Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 23, 2010

As most of you know, I’m a very long time veteran of web application building. I’ve been involved in web application development basically since they started – when, when a cgi-bin folder with some perl scripts to process simple forms was the norm. It’s that simple. I know this is high, but I’m serious.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 11, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Tidbits June 11, 2008 The Tides Foundation is accepting applications for the 2008 Antonio Pizzigati prize , a $10,000 annual award for outstanding contributions to software in the public interest.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

My theory of practice is different than my consulting philosophy. Reading, research, collaborating with others, getting my hands dirty with servers and code, playing with new applications and new APIs – all of those things keep my technology expertise fresh. They certainly are consistent with each other, but they are distinct.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

Tim says: If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that’s a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. We don’t want to have the same application on multiple social networks.

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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

APRIL 3, 2008

Adobe (yeah, Adobe ) joined the Linux Foundation , and released a Linux alpha of Air , their new application platform. { Adobe (yeah, Adobe ) joined the Linux Foundation , and released a Linux alpha of Air , their new application platform. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 29, 2008

Soon, we’ll be updating the primer , releasing a report on our survey, starting a training and consulting program, doing a webinar series … phew! I get to use my expertise in web application development, but not have to do any web application development (which feels to me a lot like having my cake and eating it too.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 21, 2007

The salient quote: Why not roll your own social network, include the OpenSocial API, and have applications, groups, widgets and portals to your site in any number of the “OpenSocial” platforms? It seems to me that many organizations are going to have very similar needs in terms of kinds of applications. Anyone interested?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 18, 2007

Asterisk is the open source PBX application that works by using VOIP. And today, I learned about two online tools written with Asterisk, which would have been impossible a few years ago. Committee Caller seems like an amazing tool. And it’s free, too. 1 comment… read it below or add one } 1 Ed Dodds 12.29.07

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Amy Sample Ward

DECEMBER 9, 2010

The Database, together with the fully-updated 2011 Nonprofit Tagline Report, are key tools in in crafting taglines, organization names and other messages that connect and motivate action. We provide both a feature summary and detailed reviews, as well as a directory of consultants. Get the Tagline Database and Report!"

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 12, 2006

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology OSS User communities December 12, 2006 One of the things that can make (or break) an open source tool is the community around it.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 17, 2008

. :-) Convio is launching the new application , built on top of the Force.com platform. Leverage the power of the open platform of Salesforce.com, and do the work that nonprofits (and consultants) have been having to do to bang Salesforce.com into shape as a donor database. It is named, as of now, Aikido.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 17, 2006

These are Application Programming Interfaces, and they are a relatively new part of the way that Web 2.0 These are using data in your own databases, and grabbing maps from google maps and putting them inside your application. Other examples include desktop applications that allow uploading photos to flickr. for geeks is APIs.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 15, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Speaking too soon April 15, 2007 I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since I wrote my post, a few weeks ago , saying I was done with technology consulting. At first, I liked it a lot.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 30, 2008

Komen for the Cure, for their Salesforce-based application formerly known as Aikido, presently known as Common Ground. Beth is, of course, THE web 2.0 and social network guru for the nptech community. Allan Benamer talks about Convio’s new big client, Susan G. I trust Allan’s gut instincts about CRM technology.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 12, 2008

I said: I will not be buying an iPhone until they sell an unlocked version that doesn’t need to be hacked to use third party applications. I swore up and down I wouldn’t get one. Well, the iPhone 3G changed the equation, some. The iPhone 3G does have 3rd party apps, but they have to be vetted, etc. by Apple, which is a mixed bag.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 15, 2007

It allows you to access 16 entities within the Kintera application, including lots of data about contacts, plus data about appointments and tasks. One of my favorite quotes in the Connect documentation is this one: “As long as you can invoke the API over HTTP, your application can be Microsoft, HP, IBM, Novell, Oracle, even Sun-based.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MAY 20, 2008

And note: this application is not HIPAA compliant. Through our health offering, our users will be empowered to collect, store, and manage their own medical records online.&# Sounds pretty interesting, but hold on a second. Before you sign up, read the privacy policy carefully. Here’s why.

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

FEBRUARY 10, 2009

BusinessWeek innovation blog reached out to its readers on Facebook, Twitter, and its blog asking for suggestions for social media innovators for 2009. 1) Toolmasters: Imaginative techies whose schemes and applications open new doors and lead to insights. I was selected as "eyes to the world." The profile is here.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 17, 2008

Because these applications are not proprietary, and anyone can get their hands on them, and install and use them, this means that nonprofits get the benefit. This is going to make these projects better, and make support for them more available.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 13, 2008

These look like pretty interesting, and useful applications. But, anyway, I’m not putting the silly badge in the sidebar, sorry. MPower has started to generate some community-driven development. But I still haven’t seen much activity on the sourceforge page, nor does it seem that the code for these new projects is available.

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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.) He has a recent article in “ Director Magazine &# which is a UK-based business magazine (no, I don’t read it, I just got the link from his blog,) entitled 10 tips for reducing burgeoning IT costs.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 14, 2006

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Things that make me feel better December 14, 2006 As someone who has developed web database applications for clients, I always hate when they get errors. Things like this make me feel so much better.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 13, 2007

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out – both are incredibly strong applications. But, that said, I like WordPress, too. I imagine that this is a bit of a response to WordPress ( others think so too.) MovableType is written in Perl, which I hadn’t realized until I was doing research for this blog entry.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 15, 2007

Basically, third parties will be able to build applications which will allow two-way communication into the platform. It seems like it will start out with a local query system, then will be opened up to allow third party development of data analysis tools. to the data in the Kintera platform. The APIs will be without cost.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 18, 2007

And, it is beginning to appear that facebook will integrate better with my workflow than LinkedIn, because of facebook applications. I’m still not convinced by any of these social network sites not directly linked to content (unlike del.icio.us or flickr) – but it’s fun to play with, anyway. So we’ll see how it works.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 15, 2007

One of the biggest issues for nonprofits in terms of adoption of Linux has been the lack of availability of ready-for-primetime applications like accounting. They announced that their server product, Quickbooks Enterprise , will be released to work on Linux Servers.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 6, 2007

It’s great to have easy Google tools at my fingertips. There are tons of other add-ons for all of the Mozilla Suite applications. For Thunderbird, the two I’ve been trying out include XNote , which is kinda fun, it allows you to add sticky notes to email messages. I’m trying out some new themes soon. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2008

I look forward to the growth of this community, and the ongoing development of the MPower solution as an open source alternative CRM for nonprofit organizations. . “If we build it they will come&# only works in the movies. { 1 trackback } Bookmarks about News 11.09.08

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

A while ago, when I was still developing web applications, I wrote a wiki plug-in for this behemothic open source CMS/Web database system that I wrote, and has (mercifully) died a slow death (there are still a few installations of it in use, hopefully soon to be retired.) Different enough to drive me crazy.

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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. It wasn’t so long after that that virtual hosting companies became ubiquitous, and affordable for nonprofits.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 14, 2009

Trade-off – you don’t get best of breed tools for both. I’ll have follow up posts on specific examples of this integration using open source tools (on one end or the other, or both.) Are there any tools that you know of that combine CMS and CRM (rather than pasting a web form html snippet on to another website)?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

First off, it means that in the short term, it will be possible to write just one application, and reach multiple social networks, thus expanding reach. In the long term, if the whole web 2.0 2 comments… read them below or add one } 1 Beth Kanter 11.10.07

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ASU Lodestar Center

JANUARY 9, 2013

Linton Weeks wrote an article on NPR back in 2009 on microvolunteering , and he said it right: we live in a micro world. VolunteerMatch is a great tool for nonprofits to recruit volunteers, as well as for volunteers to see exactly what opportunities are available in their area. Should you hire consultants or part-time staff?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 1, 2007

Any application written for OpenSocial will work on any partner social network – any OpenSocial “container&#. at 8:33 pm Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants - November 26th, 2007 « Giving in a digital world 02.05.08 And the language of these APIs are standard HTML and Javascript.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 20, 2007

Many standard virtual hosts have “one click install&# or “fantastico&# – which makes it easy to try out some kinds of web applications. { Many standard virtual hosts have “one click install&# or “fantastico&# – which makes it easy to try out some kinds of web applications. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

In many ways for me, the most important aspect of free and open source software is that it does just that – it levels the playing field so that people and organizations with few resources can have access to quality tools to do what it is they need and want to do in this software-driven world. I have to ask, why would you think that?

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