Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 14, 2008

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Speaking of open social networks … August 14, 2008 I just joined identi.ca. The documentation is a bit lacking, and it’s clear that it’s a very new project.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 19, 2008

The description: “ Talk with Michelle about internal software systems – document and knowledge management, CRM, client management databases, intranets, etc.&# I volunteered to be the “expert&# in residence for the “Program&# track of Office Hours. So, come join me.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 4, 2008

It is open source, after all. Yes, it is open source, and I applaud Google for releasing open source software. I won’t be downloading it, or trying it, even when they release Mac or Linux versions. Why so curmudgeonly you ask? And it has some cool features. I am going to have to stop using Chrome.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JULY 10, 2008

My theory of practice is different than my consulting philosophy. Actually, a client had a grant proposal, and it included the consultant’s “theory of practice&# which of course is something that most organizational development/effectiveness type consultants have, but rather few technology consultants have.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 7, 2007

Home About Me Subscribe Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology Thoughtful and sometimes snarky perspectives on nonprofit technology Microsoft Fails to get ISO fast-track for OOXML September 7, 2007 For those of you that pay attention to open standards, this is old(ish) news. In fact, that is far from the case.)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

JUNE 1, 2007

I also have a document nightmare – I have documents on the desktop, documents on my laptop, documents on external hard drives, aiii. There’s been some interesting activity in the realm of women in open source. I need to figure out a good network configuration.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 10, 2007

I’ve been reading Matt Asay’s blog on open source business models, and he has an interesting post which suggests that writing documentation is a good marketing strategy ! Although the breaks I take during my work day don’t look like this, I liked this cartoon.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 26, 2007

Closed – can’t upload open document formats Can only buy books from Amazon I’m still not clear about what happens when you buy your 201st book – do you have to throw out one? Allows me to upload any open document format (.odt, But … Why am I not buying a Kindle? Sorry, Amazon.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 16, 2007

If you read the reviews (most of which were quite positive,) the people who liked it were looking at the real functionality (it could edit their documents, it could surf the web, read email, etc.) Walmart was selling $200 PCs running gOS (no, that doesn’t stand for googleOS, but greenOS, based on Ubuntu 7.10,) and they sold out.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 11, 2008

That includes applications from Google Documents, to Salesforce.com, to Gliffy.com , (the service I used to create that graphic.) So I’m going to try and lay out the details of what cloud computing is, and how it’s useful for nonprofit organizations.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 9, 2008

And, as Dustin pointed out in the comments to my venting post earlier, a lot of this is not the fault of open source desktop software developers. And I’ve talked about how the means and the ends are the same – so it’s important to me to use open source tools. This is my dilemma. And I have to eat, too.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

OCTOBER 15, 2007

At first blush, although Kintera officially got out the door first, announcing Connect weeks ago, and delivering the APIs and docs on Friday, their play is a good start, but Convio, announcing Open tomorrow, appears to be ahead in terms of providing real openness. The API is SOAP. Extensions also include the pantheon of Web 2.0

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

AUGUST 15, 2007

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. A couple of annoyances: the documentation for the APIs aren’t up yet, and the sample code they are going to publish is in C# and Java! That part looks very interesting.

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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

OCTOBER 20, 2006

It would have been nice to have heard from a circuit-rider or "for-little-profit" integrator/consultant type person, and maybe another nonprofit type (a moderately tech savvy ED?) Also, basically, what made an API "open" was that it was free to use, and well documented. That’s good news.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

APRIL 18, 2007

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. Phil: I agree – with time and effort, OO or any open source spreadsheet could out Excel Excel. Maybe WikiCalc is the way to go.

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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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NTEN

JULY 15, 2011

Open source. Open Source – API. On the other end of the spectrum, there are uses of technology to create unique "co-create" opportunities, if not open opportunities, where content can be made available through APIs and syndication for others to use. Authenticate. Authenticate – FB Login, Twitter OAuth.

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 24, 2006

We like what the delicious mirror API (named Mirrord) can do in porting existing applications, which is happening and documented on our blog. Finally, speaking of the API, we also have our regular one which is fairly robust and a great way to take advantage of the more unique aspects that we have going. 8 Todd Sieling 11.06.06

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Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media

JANUARY 26, 2007

(Pop through your read to check out the new look for the blog too, although there are vendor ads via Google) Sundance, the Oscars, and Nonprofit Technology? Democracy in Action has invited everyone into the NpTech Oscar Pool Katya Andresen from Network for Good gives us the lastest celebrity news (what no gossip?)

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

MARCH 16, 2009

This is, for sure, one of the most robust open source CMS to CRM integrations out there, and one that seems to be getting pretty close to providing very powerful integration “out-of-the-box&# – instead of having to piece things together and do customized code, which is more common than not. 3 Christopher Johnson 05.05.09

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

NOVEMBER 5, 2008

They both have good documentation and active communities. I can imagine, though, that the Symfony approach can be powerful. Looking at Ohloh , Cake is more popular than Symfony (on Ohloh, who knows about in general), but Symfony has a lot more developers (81 vs 17).

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Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

SEPTEMBER 11, 2008

It’s definitely a new project, and a very new community (with some huge warts) but it is promising for organizations that want to create private (or public, perhaps) social networks that include groups, discussions, document sharing, bookmarking, blogs and other things. What do these tools allow you to do?

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