Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Frustrations March 9, 2008 As some of you who follow me on Twitter know, I ran into frustrations a few days ago with WPA. The problems I “solved&# by offloading the functions onto the web.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 9, 2007

July 9, 2007 So I talk a lot about both open source software, and the preciousness of one’s own data. I tout the benefits of open source software. First problem: Linux address books … suck. Open source projects do get better. That’s open source, no? It was great.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology My iPhone 3G August 12, 2008 I once joined the “iPhone non-buyers&# group on Facebook. I swore up and down I wouldn’t get one. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 19, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology NPTECH Punk June 19, 2008 Beth, of course, suggested this , and I’m jumping on her bandwagon. I realized, in being introduced to Edupunk , that I have been doing it for, oh, almost 20 years now.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 18, 2007

Microsoft this week has started saber-rattling against Linux and other open source projects, by suggesting that they infringe on 235 patents that they hold. Just threatening to sue, threatening to get license fees (which, for some open source projects would be a major problem) is enough to make people doubt the future of open source.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 14, 2007

I’ve now seen two posts (one from David Gielhufe , and one from Lobo of CiviCRM ) suggesting that I dismissed the extremely positive results for the open source CRM tools (particularly CiviCRM) because the sample wasn’t large, or representative of the sector. To my mind, it bodes well for the open source tools.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 29, 2008

February 29, 2008 OK, so we all know that I have been eating my own dogfood (that is, using Linux on the desktop) for a while now. 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. { I even decided not to buy Leopard for my Mac Mini.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 21, 2007

More lately, I’ve been working to focusing my advising practice on helping people implement open source software (mostly server-side) in their organizations, providing advice and training. I also ran into a weird problem with a daemon called “avahi-daemon&# which is basically the Linux implementation of “Bonjour&#.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tidbits February 14, 2008 These are tidbits of things I’ve gotten recently from vendors, or gotten via feeds or twitter. Kintera opens a Developers Challenge. Setup of all three has a one time fee.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

August 11, 2008 You’ve likely heard a lot about “ cloud computing “ And what’s true is that the sales-talk about computing in the cloud certainly makes the conceptual issues behind it, honestly, well, cloudy. Changes in the application happen without your knowledge or consent. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 10, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Reflection and Evaluation March 10, 2008 Michele Martin, one of my fave bloggers, has a great post today on Reflective Practice. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 1, 2007

The problem of how do you fund the actual writing of content was not really addressed, and I think that is one of the harder nuts to crack. In general, it seems like most models depend on some sort of up-front funding, whether it be an investment or a grant, to fund the initial writing of a large amount of content. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2009

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. As a quick comparative look between a small number of open source systems, it’s hard to argue that it contributes no information. More on that in a bit.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 24, 2008

June 24, 2008 I’m doing a webinar on Linux Desktops next month, and it’s making me think a lot about my own experience using Linux on the desktop, and where I think things are going. I have had varied problems , from issues of software integration, video problems, wireless issues … The list is getting very long.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

It’s the standard “if I have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.&# I wanted to figure out how to make my product solve every problem that my clients had – or, if I couldn’t, I wanted to figure out how to build/install/integrate something that could. But, I was myopic anyway. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 30, 2007

But my role in that context is much more around helping to solve specific problems, or educate in specific ways about technology options. { I hope that in the process of doing projects for clients, I am able to ask those deep questions, and help them ask “why&# much more often. Be Helpful.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 19, 2013

She founded the nonprofit Sustainable South Bronx , was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship and today leads the Majora Carter Group , an economic consulting firm she formed in 2008 to bring her approach to underserved communities across the country.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

I think one of the problems here is that people see spreadsheets as *just* one component of an office suite. What I’d really like to see though is a true, enthusiastic Open Source community get behind a “better&# spreadsheet for its own sake, not for the sake of copying Office. More formatting options. Be Helpful.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 9, 2007

Open Office works better on Linux than on the mac, as does thunderbird and firefox For a few things (mostly system/network tools) there are some incredibly awesome options, amazingly good for free (as in beer) software, and better than software you’d pay for. I have no problem getting just about all of my work done using Ubuntu.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 5, 2007

Shell sessions are basically not doable, unless I am amazingly patient – the 4 second latency is definitely a problem in that case. It even snowed a bit – and everything seems fine. But it didn’t stay good. About 5:00, the bandwidth hit the floor. It bounced back up a couple of times. Now, it’s at: That sucks.

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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

NOVEMBER 28, 2006

Unfortunately, the nptech world hasn’t yet caught on to the “Planet&# phenomenon of the open source world (see Planet Ubuntu Women.) These are sites that are simply aggregators of the blogs of those involved in a particular open source project (like, in this case, women involved in Ubuntu ). That is so cool.

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Tech Soup

MAY 14, 2013

It is a nonprofit tech company that develops free and open-source software for information collection, visualization, and crowdsourced interactive mapping to help mitigate disasters. Ushahidi was a NetSquared Mashup Challenge winner in the fabled 2008 Netsquared conference in Santa Clara, California.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 17, 2007

Given the widespread problem with phishing schemes, it’s disturbing that web apps are training users that it’s OK to give a new site your email username/password. Just like how search engines allow you to quickly find anything you want, future technologies will help you easily connect with friends from anywhere. 4 Ade 12.18.07

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 10, 2006

If we adopt, in whole, or in part, the metaphors of the corporate world, whose basic fundamental goal is making a profit, and use it in the nonprofit sector, whose basic fundamental goal is making people’s lives better, does that create a problem or conflict? 4 comments… read them below or add one } 1 David Geilhufe 10.10.06

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

First, the major problem is that there are, at this point, so many of them, and although many (most?) of them have open APIs (that is, they allow other software to interact with them, and grab data, or add data,) they aren’t really interoperable (see Marshall Kirkpatricks excellent post on issues regarding Yahoo and del.icio.us

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Tech Soup

MARCH 29, 2017

Ushahidi has been developing open-source crisis mapping software for over eight years now. The organization got started when a group of Kenyan bloggers led by Erik Hersman began doing online mapping of violence reports after the 2008 Kenyan election. These folks do astonishing work. So much innovation.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The “Open Source Software is Free&# myth July 14, 2008 I had a startling realization a few days ago. 1 trackback } Wild Apricot Blog : Tech Support for Free and Open-Source Software 08.20.08

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Tech Soup

FEBRUARY 14, 2013

She is a favorite on TechSoup for Libraries because she is always open to new technology. For instance La Conner has been using thin clients since 2008, and recently installed an open-source integrated library system. Firefox didn't have this problem. She became the library tech person by default.

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Tech Soup

FEBRUARY 14, 2013

She is a favorite on TechSoup for Libraries because she is always open to new technology. For instance La Conner has been using thin clients since 2008, and recently installed an open-source integrated library system. Firefox didn't have this problem. She became the library tech person by default.

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Library Case Study Studies Instruction 40

Amy Sample Ward

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

Problems were that many survivors had no internet access, let alone electrical power, let alone computers or even computer literacy. Another problem in theory is fraud, and another problem is that many sites only included last and first names which in a mass of several hundred thousand displaced persons obviously included many duplicates.

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Wild Apricot

JUNE 27, 2008

Targeting a very specific audience will make it easier for you to address the specific problems faced by that audience, and for your message to make a real connection with them. Published Friday, June 06, 2008 8:13 PM by Rebecca. June 6, 2008 10:41 PM. June 8, 2008 11:03 AM. Wild Apricot Updates - June 2008.

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Forum One

MARCH 25, 2009

s focused on an important problem ? s very innovative in its open-source and collaborative approach, it?s Global Energy Observatory ? We think GEO should be funded because: it?s how we generate and use energy, it?s s highly scalable and could be used by many around the globe, and it already has a well developed ?alpha?

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Forum One

MARCH 25, 2009

s focused on an important problem ? s very innovative in its open-source and collaborative approach, it?s Rajan got in touch with us at Forum One in 2008 because of our prior online data/map/API work for " Carbon Monitoring for Action " - and we've discussed his project several times, but not worked for him.).

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Forj

DECEMBER 29, 2017

In eLearning, we are at the very start of the hype curve with distributed ledgers: we can imagine the technology solving one of our recurring problems. There are big problems with tracking and verifying a learners’ CE balance. Think of those Google Alerts you excitedly set up in 2008 and haven’t read since 2009.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

OCTOBER 21, 2008

Well, I just got my first one out in 2008! Benetech Update: Summer 2008 I'm thrilled to be writing you this update, because this year is unusually exciting even by Benetech standards. You can imagine the impact of Bookshare.org going from a $1 million per year enterprise in 2006 to over $7 million in 2008.

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Tech Soup

DECEMBER 16, 2015

We also shine the light on the potential security problems of smart toys, predict the end of the digital divide, and discuss a health-related wearable that can't get here fast enough and some intriguing 10 year-old predictions that just happened to come true. This has been a steady upward trend since 2008. This past year, U.S.

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