Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 29, 2008

With all of the amazing examples of really great free and open source software, here is an example of one that just isn’t what it should be. { We are trying to eat our own dog food re: transparency and openness in social media. So it’s an example of where proprietary lock-in really is crushing FOSS.

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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. and our own Social Source Commons , are a different animal.) I’ve always been an advocate of open data and open standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

We hope that this will spur development for more social applications and mashups as well as better distribution of these applications worldwide. Katrin over at MobileActive.org weighs in , and I agree: So what does this mean for the ‘mobile for good’ field?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 30, 2007

My role has been to gather up the use cases (specific examples of translation processes). That’s been a very interesting process, and we have been generating some good examples that will be really helpful in the process of figuring out what tools are present that can do what’s needed, and what gaps exist.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Minor releases are, for example, when a project goes from 2.2.3 0 release – for example from 2.x When was the last release? How much time generally passes between major or minor releases? Depending on project, going from x.2 3 might be a major or minor release. Going to a x.0 is always major.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2006

He talks about three examples which have become classic – free/open source software, SETI@Home , and Wikipedia. In the next chapter , he will talk about the economics of social production, and the motivations behind peer content creation. This is what I call “commons-based peer production.&# It’s really worth a read.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 19, 2007

Katya gives us a “Craigslist&# of social marketing principals. Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention has some great examples (that I’ll be using really soon!) I’m a real fan of Craigslist. Good stuff! for writing one-page fact sheets.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 9, 2007

So, here is a real life example of someone with a measly 195 records in her contacts database. July 9, 2007 So I talk a lot about both open source software, and the preciousness of one’s own data. I rail against vendors who promote lock-in. I tout the benefits of open source software. There are still some, shall we say, hanging chads.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 29, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Gender, Race and Open Source June 29, 2007 My session on Free and Open Source software and the US Social Forum went great yesterday. The presentation is available on my wiki (it’s at the bottom.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 17, 2006

One of the best examples of the use of APIs are Google Map mashups. Other examples include desktop applications that allow uploading photos to flickr. services, like del.icio.us, google, flickr, and many, many others, and use and manipulate this data to their own ends.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 4, 2008

Otherwise, fuggetaboutit. { 2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 Alanna 09.05.08 at 8:48 am That’s a ereally good point. I am going to have to stop using Chrome. 2 film fan 09.16.08 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

SEPTEMBER 18, 2006

But first, a great example of Web 1.0 Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Google Analytics vs Site Meter September 18, 2006 Yes, I promise, the post on tagging and folksonomies is coming.

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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. 3 Seth Schneider 04.15.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 21, 2007

They do a good job of using examples for each of these things (like why Southwest Airlines is so successful, and why the Kidney Heist urban legend sticks so well, among other stories. It uses examples and such, but it is not anywhere near as engaging and readable as “Made to Stick.&#

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

There are a few examples of SaaS that are based on open source projects, although most SaaS are proprietary – the code is never meant to be released. For example, we (DonorPerfect Online), use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 for the database engine. And, at the level of most nonprofits choosing software, this is, in fact, correct.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2008

’&# She gives some great suggestions and examples Joanne Fritz talks about three big mistakes – outdated information, insufficient contact information, and outdated design. She makes some great points, and gives good tips to make changes.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 18, 2007

Those shine as industry-standard examples of how open API s need to be distributed. From both a business point of view and from the point of view of how our sector should work to heighten transparency in society at large, there’s no reason to limit the ability of coders to learn about and discuss the API at hand. He’s right.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

If they want to brag about an accomplishment (a certain number of page views or visitors to a particular campaign page, for example), that’s fine. If you don’t see the analogy to blogging or any adoption of social media, then you’re blind. It’s called leading by example, try it, you might like it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 15, 2007

Their code on the server-based method examples only include PHP at this point (the client based method code examples are in the expected HTML and Javascript.) The geek in me thinks the Convio APIs are wicked cool, since they allow you to do client programming via AJAX, as well as more standard server-based programming.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 19, 2007

There will be detailed case studies in the new primer, but what’s been striking to me is how many examples of this there are out there.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

I’ll have follow up posts on specific examples of this integration using open source tools (on one end or the other, or both.) I know a lot of the free site tools, wikis like wetpaint.com, keep trying to move to become more social, and let the audience/membership interact more – that is definitely related.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

But there are successful counter examples. The “open source&# ends up just being a buzzword label they can use, but has no meaning, if they don’t foster the community around the software. So we’ll see what happens. MPower has the additional hurdle that their software is written in.NET, and requires Windows.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

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.) BTW, I exercised great discipline and only have two social bookmarking accounts! But, I have some to do lists I need to share, and others I don’t. 3 Beth 12.01.06

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

Can you tell us some examples of how Excel is superior or more supple than Calc? There’s no reason that OpenOffice Calc *couldn’t* take the lead and go past Excel, especially with the socialized functionality I was talking about. at 7:28 pm I’m a rather modest user of Excel or OpenOffice.org’s Calc.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 31, 2008

Here’s an example of some activists using it: [link] And, yes, I’m doing some work for ooVoo. It can be found at [link] They’re an online video telecom service that’s can have up to six people talking at once. And, as a competitor to Skype, ooVoo is much lighter on your system it’s quite easy to use.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

This is where the role of nptech peeps like e-riders and so on can help support in an unbiased way to help groups to make the correct and informed choices (which is partly why I personally work with so many different apps).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

The eePC is a great example, as are cell phones, media players, etc. For example: broadcom chipsets. My theory is that where Linux is going really work is in dedicated devices built from the ground up to run Linux, and used for relatively limited purposes. This is where Linux will shine.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

But there are many, many organizations in the middle of these extreme examples. The time and energy that it devotes to their blog(s) (yeah, they should probably have more than one) would likely pay off in the short, and long run. Blogging takes time, focus, and energy from someone or someones.

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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. But it’s a journal about technology and social change ! For example, all of Elsevier’s journals went green in 2004. Below is his response.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

There’s for example, no sane way of specifying joins. Example: Author hasMany Comments, Author hasMany Article. Turns out joins are only performed on hasOne and backwards on belongsTo relationships. You can’t tell it, I need a join here. You have to rely on the ORM’s magic to make that decision.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

For example, Yahoo bought del.icio.us – it didn’t have social bookmarking. There are certainly some examples where it is true. There basically are three types of software acquisitions that companies make. The first is to acquire a company that does something that you do not. As a general rule, it is not true.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 24, 2007

I recently blogged about shortsightedness and one example in that entry was me not providing education as tech support when I probably should have: [link].) It opens additional doors. 2 cheryl 04.26.07 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

JANUARY 26, 2009

You install CiviCRM inside your CMS installation directory, and the CMS and CiviCRM talk to each other through PHP APIs (or “hooks&# ) (there are some examples of database calls across the CMS/CRM). If you have detailed info, please feel free to share in the comments.

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