Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 7, 2009

Of course, everyone is still on Twitter, and Linked in, etc., to send the same status notices everywhere, or connecting my twitter account to my facebook and linked in accounts, etc. I do think that still, the majority of nonprofit organizations aren’t all that connected to social networks. so I still feel connected.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 1, 2009

We are focused on delivering quality web technology solutions to nonprofit organizations and social enterprises. We are keenly interested in building on our expertise to integrate these open platforms in really rich ways, to allow organizations to create great online applications. And you can follow us on twitter.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 5, 2009

And, you will get the occasional promo post about something the organizations that I am on the boards of (Aspiration and NTEN) are doing. I won’t explain how or why to use twitter or facebook, unless you are trying to put a twitter stream into a Drupal page ( moving data, open source.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 22, 2009

You can email me, @pearbear on twitter, or give me a text message or call … if you know my cell, that is. :-). Monday 1:30: So you want to be a consultant … ( Robert Weiner is organizing a great group of consultant types, including me.). Sunday morning: NTEN Board meeting. I can’t wait!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 7, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Please take the NOSI survey January 7, 2008 In my work with NOSI (the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative,) I’ve become really interested in how FOSS is used in nonprofit organizations.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

A year ago, I was bear-ish on Facebook, and said I wouldn’t Twitter. Now, I tell my clients that they really have to think about a Facebook strategy, and that nonprofit staff can gain a lot from networks like Twitter. A note : Most people will notice that I have pretty much lost my curmudgeonly approach to social media.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 5, 2008

I’m a fantastic book learner, which means I’m a great blog/twitter learner, too. And, in a bigger picture way, how important do you think it is for people who work with nonprofit organizations on technology issues to keep up? For me/my organization, it’s not critical that anyone be way out on that bleeding edge.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

And lastly, since I’m hosting, I get to mention my recent post on Twitter and nonprofits. at 4:17 pm We are finding that to stand out there has to be something that provides and opportunity for the organization to be remembered. Next week, the Carnival is being hosted at A Small Change – Fundraising Blog. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 6, 2008

Dataportability.org – the organization, has gotten a lot of press in the tech industry lately because some very big players recently joined. I think as nonprofit organizations begin to work more and more using Web 2.0 I’ll be doing an entry soon, sort of “how social networks could use open standards 101.&#

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 17, 2008

I started a little Twitter conversation about it, and people seemed intrigued. As a funder, you can put up RFPs (at a cost), and people can apply directly online. It looks interesting, and potentially useful. I wonder how many foundations will go for it, though. It looks very promising.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2007

November 21, 2007 Beth’s wonderful post about a decision tree for whether or not an organization should get into the social networking business had a link to a comment about OpenSocial. It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very similar needs in terms of kinds of applications. Anyone interested? That was all.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 20, 2008

Google says: “Google Health aims to solve an urgent need that dovetails with our overall mission of organizing patient information and making it accessible and useful. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.&# at 12:10 pm Woah. No freaking way.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

But it’s only been in the last few years that mega storage, and mega processing power were available to organizations to power big web applications and the like. If a nonprofit organization has a server, it’s actually not so unlikely that it is running RHEL. They started out with their S3 – simple storage service.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 27, 2008

He has some good ideas and suggestions about how to be transparent as an organization through the website. I do think the biggest mistake an organization can make in the re/creation of its website is to go with the vendor with the lowest bid. Check This List 07.28.08 Check This List 07.28.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

What can an organization use a LMS for? Well, that depends of course, on the organization. Many organizations provide trainings, courses, and varied sorts of learning activities to their constituents. An LMS, or learning platform, is a system that is designed to facilitate some sort of learning process over the web.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

Earlier this week, ISO, the International Organization for Standardization, rejected Microsoft’s bid to fast-track OOXML ( Office Open XML ) to standard status. What this means is that MS will have to take all of the varied input from the ISO bodies, and go through a second vote early next year. I’ll keep you posted. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 2, 2008

In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise – donor management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits, and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on their donor management packages. of use in very large organizations. and MPower at 0.4%. and MPower at 0.4%.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 9, 2006

I’ve been learning about some interesting examples of the use of APIs in nonprofit organizations, as well as learning what vendors (both proprietary and open source) are thinking about the issue. I’m looking forward to getting into the meat of the writing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 21, 2008

which can be useful for organizations that need that functionality. CiviCRM is a great CRM for small-to-medium sized organizations that need CRM functionality. There is even a new case management feature in 2.0, Drupal integration is better, but there is a lot of active development going into improving the Joomla integration.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2009

at 4:21 pm We would love it if you’d add us (Home Free Organization) to your blogroll…we will do the same…thanks! 2 homefreeorg 05.01.09 3 homefreeorg 11.06.09 at 1:09 pm Thanks so much for the shout out…take a look at the latest article [link] Thanks so much for the support!

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Or you’re just curious about projects you’ve heard about. How do you go about finding out whether it’s the right software, and whether the project has a healthy community, since you don’t want to adopt a project that doesn’t?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 13, 2007

Update: Nick Carr thinks the fair use study is “a crock.&# 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

AUGUST 11, 2008

So I’m going to try and lay out the details of what cloud computing is, and how it’s useful for nonprofit organizations. As the bandwidth available increases (via FiOS , and other methods) cloud computing will get even more attractive to organizations and people. at 5:17 am TechSoup Blog 09.16.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 27, 2008

I’ve been hearing good things about SugarCRM from organizations that use it. That’s the one I’ve been using. They also have a newer on-demand version (that is, software as a service, like salesforce.) It also gets kudos from NTEN’s satisfaction survey (it came in third, after CiviCRM and Salesforce.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

That’s an interesting model, and, if the software is decent, sounds like it could be a good option for some organizations. The interesting thing, too, is that their model is that they take a percentage of what you raise (5%.) No setup fees or anything else. But, of course, as with anything, look (a lot) before you leap.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 7, 2007

NTEN is, to my mind, a critically important organization in the ecosystem that is the Nonprofit Technology field, as the convener of the gathering that anchors the community, as well as a unique and necessary multi-dimensional resource at the regional and national levels for all sorts of constituents in the nptech world.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 17, 2008

They are starting with a “charter&# program – a few nonprofit organizations, to iron out all of the varied issues, both technical and logistical, I imagine. Of course, the proof will be in the pudding – we’ll find out over time how this app works, and whether organizations like it. And make it reasonably priced.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 27, 2006

Part III: Blogs, Podcasting and Vlogs September 27, 2006 When I start out these series, I seem to have an idea in hand about how to organize them, which, invariably, gets rearranged in the course of writing. Which, of course, is why many people and many organizations don’t need blogs. Such is life. That’s part of the point.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 19, 2008

To their credit Convio asks this question on their blog : “Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply self-serving marketing fluff?&# What do you think? Time will tell. {

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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

JANUARY 17, 2008

So what does this mean for you, o struggling nonprofit organization? OpenAds , an open source ad server (very cool) just got tons of $ in financing. A company that provides services for Ruby on Rails got a bunch of funding.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 1, 2007

The thing we have actually done the most of is write the primer , and I’ve got more ideas for types of open content that NOSI could get involved in doing, so these suggestions for business models are quite welcome. { 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 4, 2008

Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { The surveys could stand some graphic design help, but you can design templates for it. It’s a LAMP stack application. 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

AUGUST 16, 2007

Most of the 10 are applicable to nonprofit organizations (I’d skip the “Offshore work&# tip.) The one I love the best: Procrastinate. We all don’t need to be on the bleeding edge to get stuff done. { 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

DECEMBER 12, 2007

Finally, Organizer’s Database is open source, but written on top of a proprietary platform (Microsoft Access). CiviCRM was first in satisfaction, SugarCRM, Organizer’s Database, and Democracy in Action were 3rd, 4th, and 5th, respectively. 201 out of 665 users used these 6 open source tools. That’s pretty impressive.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 6, 2007

It will be given under the auspices of Linuxchix , an organization I’ve been a part of since 2000. The course is a 12 week course, starting on November 19th (with time off for the holidaze.) Check out our Moodle page for more details (the outline, and information on how to participate is there.)

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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.) But there still isn’t a lot out there. But I think more is needed.

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