Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

How much time generally passes between major or minor releases? Minor releases are, for example, when a project goes from 2.2.3 0 release – for example from 2.x Look at the “download&# page (or “releases&# ). When was the last release? Depending on project, going from x.2 3 might be a major or minor release.

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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.&# He thinks that time-based billing is bad.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 29, 2008

At this point, I still have to futz with the configs every time I start up, and it still isn’t right. 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. { But plugging in a new monitor just should not be this hard. .&#

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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. Other times it is more important to have an open API or an app that is properly designed for plug-ins or extensions. But the real story is much more complicated.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 17, 2006

Like the freedom that RSS gives to end users in terms of getting the data that you want in your hands, to read when and how you want it, APIs give programmers (and, at times, end users) the freedom to get data from Web 2.0 One of the best examples of the use of APIs are Google Map mashups.

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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. But the last time I tried Evolution, it was a horrible experience. 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. 3) Evolution.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 19, 2007

Nancy Schwartz of Getting Attention has some great examples (that I’ll be using really soon!) Maybe it’s time for me to go out and find some blue and yellow clothes. Beth Kanter digs deep to try and figure out how to pull RSS content into Facebook I review Facebook’s new ad platform. for writing one-page fact sheets.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 18, 2006

But first, a great example of Web 1.0 at 1:27 am From my personal experience after using both: Sitemeter scripts are slow and increase your page load time, whereas the Google Analytics script is fast! vs Web 2.0 – I wanted to talk about Google Analytics. I found this by way of one of my favorite new blogs, Lifehacker.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 31, 2008

It was, perhaps an odd perspective, but in any event, I figured it was time to revisit this, and review what I’ve found. Here’s an example of some activists using it: [link] And, yes, I’m doing some work for ooVoo. ReadyTalk is proprietary and not free (as in beer). 2 admin 01.31.08

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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.) But I think time will tell. They have the gold standard in API and I think it will be a long time before anyone else gets to that level.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

What happened was I felt like I was wasting too much time on things that should be easy. The eePC is a great example, as are cell phones, media players, etc. And we don’t (at least I don’t) want to spend to much time getting all of that to work. It should be easy to plug in a new monitor. 4 Brian 06.25.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

At the same time, it really doesn’t make a lot of difference to the customer that was going to hire Mpower anyway. But there are successful counter examples. The customer only hits a down side if Mpower does a poor job as a vendor and there is no alternative vendor to switch too since the ecology is small.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

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’ve always been an advocate of open data and open standards, and Facebook is a great example of a one-way street. Wired says : Therein lies the rub.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

I don’t get paid to blog, so I don’t really want to spend my time doing that. They each have their good points and bad, strengths and reasons I use them (I use furl, for instance, to save pages I think might go away, or become paid content after a short time being free.) It’s just so … painful.

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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? So someone like Sun think that they need to give equal time to making their PowerPoint clone and their Access clone. Phil: I agree – with time and effort, OO or any open source spreadsheet could out Excel Excel. 2 phil jones 04.19.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 17, 2007

I don’t want to start a race to the top of the Nonprofit 25 – where organizations start spending more time worrying about their position on that list, and less time feeding people. Even if Allan’s vision does become reality some time in the future, why rush to present your figures now. Allan assumes two points here.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

I haven’t spend enough time with Plone to really get a feel for it. It will take some time and effort to get a site up, but that’s standard for any website. It will probably take you less time than a generic HTML site will. { I’ll mention the other FOSS CMS systems in other posts.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

The organization wants to capture the demographic details, as well as make sure that data is synchronized with the data they might already have on that web user, so they can track their constituents over time. All of these strategies take time and resources, but of different kinds. Some CRMs still don’t have openAPIs.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 6, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Time to find a fundraising solution that can’t be bought August 6, 2007 Blackbaud , which is one of the big gorillas in the CRM/Fundraising space bought a littler guy, eTapestry. 5 Jon Biedermann 08.09.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

The time and effort it would take to maintain a blog isn’t going to result in any better accomplishment of mission. 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

JUNE 29, 2007

Which, of course, has been an issue for me for a long time – lack of open source alternatives in the "vertical" application spaces – case management, etc. An older woman of color noted that a lot of the problems that open source developers were solving weren’t problems that communities faced.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

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. There’s for example, no sane way of specifying joins. Example: Author hasMany Comments, Author hasMany Article.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 7, 2007

How can we talk about technology in social change, while, at the same time, publishing in a format that limits the availability of this knowledge to people privileged enough to pay for it? The Public Library of Science is a wonderful example of a reputable, respected peer-reviewed journal where articles are freely available to the public.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 24, 2007

As I move out of doing implementation, and into more evaluation, planning and facilitation of technology change within organizations, I wanted to spend some time articulating what I have tried my best to practice when I’ve been in a place of providing technology support. All technology providers have to deal at some level with support.

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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). That said, I’ve run it successfully on shared hosts in Joomla for a long time and am not and IT person in any way.

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