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

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

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

MARCH 9, 2008

These posts on open source applications are so helpful. Update: I’ve been using it now as my default browser for the last day or so, and it is really growing on me. { 1 trackback } Boy in the Bands » Blog Archive » Because the power of the Internet increases as people get connected. at 7:46 am Just wanted to say: thanks.

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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

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

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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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 4, 2008

It’s a LAMP stack application. The admin interface is nice looking, and fairly intuitive. The surveys could stand some graphic design help, but you can design templates for it. Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. { Worth a look if your organization does surveys. {

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 31, 2008

Firefox, is, of course, the FOSS application that is on more desktops than all the others, combined. Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Free and open source tool #7: Firefox January 31, 2008 This almost feels like cheating, talking about Firefox.

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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 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

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

DECEMBER 18, 2007

Asterisk is the open source PBX application that works by using VOIP. Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology The power of open source VOIP December 18, 2007 Today seems to be Asterisk day. What is Asterisk, you ask?

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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 12, 2006

Just like evaluating a company that releases as specific application that you are interested in, understanding and evaluating the community around an open source project can be quite important. 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

SEPTEMBER 30, 2007

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. Jobs understands that DRM doesn’t work, and doesn’t help sell music. There are better sites for music and there are adequate players for 1/5th the price. The iPod is a rip off.

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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

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

JANUARY 24, 2008

It is another of those open source software applications that “just works.&# Here is yet another amazing free and open source tool getting a lot of good attention. Anyway, WordPress is a blogging tool (in fact, the one that runs this blog.) It is a great blogging tool. Installation of WordPress is scarily easy.

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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

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

JUNE 29, 2007

Toward the end, a young man, who worked with urban kids of color on media and music, commented that he didn’t really know how to get access to the kinds of things available, and he noticed how few people of color were in the room. This require human centered-software and human-centered communities.

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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. The Connect platform is a set of APIs, starting with the contact and payment sets of entities, that will allow access (via SOAP 1.1) to the data in the Kintera platform. The APIs will be without cost.

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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

SEPTEMBER 6, 2007

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. Lightning , which is a Sunbird calendar plug in, that gives me a calendar integrated with Thunderbird.

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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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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 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

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

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. at 1:15 pm Open Social !=

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 20, 2008

Oh, and Crystal Reports Application Server. Their web site makes no mention of what server technology is used/required for MPower. Turns out it requires MS SQL Server ($240 + CALs from Techsoup, plus hardware). Not among Techsoup’s Business Objects offerings, and $15k without discounts – there may be some available.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 25, 2008

There are innumerable really great free and open source desktop applications that can run on any OS, and there are more every day. I could easily argue that for the overwhelming majority of places you need an operating system, the free and open source alternatives are better (if you count the BSD core of the Mac OS.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 24, 2007

We hope that that contributes in a very positive way to the way people around the world can work together — regardless of geographic location, computer skills, application, OS, and budget. A universal service for the masses. I hope that sheds some more light on how we are actively contributing.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 1, 2007

Signing up for new ones, making profiles, adding friends, adding applications, etc. My curmugeonly thoughts fall into three basic categories of sucks: time suck, content suck, privacy suck. Time suck: Social networks are a time suck. And, yet another login and password.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JANUARY 1, 2007

I’ve been using databases since I was a grad student in the 80s, and I’ve been designing and developing database-driven applications for the web since 1995. hardware, network, application server…). more on Open Standards and Benkler (actually, Benkler is up next – I’ve got two chapters to review).

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