In addition to my primary pursuits—managing technology at Earthjustice and being a good member of my family—I’m working on a few additional projects that I’m also excited about:

• Virtualization Webinar

I’m preparing a webinar for NTEN on the power and benefits of Virtualization technology. Geeky stuff, yes, but the entire concept of server management has been turned on its ear by this development and it’s fascinating stuff for even smaller nonprofits.

• Software Purchasing article

Idealware will likely publish an article I’m writing on how to successfully accomplish a major software purchase. How to identify the suitable apps, prepare the Request for Proposal/Quote, and get the right people at the evaluation sessions.

• BDP Website

The Briggs Delaine Pearson Foundation is a nonprofit in Clarendon County, SC, where the first action in what eventually became Brown vs. the Board of Education began. My Grandmother-in-law was one of the original signers of that petition, along with other family and the attorney, Thurgood Marshall. My wife and I are going to revamp the current website to tell the story in an engaging fashion, invite participation from others, and, ideally, make the site more of a tool in garnering support for an organization trying to accomplish the unfullfilled promise of the Brown decision in the community where it all began.

What are you up to?

I took a trip up to Juneau, Alaska last week (April 16th, 2008).  Didn’t get too many pictures, but the ones I did included an avalanche in motion – we had a foot of snow while I was there (very late in the season).  So, here’s a good test of Wordpress 2.5’s new Gallery feature. These shots were taken while driving around Juneau checking out potential office spaces for the Earthjustice office to relocate to during a potential renovation.  The avalanche starts in the second row, coming down the mountain and then billowing up in a gray cloud over the building on the right.  The second to last shot – the one with the colorful houses – is the view from outside of our office (which is in an old house).  Beautiful place, Juneau!

What a week – I flew to Tallahassee in Sunday and had a great visit with the attorneys and staff at Earthjustice’s office there, then hopped a couple of planes Tuesday night to New Orleans for NTEN’s annual Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC). As usual:

• a bigger crowd than the prior year;


• a meticulously planned event that leaves no room for anyone not to get a lot out of it;


• great speakers; great food; great networking.

I participated as a panelist in three sessions:

• Change Management: The People Side of Tech Adoption, which I designed. Steve Heye, a technology planner for the YMCA, and Dahna Goldstein, CEO of Philantech joined me, replacing Amir Tabei, CIO of NPower Texas, who fell victim to air traffic problems that messed up a number of NTC commutes. I thought the session went reasonably well, with some valuable info imparted and a good dialogue, but it got a little testy toward the end, which I think is indicative of a lot of the frustration we all have with the knowledge that technology planning is key to successful change management, but there are still far too few CEOs that get that. Or, it could be because the room was too small and we were practically sitting on top of eachother…


• Will Your Data Be Yours? Evaluating Data Exchange in Software. This one, led by Laura Quinn of Idealware and with Alan Gallauresi of Beaconfire, was far more technical, diving deep into data exchange technology. Alan took the real technical role, and I did my bit to soften it and tie it to real world examples, but, truth is, I think we had an audience that was pretty good with the acronyms, and it was another successful session.


• Finally, Roundtable: How I Solved my Data Integration Problem was led by Dahna (above), and we were joined by Corey Snipes of Twomile Information Services and Richard Jeong of The Friends Committee on National Legislation. Again, the other guys took the more technical side while I presented the management issues. This was, I think, the best session of the three. It really was a mix of the first two topics, focusing heavily on the politics around integration projects, and the dialogue was really robust, as with the Change Management session, but much more friendly.

Rumor has it that that last session was videotaped – I’ll link here if it shows up.

I also attended a pretty compelling session on organizational metrics. Steve Wright (Salesforce) and Rem Hoffman (The Center for What Works—day job: Exponent Partners) pitched a movement to change the metrics that nonprofits are judged by from the standard financial ones that Guidestar tracks to a more mission accomplishment-based model. This is an ambitious, but important effort, and Rem’s Center is a good place to start.

On Friday, I attended the first Meeting of the NTEN IT Directors Affinity Group, and, once again, we were in far too small a room. It started out a bit surreally. We all agreed that this was a place for the leaders of Information teams in organizations to talk freely about our challenges and our vendors. We started the session with round the room intros – name, org, number you serve and number on your staff. The fourth person explained that he was from some charity-focused telco and wanted to talk to us about his company’s offerings. I truly thought this was a joke, but when I called him on it he got up and shuffled uncomfortably out of the room. If you do anything similar to what I do for a living, then you know that it’s an endless barrage of cold calls and spam. As IT decision makers, we are all walk around with big targets on our chests for these vendors. They have little sense of propriety, as this truly illustrated. It’s amazing that they don’t just ring my doorbell and invite themselves over for dinner at night.

Note: I make a huge distinction between vendors selling products and services and nonprofit-focused consultants (circuit riders). Circuit riders tend to people who are just as mission-focused as I am, and see a more effective role for themselves as freelancers than employees. Vendors want to sell me products. There are many decent, nice vendors, and many who will discount software for worthwhile organizations, and I’m highly appreciative. But the best ones also know that we have enough to do without listening to pitches every ten seconds. Hard selling in the nonprofit community is not cool.

So, rants out of the way, the conference also offered great New Orleans excursions for food, the traditional Day of Service, where conference attendees donate time and expertise to local non-profits (I consulted for the Pro Bono Project), and a couple of keynotes. They were unusually weak this year – David Pogue, NYTimes tech critic, gave an entertaining canned performance that, while funny, lacked much in the way of relevance and depth. Most of us actually already knew about cell phones, Google, Internet TV and Web two-dot-oh. He would have done better to find out who he was addressing prior. On Friday, three women from New Orleans non-profits told interesting stories and painted the rosiest picture possible of New Orleans’ post-katrina recover—I mean, renaissance. Their talk was countered by a rash of twitter links to articles on how only a 16th of the families that own houses have actually received the money promised them (not to mention the fact that anyone renting is just out of luck). New Orleans felt like a ghost town, with pretty empty streets and lots of for sale signs. It is certainly inspiring to see and hear about the efforts of the local churches and nonprofits to rebuild it, but it’s a continuing disgrace that the government and national media ignore the situation and let incompetence guide every move. The federal government has pretty much abandoned the gulf coast.

Next year, NTC comes home—it’s in San Francisco. I look forward to attending without flying, for once! I have every confident that it will be one of the five best conferences I’ll have ever attended, as this, my fourth NTC, was one of the four.

Ah, poor, neglected blog. Wanted to post a few things here:

• The Techcafteria website has been cleaned up a bit – consulting pitch removed, as I’m fully employed at Earthjustice; I also beefed up the documents section. I was happy to find my Non-Profit Times article on Data Management Strategy is now available in their free archives.


• Upcoming articles: I’ve submitted a draft of an article on Document Management to Idealware, which might see publication in the next month or two. I’m a big proponent of enhancing the process of saving and opening documents, and I have a lot of experience with it, having spent most of my career at law firms. I’m also one revision away from a good guide to dealing with your domain name – how to register it, what to look out for, and what to do if things go wrong. My impression is that this is a big headache for NPO’s and I can’t find much written on it at Techsoup or other logical places.


• The NTC is coming up quickly! I’m really looking forward to NTEN’s annual Non-Profit Technology Conference in New Orleans in March. I’m leading a panel on Change Management (“the human side of technology adoption”) and I’m participating in one or two Open API-related sessions, following up on my first Idealware article. I’ll say it again: Holly and the team at NTEN put on the absolute best event you can hope to go to. I’ve been to tech conferences put on by Microsoft, O’Reilly and others, and they should simply be ashamed of themselves. The planning and quality of the event, meals, sessions, locations for NTC always excel.


• And I’m on the committee for NetSquared’s next Developer Challenge, tying in with the 3rd annual NetSquared Conference in May. Billy Bickett and others at Techsoup/Compumentor are looking to make it even more exciting this year than last, with a host of big name companies sponsoring and participating.

I am not a luddite. In fact, I’m a big advocate of most of the concepts of social networking, and a long-time participant. But, about a month ago, A persistent friend roped me into joining Facebook, which, as you no doubt realize, is about the trendiest web site on Earth right now, basking in more than it’s fair share of memespace. Man, am I hating it.

Facebook is decidedly social. You fill out your profile, connect to your friends, and, from that point on, every time that you or a friend do anything on Facebook, the rest of your community knows about it, as a constantly updating scroll of alerts keeps you up to date. I know that Scott won a Disney trivia quiz, that Holly is now friends with Heather, and that Michelle has been experimenting with Trac, my favorite source code repository software. That’s a lot more info than LinkedIn tells me about my associates when I log on there. I also know, or have good reason to suspect, that a co-worker of mine broke up with his partner recently, because he updated his profile to note that he’s single. That was more info than I really wanted to know…

Most of what can be done on Facebook involves using the custom apps that programmers and pseudo-programmers (like me) can easily develop for the platform. The problem is that the majority of these apps are astoundingly trite in nature. There are hundreds of apps to let you poke your friends and compare your pop culture acumens. But there’s little of substance. I know that what drew the bulk of my friends to this platform was the promise of using it as a mission-marketing and fundraising tool for our non-profit orgs. There are plenty of apps that support that, but I’m pained to see where this is a very effective tool for it, unless donating to something meaningful makes people feel a bit better about themselves after six or seven hours of online tickling, poking, and otherwise engaging in remarkably trivial pursuits.

Social networking takes a lot of forms on the net, from the little “people who bought this also bought that” notes on amazon to the web-based communities around games and mobile devices to the whole hog social networks. The latest educated speculation is that Google and Yahoo will start adding social networking features to their email platforms, and Firefox 3 will act as an aggregator, pulling data from multiple social sites into the browser interface. If nothing else, this tells me that I can choose to join Facebook or Myspace today, but next year the challenge will be opting out.

Slam the blogosphere if you want, but the social interaction there starts with someone writing something they care about. And if you read a blog entry that speaks to you, you can engage in a focused conversation via the comments. Or, as I’ve done a few times in the past, roundtable discussion among related blogs. Something about the trivial level of automated discourse on Facebook almost knocks out the potential for meaningful interchanges, and when something more real pops up—like someone changing their profile to reflect a very real change in their life and who they are—it’s awkward to see it scroll up, sandwiched between the latest flixter movie showdown and the news that some friend of yours is bored with their commute. This almost moves the level of discourse between my friends and myself about three steps closer to spam. The Facebook brand of social networking is far too dominated by the fact that, even for an internet junkie like me, the majority of things that I can do on Facebook are not that interesting, meaningful or real.

Well, work happened, and I have to admit that I am not the driven blogger who can maintain a steady flow of posts while working full-time. I’ve been doing a consulting/contracting gig in San Jose that not only keeps me busy, but takes huge chunks out of my day for the commute, so my attention to Techcafeteria has suffered unduly. I’ll be wrapping up the work in San Jose and transitioning to a new, full-time position over the next month or two, returning to the ranks of Non-Profit IT Directors that I didn’t imagine I’d stay out of for long. More on that position later – I’ve been asked to keep it under wraps for a week or so.

So I’ll be closing the consulting services section of Techcafeteria, but I’ll be keeping the website going as time affords. It’s been an interesting year for me, so far. From 1986 until 2007, I held three jobs. I stayed at each one for at least six years, and I secured the next one before leaving the prior. I haven’t been unemployed (aka self-employed) for over two decades. But I have a bit of a self-imposed challenge – I want a job with deep business and technology challenges, at an organization with a worthwhile mission, at a pay scale that, while not extravagant, is enough to support my family living in the Bay Area, where my partner spends most of her time homeschooling our son. Those opportunities aren’t a dime a dozen. I reached a point early in the year where I was downright desperate to leave the job that I was at (a long story that I have no intention of relating here!), and applied at some for-profit companies. I think I sabotaged myself in the interviews, because it eventually became clear to me that having day to day work that combats social or environmental injustice is a personal requirement of mine. My partner supports this—she was proud to tell people that I worked for Goodwill and she’s even more excited about my new gig, which sports a killer tagline. So setting up the consulting practice was—and probably will be again—a means of staying solvent while I was very picky about what I applied for.

One job that I pursued was with an org called the Pachamama Alliance. They are a fascinating group of people. Their story is that the indigenous people of Ecuador put out a call for help to the Western World as they saw the earth and their culture being destroyed by the clearing of the rainforests. The group forming Pachamama answered that call, and their mission is to “change the dream of the western world” into one that is in harmony with nature, as opposed to dominance and disrespect of it. They maintain that environmental injustice and social injustice are tied at the knees – where you find one, you’ll find the other. For those of you who saw Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth”, you’ll recall the fact that the main water source for the Sudan dried up a few years ago. That bit of trivia puts the subsequent genocide in Darfur in an interesting perspective. Pachamama has adopted Gore’s tactics with a multimedia presentation that both educates and inspires people to adopt a more sustainable dream. It’s a timely movement, as it’s becoming clear to all of us that our current rate of consumption of natural resources is having dramatic impacts on the environment. Pachamama spreads the word by training volunteers to share the presentation. Well worth checking out.

In other news, I’m hard at work on an article for Idealware that attempts to deflate all of this big talk about APIs and put it in terms that anyone can use to understand why they might want to migrate data and how they might do it. I’m also talking with my friends at NTEN about doing a webinar on the best practices for rolling out CRM at a non-profit. As long-time blog readers have probably picked up, I consider Constituent Relationship Management software to be the type of technology that, deployed correctly, completely alters the way a business is run. It’s not just about maintaining business relationships and tracking donors – it’s about working collaboratively and breaking down the silos of business relationships and data. So installing the software (if software even needs to be installed) is the least of it, and data migration is just a chore. But aligning business strategy to CRM technology is the real challenge.

So, I’ll post next week about my new gig, and look forward to a long life for Techcafeteria as a resource on non-profit technology, with less of the hawking of services.

Okay, I finished the big job of migrating my blog from it’s old home to my new digs, and I think I have the bugs out, with thanks to the two blogs that linked to my OpenID article, and the two people who let me know that the email was broken (making it impossible for people to register). We’re off to a good start!

I offered some preliminary thoughts and asked a question about OpenID, proposing that, while this is a boon for users, it might have a negative impact on an organization’s ability to coax contact information out of web visitors, as providing personal info will no longer be a requirement for authenticating to a web site.
Johannes Ernst, a man who designs identity management software for a living, responded on his blog with a few counterpoints (which I’ll brutally summarize):

1. People often present false information in contact forms anyway;


2. “Because users can provide their OpenID that they also have provided to other sites, the site can actually learn more about the user — which other websites they frequent, for example.” Johanne qualifies this one with the rider that people won’t necessarily use their OpenID to share such data.


3. With control of their identity, the visitor might feel more confident about sharing information.


4. With single sign-on, and easier access to the authentication-required content, visitors might be more compelled to join and share.

Simon Willison, a co-creator of the Django Web framework, anticipated my question and replied on January 10th. Simon makes the clear point that OpenID will only replace the “enter your name and type a password twice” portion of an online registration. It won’t fully replace requests for further data and confirmation, such as the graphical Captchas that we’re all getting so used to. In fact, he proposes, the fact that a user has an open ID doesn’t mean that they aren’t a spammer—we shouldn’t accept it as full authentication, just a convenience for the password tracking part.

Simon has me fairly well sold that this isn’t as big a threat as I thought. But I still have a lot of questions about the idea, and I’m curious as to how it will play out once the standard is established (assuming it will be – I suspect so). if the authentication is as weak for the web service as Simon suggests, will an industry like SSL arise, adding verification to OpenID authentication? And I’m still intrigued as to what conventions will grow out of everyone having a personal web address, which, of course, will lead to some sort of web page.
Johannes made a comment that really intrigued me on his post, when he said:

” Personally, if I have a choice between knowing a URL pointing to your blog, and having the information you typed into a web form that I put up, I take the blog any time. (That might even be true if the form’s data was all correct!) That is not data that your typical CRM system knows how to manage, but as we all know in the blogosphere, extremely valuable to gain some view on the user’s social network and reputation and interests.”

Johannes has a pretty interesting idea for a marketing app there. While he suggests that the data is free-form, I’d counter that – most blogs follow very standard conventions, and many bloggers (hey, me included!) use the standard text that comes with our blogging platform to denote them. So just as HR staff no longer “read” resumes, how far can blog scanning be behind?

As you’ve noted if you read this blog either through NPTech.Info or Techcafeteria.com, I’ve been doing some serious remodeling. I’ve never been happy with the plain white look of NPTech.info, but, being much more of a plumber than a gardener when it comes to web development, I’ve been too shy to tackle it. But I’m actually proud of the work I’ve done on Techcafeteria, so I decided to share the wealth, bringing NPTech into the fold, so to speak, but I think it’s an improvement. Let me know if you have any thoughts one way or the other.

Techcafeteria was thrown up in my spare minutes during my last week at Goodwill, while I was cramming to finish up there and prepping for the NTEN conference. I basically typed it in on my laptop whenever I could catch a few spare minutes. This week, I finally took the time to turn it into a real web site with more of a graphical feel, some ajaxy stuff, and search. I’m using Google Custom Search because it searches through a variety of file types and allows me to publish the results locally.

...by Diana Prince (Wonder Woman) and Lois Lane!

(From the latest Superman comic, #661)

Okay, first, apologies—one more neglected blog in the wasteland. And I’m not going to promise to do better.

In the mid-seventies, I was a folkie. I liked Pete Seeger and Chris Smither and loved the British folk/rock stuff like Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span. And there was one record that I truly loved that was really unlike any record I’d ever heard prior or have ever heard since – Fraser and DeBolt. Fraser and DeBolt were Allan Fraser and Daisy DeBolt, and this was about the most surreal folk duo I have ever heard. The music was strumming guitars and violin and harmonious male/female lead vocals and the songs were about love and life – could be any boring couple with guitars and some friends for a backing band. Except that what they put together was unique. The beautiful melodies strained into orgasmic, out of tune wails in places, and the lyrics maintained a healthy level of wittiness and absurdity. The result was about 60% pretty folk-country, 20% acid folk, and ten percent pure kitsch. And the artists clearly enjoyed the hell out of making this absurdist masterpiece. You can hear them laughing at the lyrics as they sing them, in places. But take it all in – the record is funny and it’s ridiculous, but there are ample moments that are pure, devastating heart.

Old Man on the Corner is their surrealistic masterpiece.

Well, I got no need for time these days
You know the day ain’t worth a damn, oh no no no
Because my wristwatch ain’t got no secondhand

Them Dance Hall Girls is a killer honky-tonk about loneliness in Baltimore.

My sense of time – Oh I’m a week behind
I’d send you a letter home, but this all takes time, you know
I wanna get some money, I wanna go back home
These dance hall girls know how to make a man feel alone
Is this the way it always is here in Baltimore?

For close to thirty years, I have somehow managed to keep alive a scratched up LP and a beat up cassette of the album. It never hit the radar of anyone capable of marketing a CD. Fraser and DeBolt were, and still largely are, lost to the world at large. So you can imagine how pleased I was a few months ago to discover their new web page. And even more elated to find their two albums digitized for free, legal downloading.

The web page is at http://fraserdebolt.com

The music is at http://fraserdebolt.com/audio.html