin board, email and IRC community support.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 4, 2011

As you know, I am pretty loyal to Drupal (and secondarily, WordPress) but I have to say that Joomla and Plone are solid, wonderful projects, with great communities, and active development, and will serve you well. The open source options are many, but the big four: WordPress , Drupal , Joomla , and Plone , stand out from the pack.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 19, 2006

So if you are a hardware geek, expect to pay MS every other time you get a new motherboard Is this referring to activation? As long as you don’t use the same key to activate multiple Windows copies in a single short period of time (read: post the key on Usenet), my experience is that activation has been pretty nonintrusive.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

This is not so far on the heels of the acquisition of Get Active by Convio. Blackbaud has done other acquisitions in the past. And, I’m sure there are more to come. There basically are three types of software acquisitions that companies make.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 1, 2007

tools that come out every single day. I am waiting for this bubble to burst, too, but until then: Timebridge – this seems like a pretty useful scheduling tool. We’ve seen a lot of activity from non-profits and we’re excited that we can help! It’s a bit staggering, sometimes. That’s kinda cool. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

They both have good documentation and active communities. Not to mention the excellent console tools. Looking at Ohloh , Cake is more popular than Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot more developers (81 vs 17).

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