Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 21, 2007

I came upon these three for different reasons, and although I’m not interested in adopting their primary points of view, there were tidbits that were worth the read (or a skim, in one case) in the end. The third book is in a bit of a different category – not about landing more business, per se, but making more money.

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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. There are several to choose from, and they differ both in difficulty to get installed and working, as well as features.

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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. They are both installable on pretty standard shared-hosting accounts (although shell access really helps.) I do agree with Jon to some extent.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Lots of people were there (I ran out of handouts – I was surprised to see how many people showed up.) There were a very wide range of people there, from folks who didn’t know a whole lot about open source, to those who were developing open source apps. This feels like a different part of the digital divide.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 17, 2008

I’m in a little bit different of a place this year, than last. Be Helpful. I’m looking forward to it. I’m on the Evaluating Open Source panel, with Laura Quinn and Catherine Lane, which should be great. Lots of wonderful folks, should be great panels.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 19, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Spirituality and Technology January 19, 2007 A number of people have written me, and said that they appreciate that there is a blog with a spiritual take on technology. I can’t help it.) Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 23, 2010

I’ve considered myself pretty successful at both helping clients navigate the tough waters of web development projects, as well as accomplishing web projects for them. And how unwilling people are to sacrifice that for raw functionality. What could I have done differently? And, frankly, have come to expect. The developers?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 16, 2008

But this seems very low, considering that probably 5,000+ people saw the announcement (adding up the totals for the varied list subscriptions.) In the past, people cared much more about whether or not something was free (as in beer) or cheap, and whether or not it was open source wasn’t on the radar. 3 Beth Kanter 01.20.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 10, 2008

It provides for me a sense of community, and a sense of what people I know and care about things I care about are talking about (in a certain realm, on other realms, not so much). It is made up of people who are techically-oriented, largely affluent, and largely spend inordinate amounts of time in contact with electronic devices.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Wiki Syntax madness November 26, 2007 As most people deeply imbedded in Web 2.0, And none of these have the same syntax – they are similar, but slightly different. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2007

I think the time has come to think differently. But here’s the thing – half of the world’s nonprofits wouldn’t exist if people didn’t do it because a new nonprofit isn’t going to make a dent. I am still a novice in the world of nonprofits, but certainly not in helping people.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

My theory of practice is different than my consulting philosophy. Be Helpful. Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology My Theory of Practice July 10, 2008 I finally had the reason to begin to more completely articulate my theory of practice.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 15, 2007

For instance, I’m reading the book, Made to Stick , and this week’s post by Jeff at Donor Power talks about taglines that organizations use – how they make internal sense, but don’t make sense to people outside. He provides exactly the kind of advice that will help organizations connect with their donors.

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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 I struggled mightily with my own capacity to build really good applications mostly without other developers to help out. Thanks for blogging.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 9, 2007

The topic I chose was a tough one, too: I asked people to talk about mistakes they make with clients, and how they deal with them. Michael Stein talks about three different kinds of mistakes that one can make in technology consulting, including some errors of process, and the “Hot Dog&# syndrome. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 17, 2007

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 August 17, 2007 I decided, perhaps rashly, that one way of exposing people to, and training people on, open source software, was by doing web conferencing.

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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

SEPTEMBER 29, 2006

Sometimes, I’ll talk about technologies I think are just cool, and useful, and, well geeky, ’cause I can’t help being a geek. So in comes IPv6, a different kind of addressing protocol. One of my favorite people who makes geeky stuff understandable is Carla Schroeder. Be Helpful. They are worth a read. {

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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 hope this will help in understanding how it works. Walk right under it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

April 15, 2007 At NTC , there was a lot of talk about the “big three&# open source CMS packages that most people these days in our sector are using: Drupal , Plone , and Joomla. It’s the same, really, with Drupal, only different. Be Helpful. So I like Joomla. Do I like it better than Drupal? I’m not yet sure.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 19, 2007

I got to be a geek, and feel like I was really making a difference in the workings of organizations, and, hopefully, in people’s lives. Although it certainly could be argued that would have just involved different demons. I want to see people’s real faces, and hear their real voices. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

and our own Social Source Commons , are a different animal.) Facebook (and LinkedIn) are what people are calling “walled gardens&#. Yeah, it’s fun that there is a great mix of people that I can keep track of (and they can keep track of me) – that’s the part of the equation that’s hard to find elsewhere.

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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

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? Be Helpful.

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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.) Facebook has quite the motivation to keep people on Facebook, and keep the eyeballs there, because of their revenue model, which is ad-based. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

I think that for a while, at least, Linux won’t be a good desktop option this broad group of people. Because most people will only use what they are familiar with. it is particularly sad because its still virtually impossible to spend grant money on GNU/Linux support, people like to fund shiny hologram boxes.

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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. But a few more people will have a lot more money in their bank accounts. Be Helpful. It also means fewer options. And this, I think, is one really important thing to think hard about.

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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. But a few more people will have a lot more money in their bank accounts. Be Helpful. It also means fewer options. And this, I think, is one really important thing to think hard about.

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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. Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations don’t need blogs. Would this help: 1) gain donors? Be Helpful. That’s part of the point.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

Think about how powerful the use of the metaphors around the "war on terror" are, and how differently we’d think about our world and our life if the prevailing metaphor were one of "catching criminals who use terrorist tactics." Be Helpful. Metaphors are powerful in terms of the way we think about things.

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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. Watching the collaboration of people across time zones developing these proposals has really been inspiring to me. Be Helpful.

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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.) Letting people know Changing the DNS of the old site (and changing the site on wordpress.) Be Helpful. I’d recommend it to anyone. That’s all. Getting the varied blogrolls and badges, etc. copied over.

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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

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. A new social networking site, called “Quetchup&# spammed (without permission) the contacts of people who signed up for the site. Be Helpful. goodiness. at 9:46 am Web 2.0

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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. The challenge is to design a template that travels well and can be easily and consistently updated (when our organization moved, I had 5 different footers to update). Be Helpful. Some take internal staff resources (especially the Manual strategy.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 26, 2008

I use WP pretty much everyday, between my own blogs, and helping clients maintain theirs. Oh what a difference a year or so makes. I love discovering new music, seeing what people I know are listening to, and learning more about what I listen to over time. Open Source Tools. WordPress. SaaS Tools. I love last.fm.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 2, 2008

In some ways, it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there are. So how did people like these? Be Helpful. There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM systems and Donor Management Systems. They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a package.

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