Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 16, 2008

I think that if I had to pick only one thing that would help people understand the character of Drupal, it would be the WYSIWYG editor that comes standard with an out-of-the-box Drupal installation. So if you want to start adding content to your new site, and you need a little formatting, or a picture, etc., That would be NONE.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

August 7, 2007 I’ve been experimenting with the non-content centered social networking sites LinkedIn and Facebook for a while now. The content centered ones, like flickr, del.icio.us Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens&#. and our own Social Source Commons , are a different animal.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

Turns out, unlike Facebook, or Myspace and such, the “Spock Bot&# makes pages for people without their knowing. So people who were in my gmail address book, and in Spock, got a request for trust from me, not knowing where it came from. I then decided, why not – let’s find out who else is on Spock. Walk right under it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 6, 2007

Taxonomies are developed by specific people for specific purposes, and as such, are limited by worldview and perspective. What is their worldview, and how does that effect the taxonomy that they come up with – and how does that determine the effect of a taxonomy on people who are not the experts?

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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. This news is so old it’s embarrassing – NPR opened up their content API. I was profiled on Linux.com. That’s kinda fun! Way to go, NPR!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

apps out there, and beginning to try and use them to create content and organize my life, I have come to the following conclusion: the apps are great, but integration still sucks. And, I also don’t want to do too much cross-posting of content. First, there’s the blogging issue. Hint to NTEN : Affinity Group Planets!)

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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’m still not convinced by any of these social network sites not directly linked to content (unlike del.icio.us

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

Chapter 3 is a discussion on Peer production – it talks about how it is that people have come together to collaboratively create software and content – basically, knowledge production. In the next chapter , he will talk about the economics of social production, and the motivations behind peer content creation.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Matt Asay is a key member of the company behind Alfresco, an open source Content/Document Management system. Have a chat with the people at SugarCRM - both the company, and developers/partners. They have built a fascinating ecosystem around what is basically a commercial product (with an open source version.).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

Sorry, Lobo, with all due respect to you and CiviCRM, a PHP API accessible only to other PHP apps on the same machine is simply not sufficient integration in an age of web services, where people run different apps on different machines and use languages other than PHP for building web apps. What’s involved in this? 13 Eoin 06.25.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations don’t need blogs. The originators of blogging probably thought of it mostly as a way for people to be able to easily update their websites quickly, and provide interesting content on a moving basis. It’s more about the ephemeral versus the enduring.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 8, 2008

It is not because you aren’t interested (although many of you might not be), but because Sage is one of those archaic academic publishers who had decided to lock down its authors and their content behind heavy iron walls. I am boycotting locked-down journals and I’d like to ask other academics to do the same.

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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. And as time wore on, I lost touch with people and organizations. I wanted to work directly with organizations and people.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 5, 2008

It looked quite like it might be a fun event to be at, but the hefty $3000 price tag for admission wasn’t something that I could possibly stomach, so I sat in front of my laptop, watching people describe new tools. So this is definitely a tool to watch. good2gether is an interesting concept. Watch the demo.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

For organizations, web stats are useful indicators of how many people are being reached by their message, the geographical spread of the visitors and whether or not a specific campaign was successful in driving traffic or creating actions (like donations, or letters, etc.) For one thing, feeding people is not what NTEN does.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

In many ways for me, the most important aspect of free and open source software is that it does just that – it levels the playing field so that people and organizations with few resources can have access to quality tools to do what it is they need and want to do in this software-driven world. would all be free (libre).

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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? You could google for them, but wouldn’t it be great to see other people’s links – things they found organically? Does it really connect me to people? to Ma.gnolia. Sometimes, but not generally.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 7, 2007

It’s peer reviewed (good), but it’s got a rather restrictive license, and the content is not freely available. If you have purchased a copy/subscription to the Journal with a corporate license, this means that it is for use by people within your organization. But then I looked deeper. Others aren’t at all.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 4, 2011

Content Management Systems are an essential part of the communications function of nonprofit organizations. Many people have found that option 2, using a large package, which includes donation pages, event management, etc. There are a myriad of options, open source options are among the most popular, possibly the most popular.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 29, 2008

Most people (67%) want an easy to use interface. Most people (57%) also want ongoing support. Probably not that well, because I think we’re still about 6 months away from Wordpress being an out-of-the-box CMS — a bit too much tweakery is still required, especially with regards to category-smart dynamic inline content.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 8, 2007

Sometimes, the forward march of technology seems like this train I’m riding on – inexorably traveling down the track of capitalist profit while nonprofits are hanging on to those little hand-powered trucks that we, the people who serve them in this realm are working really hard to pump up and down, so we can try and gamely keep up.

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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. 6 Mike Gifford 01.04.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 17, 2007

I’ve also noticed how most people in the nptech world who experiment with this stuff have moved over to Facebook. I don’t intend, for instance, to start putting my calendar on Facebook, but it’s interesting to see how much is happening, and how fast. I never did start a MySpace page, and I don’t imagine I ever will.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

It will include custom open source CRM, Web Content Management and enhanced payment system. It may not happen quickly at first, but make no mistake- Blackbaud has a proven history of acquiring products and forcing people to upgrade to more expensive support and services- here’s a funny video explaining their strategy.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2010

In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it. But sometimes, data is political.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

It’s a particularly interesting project, because it has a definite political purpose: Designed for social movements working for social justice, Crabgrass will consist of tools which allow people to connect, collaborate, and organize in new ways and with increased efficiency. at 11:01 pm Idealware 03.16.10 2 Cathy Garland 09.12.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 26, 2009

It is a great tool for small to medium-sized organizations who are looking for a CRM to track members and donations, register people for events, and do mass mailings. There are also some other features, like grants management and case management that are more nascent, but promising for the future. I do agree with Jon to some extent.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 9, 2006

is a series of innovations in web technology that have come together in unexpected ways, to change the experiences that people have in using the internet, and has made it much more deeply a many-to-many experience, rather than the more one-to-many experience it had been before. But I’ll give you my quick definition: Web 2.0

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