Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2012

I do remember why I left land, why I left the open doors (literally and figuratively), why I left the free flow of quiet into my heart. watch the fawn and it's mother, grazing in the short, scrubby, yellow grass beyond the house. They don't seem to mind our watching them, although they are wary. I wonder if we thought of them as tonight's dinner, would they notice? Would they skitter and jump into the trees just from the energy of those thoughts? .

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

JUNE 11, 2015

“Your secure software is open source: doesn’t that make it less secure?” We strongly believe not only that open source is compatible with digital security, but that it’s also essential for it. It helps establish that the safe has no design flaws or a second “back door” combination other than my own chosen combination that opens the safe. The analogy of the strong safe with an open design is directly applicable to secure software design.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014

Jerry and I had a great conversation about open sourcing of agricultural scientific models, such as those used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in their climate change reports. When we met, he was therefore especially interested in hearing about Benetech’s perspective on issues related to converting software to open source. agriculture CIMSANS climate change CSR food security Gerald Nelson open data open source SocialCoding4Good

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 4, 2011

There are a myriad of options, open source options are among the most popular, possibly the most popular. And there are open source options that can do much of the same work for much less money. The open source options are many, but the big four: WordPress , Drupal , Joomla , and Plone , stand out from the pack. CMS Nonprofit Tech Open Source Web Tools blackbaud convio commonground drupal plone sharepoint wordpress

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 25, 2009

Thanks to MobileActive.org and the Open Mobile Consortium for a fabulous event. Tags: CRM Mobile Nonprofit Tech Open Source Open Standards civicrm nptech opensource Yesterday, I spent the day in Manhattan, at the UNICEF building, with a bunch of folks passionate about the technology in mobile phones, and the ways to use that technology for good.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

AUGUST 4, 2014

Adopting an open source philosophy has proven to be quite effective for us at Benetech in our work furthering technology-for-good. I recently had the opportunity to give an interview for Red Hat’s online magazine, Opensource.com , and discuss Benetech’s culture of “open.” Ultimately, we believe that open source is more about transparency and innovation than about releasing software. The open source methodology also helps stimulate innovation.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 6, 2012

I do remember why I left land, why I left the open doors (literally and figuratively), why I left the free flow of quiet into my heart. watch the fawn and it's mother, grazing in the short, scrubby, yellow grass beyond the house. They don't seem to mind our watching them, although they are wary. I wonder if we thought of them as tonight's dinner, would they notice? Would they skitter and jump into the trees just from the energy of those thoughts? .

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NetWits

NOVEMBER 9, 2010

They’re doing a virtual book tour exploring concepts from Open Community : a little book of big ideas for associations navigating the social web. Why did you write Open Community? We decided to write Open Community as a way to address those frustrations and redirect the thinking about using social tools to build community online. So, what is “Open Community?”. How does Open Community affect NPTechies?

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 28, 2011

Since I wrote my post on “Open Source vs. Proprietary&# last week, and especially after Thomas Taylor’s very apt comment that the battle is not over in many corners, I decided that, well, what the heck, it was a good time to write a series about open source software options, and their comparisons to proprietary, in 2011, more than 12 years after this whole thing started. Comparisons of open source vs. proprietary development environments (i.e.

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Judi Sohn

AUGUST 18, 2013

In the 20 months since I left Fight Colorectal Cancer, I would guess that I’ve logged in to no less than 150 nonprofit Salesforce organizations. First as part of my role supporting customers at Convio/Blackbaud, and now in my role at KELL Partners where I work with clients who contract with us for support or virtual administration services.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 16, 2011

Because of this, the deck has always been stacked against open source tools in this arena. However, Salesforce in particular has a leg up that most other proprietary tools don’t have, because of their open APIs and their incredibly robust development platform. CiviCRM is a web-based open source nonprofit-focused CRM/Donation management tool. But in general, there are a lot choices and, sadly, few of them are open source.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 25, 2011

On top of proprietary UNIX, people will generally run associated open source server software for web, database and development frameworks. On the open source side, Linux is by far the most popular, with BSD in second place. MySQL and PostgreSQL are the open source database systems most in use for web servers, with PostgreSQL being a pretty distant second to MySQL. Open Source Web Tools apache iis Linux microsoft UNIX web

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

FEBRUARY 19, 2011

This epic battle between Open Source software (or Free software) and proprietary software is coming to a close. Speaking of Apple and FOSS, Apple’s OS X and iOS are based on the BSD operating system – another open source *NIX that has been around for a while. This is both made possible by open source software, and is completely proprietary. Open source software has won. Open Source Operating Systems cloudcomputing opensource

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Museum 2.0

AUGUST 13, 2019

I mean it had its doors open. Walking in, I couldn’t help but ask the staff member about the doors being open. She said well, we wanted to show we’re open and our installations don’t have temperature control issues. We went in to find well-written labels, solid engagement strategies, and a kind, open staff member. Most importantly, it felt accessible from the staff smiles to the big open doors. Recently, I was in Maine on a research trip/ quick family getaway.

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3rd Sector Labs

DECEMBER 1, 2013

We talk a lot about Open Source technology (and we use it quite extensively too) so it might make sense for us to take a moment and explain why we are such advocates. Affordability – Open Source is free of licensing fees. Proven – Open Source platforms like Drupal, WordPress, CiviCRM, etc., Robust – We aren’t big fans of this overblown word, but in the case of Open Source it works.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 14, 2011

The browser wars between proprietary and open source browsers have changed in some ways from the days that it was simply Internet Explorer vs. Netscape. This drop has been primarily, but not exclusively due to the open source browser, Firefox. On the open source side, Firefox is certainly the leader, with a bit less than 30% of the market. Chrome, which is sort of an open source browser, is now getting around 14% of the market. Open Source browsers opensource Softwar

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 7, 2011

On the open source side, the projects that stand out are GIMP (a Photoshop replacement) and Inkscape (a vector graphics program – like Illustrator). I’ll leave it to the graphics professionals to say for sure, but they are both worth a look if you don’t want to plunk down hundreds of $ for Photoshop and Illustrator, and/or you like to work with open source tools. On the open source side, one program you must know about is VLC by VideoLAN.

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SocialFish

JUNE 19, 2013

Open Community is now on Audible! Open Community. Written for the complicated and quirky world of associations and membership organizations, Open Community is about how associations can—and why they should—build community online. (Not The simple yet far-reaching concepts, framed by our own definition of Open Community, describe how to approach the inevitably long and complex process of building community online in such a way as to help your association succeed.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 15, 2008

However, Songbird has emerged, like many open source projects do, as a mature, stable, and, in Songbird’s case, a truly awesome application, because of the incredible extensibility of the Mozilla framework (and the talent of the Songbird developer community.). Next question: can we get the nonprofit version of the killer open source and open platform app Songbird screen. I’ve known about Songbird for a long time.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 8, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Social != Open Data November 8, 2007 As the hype (which, I agree I have contributed to ) around OpenSocial dies down, the reality behind OpenSocial becomes clear. Tim O’Reilly has a bang-on post about the fact that OpenSocial does not mean that users can have data portability.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology SaaS vs. Open Source September 24, 2008 I just finished writing a post for the Idealware blog about choosing SaaS vs. Open source. I said in that post: At one level, whether or not the software underneath the SaaS is open source is not relevant. SaaS is not, by definition either proprietary or open source.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 1, 2009

It comes out of Kirrily Robert’s keynote at OSCON about women and open source. of open source communities. Some open source communities are more diverse than others. In her keynote, Kirrily talks about two open source projects, Archive of Our Own and Dreamwidth that have a majority of women involved, which is rather unusual. Kirrily has a set of really good guidelines for open source communities: Recruit diversity.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 1, 2009

It comes out of Kirrily Robert’s keynote at OSCON about women and open source. of open source communities. Some open source communities are more diverse than others. In her blog post, Kirrily talks about two open source projects, Archive of Our Own and Dreamwidth that have a majority of women involved, which is rather unusual. Kirrily has a set of really good guidelines for open source communities: Recruit diversity.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 3, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology News in open source and open standards April 3, 2008 Here’s a few interesting tidbits gleaned from the net: It appears that Microsoft’s bid to get Office Open XML, their new office standard did get through ISO. Venture capitalists are liking open source more and more. More $ toward open source is a tide that lifts all boats.

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EveryAction

OCTOBER 9, 2018

Talk openly about the barriers your nonprofit faces and how their volunteer help could help propel your mission forward. If you work at a nonprofit, you know what it feels like to have too much on your plate. You are eager to be as effective as possible, but you can’t do it all by yourself. A thriving volunteer program can help maximize your organization’s impact.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

DECEMBER 1, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open content business models December 1, 2007 I’m at the Open Translation event, and we’ve just had a great session on open content business models. I’ve been interested in issues of how we sustain open content for a long while.

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Wild Apricot

JUNE 26, 2020

Are you wondering whether your organization is ready to re-open the office as the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions are slowly being lifted? Use these questions to help you decide

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 7, 2011

I’ve been using this tool since it actually was StarOffice, more than 10 years ago, when it was first open sourced by Sun in 2000. Nonprofit Tech Open Source nptechI recently wrote a blog entry about LibreOffice (LO), the fork of OpenOffice.org (OOo) that came after the acquisition of Sun (the old holder/maintainer of OOo) by Oracle. For the purposes of this blog entry, at this moment in time (early 2011,) LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org are the same.

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EveryAction

MAY 15, 2019

Open rates, fundraising click-through rates and page completion rates for both fundraising and advocacy all went down. Every year, nonprofit consultants M+R release their annual Benchmarks report , which provides an overview of digital trends in the sector. This year's report addressed issues such as email list growth and churn, the rise of monthly giving, and the impact of social media's peer-to-peer fundraising for nonprofits.

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AFP Blog

OCTOBER 16, 2013

4 Steps Toward Open Data Business Models : By now, ‘open data for the social sector,’ ‘open data for the public sector,’ or ‘open data for hackers’ all roll quasi-easily off the tongue. The concept of ‘open data business models,’ on the other hand, still has many experts in the field scratching their heads

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Idealware

AUGUST 2, 2016

Strictly speaking, open data is information that’s accessible, standardized, and reusable. If your nonprofit has data that could be made open for the use of other individuals or organizations, how do you open it? The first step in opening your data is technical openness. Technically open data is available to anyone online, easy to download, and exists in a common format. After technical openness, the second step of open data is legal openness.

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SocialFish

SEPTEMBER 2, 2015

———— Open or Closed—Who Can Participate? If your community is completely open, anyone can see everything, post anything, and participate as a full member of the community. In most cases, private online communities operate best when they have a mixture of open and closed spaces. Pros and Cons of Open Spaces. Open spaces have the power to attract users and draw them deeper into the community. When to Use Open Spaces.

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Connection Cafe

JUNE 26, 2013

Because #GivingTuesday is a movement, it’s open to anyone who wants to be involved. Black Friday, Cyber Monday…Giving Tuesday? That’s right. After two days devoted to shopping — in the stores and online — why NOT have a day dedicated to kicking off the giving season? That’s exactly what #GivingTuesday is to the thousands of nonprofits, companies and individual people who took part in the new movement in 2012.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 15, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Platforms break open! One of the wonderful things that has happened since I wrote the Open API whitepaper way back in January, is that finally, vendors are realizing how important openness really is, and are beginning to implement things in a big way. Open has 3 components, APIs, Database Connectors, and Extensions.

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EveryAction

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018

Advanced Asks: Solicit the Donors in Your Social Network and Cultivation Portfolio Make Cool or Cold Calls Schedule and Attend Solicitation Meetings with Prospects (The Development Staffer Can Make the Ask) Chair and Help Plan Fundraising Events When you’re on the same page as your board, you will find that they can open doors for your fundraising operation. Getting development teams and their nonprofit boards to work in alignment can be challenging.

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AFP Blog

NOVEMBER 19, 2015

Fidelity Charitable opens doors to bitcoin giving - The Boston Globe : "The charitable savings arm of Fidelity Investments will start accepting bitcoin, signaling a wider acceptance of the virtual currency once used by money launderers and drug dealers trying to skirt authorities." 'via

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Eric Jacobsen Blog

APRIL 21, 2019

Open Leadership author Charlene Li reminds leaders to periodically ask themselves these " open leadership skills assessment " questions: Do I seek out and listen to different points of view? Charlene Li Eric Jacobson on Leadership and Management Leadership Open Leader Open Leadership

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Social Networks November 5, 2007 As I’ve mentioned before, there has been a lot of thought and interest in the issue of opening up social networks, outside of what has been, until last week, totally closed silos. I linked to a great thought piece a while back on opening up the social graph (that is, your network of friends.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Free and open source tool #15: MPower Open CRM April 14, 2008 I am so far behind, it’s not funny. My goal is to catch up by the end of this month, so that I’ll still be on track to make it to 100 free and open source tools by December. What’s new about MPower is that it has very recently been released as open source.

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Beneblog: Technology Meets Society

MARCH 27, 2011

We're looking for someone great to take on a crucial new position at Benetech, Vice President, Fund Raising. Benetech has been expanding its impact rapidly over the last few years, and we need a dynamic executive to join our senior leadership team. Benetech gets the majority of its funding from revenues: from product and services sales paid for by our users (or third-party payers who buy our services for our users). The remainder of our funding comes from grants and donations.

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NCE Social Media

NOVEMBER 14, 2011

Google+ finally is allowing charities (and businesses) to have their own pages on the Google+ platform. No more work arounds. Beth Kanter has already started pulling together a circle of all charities who have a page. Another reason why I love to read Beth’s work. John Haydon has created a video explaining how to create a Google+ page for your website. This video is one of the reasons why John Haydon rocks! John, thanks for your work on this. Do you have a Google+ page for your agency?

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John Haydon

NOVEMBER 17, 2015

Getting subscribers to open your emails seems next to impossible. The post 4 Tips to Increase Email Open Rates With Psychology appeared first on John Haydon. Email Marketing click-through email marketing open ratesMost people get way too many emails, and they’ve learned to filter out messages – either by ignoring them, deleting them, or marking them as spam. All the research about what works and what doesn’t for email eventually point to psychology.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 12, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Open Source Feminism? She’s got some great video blogging, including a short one on “ open source feminism.&# Although women were only 25% of the Penguin Day attendees, that’s actually pretty darned good for open source related events.

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