Image courtesy bonkedproducer

If your spam and cold calls haven’t resulted in a business relationship, tracking me down personally on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook won’t work either.

Let’s be clear: it’s not a secret that I have purchasing responsibility for IT at my company, and my business contact info is easy to find (or purchase). Mind you, I don’t hire companies based on their ability to locate that information and email or call me. I hire consultants and purchase products based on the recommendations in my communities. So cold contacting me might be inexpensive and easy for you to do, but all it tells me is that you don’t respect my time or privacy and you can’t sustain your business based on quality and word of mouth. Two strikes against you, whereas, before you cold-contacted me, you had none.

But, in failing to spam me into a relationship, taking it to LinkedIn or the contact form here is taking your pathetic and unprofessional approach to marketing into a whole new realm of sleaziness and creepitude. Cold-contacting me at my business email or on my business phone is annoying and pathetic, but far more appropriate that tracking down my personal, non-business addresses and contacting me at those. It’s called stalking.

I’m looking at you, Server Technologies. The fact that you’ve spammed me in the past does not mean that we have an established business relationship, as your LinkedIn invite falsely indicates.

And local IT Recruiters 58 and Foggy—you take the cake. Within two minutes, out of the blue, you cold-called my work number, emailed me personally via this blog, and sent me a LinkedIn invite. That was so over the top annoying that I not only will never do business with you, I’ll make sure that all of my professional acquaintances are warned away.

Because I seriously question what a company that violates my privacy as a means of introduction would do if I actually relied on them and dealt with them financially. Ethical behavior? Not a safe thing to assume. Professionalism? Already in the toilet.

Social networks offer a great avenue for the type of business promotion that works for me—word of mouth. Sincere recommendations from people who think you’re good at what you do because they’ve used your products or services. You can foster my business by doing well enough with your current customers that they will speak well of you online. You can also demonstrate your expertise by publishing materials and distributing them on Slideshare and other public repositories (including your web site, of course). If you put your energy into establishing your credentials, instead of shoving your uncertified opinion that you’re great into every channel that you can reach me through, you’ll get a shot at my business. But using these networks to harass and annoy potential customers is incredibly stupid and short-sighted. Similar Posts:

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Things didn’t really take off until the fall of 2008, when I stated blogging elsewhere. Many of the posts here are republished from the Idealware Blog, which I now run. Accordingly, the Techcafeteria-only posts tend to be housekeeping ones (like this one); way off of NPO technology topics (such as my more political and personal entries) and overflow, because, while I write regularly for Idealware, I find myself with more things to write about than would be appropriate to flood that blog with, at times. I’ve definitely hit my stride, and expect this to continue to be a steady source of content for some time to come. But, if all you really want is the technology stuff, and could care less about whether we homeschool or how I feel about civil rights, you might be happier subscribing to Idealware, which has the benefits of a stricter focus and nine additional excellent bloggers contributing.

Over the years, a handful of my posts have either gained notoriety or stood out in terms of synthesizing some of my key messages, so I thought I’d re-recommend them. Here’s my best of the first five years list:

• Message to The Krazy.com Spammer – I occasionally write missives to people who will never read them. I’m particularly fond of this one, based entirely on a true story.


• Schlock and Oh! Facebook’s Social Dysfunction – This is timely: My initial reaction to Facebook, after reluctantly signing up.  I’ve been bashing them since 2007.  (Take note, Jon Looper!)


• The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine – I took a stab at explaining the geeky concept of virtualization in relatively plain english, and I think I nailed it.


• Why We Tweet – In case you were wondering.


• The ROI On Flexibility – I consider this to be the best thing I’ve written, a synthesis of my philosophy on technology management and my standard rant against IT control freakishness.


• Why Sharepoint Scares Me – I think I hit the corporate zeitgeist with a post that doesn’t slam Microsoft’s collaborative platform, but catalogs the things about it that might be difficult for nonprofits to deal with.


• Why We Homeschool – Homeschooling gets a really bad rap, and, as parents who have determined, for good reasons, that it’s the right path for our kid, we deal with a lot of flack and misconceptions.


• The Offensive Bardwell Defense – Keith Bardwell was a Louisiana Justice of the Peace who refused to marry interracial couples on the grounds that it was unfair “to the children”.  As is gay marriage.  As is any hatred-based viewpoint that a bigot desperately wants to justify and defend.  On a side note, I’m pretty sure that this is the article that spawned a ton of traffic from Sean Hannity’s website.  I hope it was educational for those visitors!


• Why Geeks (Like Me) Promote Transparency – In order to obtain funding and improve effectiveness, NPOs are going to have to start managing and sharing their outcome data. This is a big theme of mine, and this post said it well.

It’s been a productive five years.  Here’s to the next five at Techcafeteria!Similar Posts:

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• Blog Policy on Recent Racist Comments

Comments are moderated here, mainly in order to weed out the obvious spam that slips through my Akismet filter on occasion.  I don’t publish spam or link spam, so if you’re one of the people leaving innocuous comments about my writing style, note that I don’t believe that you’re sincere, and I won’t publish your link to your viagra site.

But the comments I received this week aren’t spam.  Instead, they appear to be the work of someone looking to provoke me.  They’re in reply to my post “The Offensive Bardwell Defense“, in which I spoke about segregation, my marriage, and the legal battle to allow same sex marriage underway.  The first message was easy to ignore, because it was pure vitriol, equating my interracial marriage with numerous controversial sex acts.  The writer, one “DMTS” of gmail, followed that up with a more measured comment that, while continuing to make personal comments about my marital status, argued that, while it’s fine for me to “hook up” with people of non-white ancestry, I have no right to blog about it.  ”Don’t ask, don’t tell”, as it were.  The full comment went:

“Peter Campbells marriage (if still intact) is just an exception to the way things really work in mixed marriages. I don’t want to deny him any success or happiness with his nice wife and child pictured (great pic btw), but he does not have any rights defending something that is clearly wrong for the majority, when he is in the minority of working mixed marriages(for now). If I hook up with a different race partner, I will just do it, and not advertise it as normal, or make a big deal and use someones legit comment as a scapegoat. WHO CARES ANYWAY PETER? no one is making laws that specify you can’t hook up with dreadlocks, beehives, or skinheads, so what are you worried about? when has anyone persecuted mixed racials? sounds to me you are looking to MAKE TROUBLE by drawing sympathy to yourself that is totally unjustified. Blog about something else that is important, like what your son is planning to do with his future, to help make this a better world without blog script shills making trouble for all races. Shalom”

The second thing I’d point out is that DMTS completely missed my point.  I used my interracial marriage, and interracial marriage in general, to point out that the same sex marriage debate underway in this country is a parallel, and, as with interracial marriage in the 60’s, the bigots, of whom I assume DMTS counts himself among, are going to lose the battle.  He seems to have skimmed my message and misread my conclusion that this type of bigotry—be it about race or sexual orientation—will be overcome.  It’s a slow process. It clearly still exists, as DMTS chooses to illustrate.  But, today, his attitudes and comments are sad.  In 30 years time, they’ll be outrageous.  Racism and hatred/bigotry based on assumptions about race (or race relations) is on the wane.  Interracial marriage is now accepted in the U. S.. It’s a slower course for a lot of the institutionalized racism in our schools and justice system. But most of the vitriol comes from old, white men, and two trends are clear: whites as a percentage of our population are shrinking, and old people will die sooner than the more enlightened young ones.

As to publishing comments like this: I’m interested in dialogue, and if DMTS responds to this with something that doesn’t use language that I wouldn’t want my Mom (who reads this blog) to see, I’ll certainly approve it.  If he provides some backing for his unverified claims that interracial (“mixed” is an offensive term) marriages are at higher risk of failure than same race marriages, a claim that I find very suspect and unlikely, I might even reply. But if DMTS actually isn’t invested in his arguments, and is just trying to get a rise out of me, it only takes a second to mark a comment as spam.  And rude, unconstructive conversation, like DMTS’s first message, which I will not publish,  is spam here; that’s the policy.Similar Posts:

• The Offensive Bardwell Defense
• Message to the Krazy.com Spammer
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Today, skimming through my news feed, I starred this article by Michelle Malkin, passed on by Google Reader’s “Cool” feed, and I just found time to read it. The gist of the article is that Census filler-outers should refrain from allowing the government to peg us by ethnicity, instead choosing “Other” and filling in the comment squares with “American”. Take that, Gubmint statisticians!

Now, this is interesting, because while Ms. Malkin proudly describes herself as a Fox News Commentator, I don’t think this question lands on a liberal/conservative scale. Discomfort with being pegged by race straddles all ideological outposts, as it should. But data is data, and the ethnic makeup of our country by geographic area is a powerful set of data. If we don’t know that a neighborhood is primarily Asian, White, Black or Hispanic, we don’t know if the schools are largely segregated. We don’t know if the auto insurance rates are being assessed with a racial bias. We don’t know if elected officials are representative of the districts they serve. And these are all very important things to know.

It might seem that, by eschewing all data about race, we can consider ourselves above racism. But we can board our windows and doors and dream that the world outside is made of candy, too. It won’t make the world any sweeter. If we don’t have any facts about the ethnic makeup and the conditions of people in this country, then we can’t discuss racial justice and equality in any meaningful fashion. We might hate to take something as personal as the genetic, geographic path that brought us to this country and made us the unique individuals that we are and dissect it, analyze it, generalize about it and draw broad conclusions. It is uncomfortable and, in a way, demeaning. But it’s not as uncomfortable and demeaning as being broadly discriminated against. And without evidence of abuse, and of progress, we can’t end discrimination. We can only board up the windows that display it.

So, I’m not going to take Ms. Malkin’s advice on this one, and I’m going to urge my multi-racial wife and kid to be as honest as they can with the choices provided to them. Because we want the government to make decisions based on facts and data, not idealizations, even if it means being a little blaze about who we really are.Similar Posts:

• Regime Change
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On Thursday, February 4th, at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern, don’t miss The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting. This panel discussion with represenatives from Charity Navigator and Guidestar will cover all of the questions I’ve been blogging about here. Join me with moderator Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar, Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D, Christine Egger of Social Actions, David Geilhufe of NetSuite, and host Holly Ross of NTEN. Free registration is here.

And on Wednesday, February 10th, from 10:00 to 2:00 Pacific (1:00 to 5:00 Eastern), NTEN and the Green IT Consortium are putting on the first Greening Your IT Virtual Conference. With a plenary by Joseph Khunaysir of Jolera Inc. and six tactical sessions explaining how your org can benefit yourselves and the earth, including the one I’m co-presenting with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC on Server Virtualization.  Registration is $120, and it looks well worth it.Similar Posts:

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First, you’re looking at the newest Idealware board member. There’s still some paperwork to fill out, but this is a done enough deal that it’s worth mentioning here. I join at an exciting time, with our first book on the way; a new website about to be unleashed,  and the successful rollout of the Idealware Research Fund (which met it’s initial goal!).

Coming up in February is the Green IT Consortium/NTEN virtual conference on Greening your Technology. Matt Eshleman of CITIDC and I will be reprising the Server Virtualization session that we did at NTC last year. Mark down the date of February 10th, and look for details very soon, including after-conference get-togethers in SF and DC..

Also in February, but as yet not fully scheduled, I’ll be participating on an NTEN-sponsored panel with representatives of Guidestar, Charity Navigator, and the NPTech/Philanthropy community to discuss the upcoming changes in how these organizations assess nonprofits. I’ve been blogging about this potentially dramatic change in the way NPOs are assessed, along with the associated concerns, here and here.

April brings the big event: NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, 4/8 to 10, in Atlanta, Georgia this year.  I have a lot going on—I’m assembling a group of NTEN’s more technical presenters to lead the technology track, five sessions that will focus on the less trendy, but eternally critical tasks that nonprofit techs face daily: keeping the servers running (and virtualizing them); installing wireless; supporting computer use and planning and purchasing with little budget.  Our hope is that this track will not only impart a lot of useful information, but also serve as the introduction of a peer community for the front line NP techs. And I’ll be flying down early enough to participate in Day of Service and this year’s experimental unconference, where we’ll, among many other things, discuss how we standardize on shared outcome measurements and what that might look like.

The biggest challenge? Doing all this without breaking the stride on my work at Earthjustice, where I’m busy developing a case management system, installing email archiving software, deploying videoconferencing systems and prepping for Office 2007 and Document Management roll-outs, among other things; blogging weekly for the aforementioned Idealware; and spending as much quality time as I can get with my wonderful wife and kid. If you have any extra hours in the day to donate, send them here!Similar Posts:

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Warning: This entry is a little off of the usual nptech topic. Feel free to skip if you only come here for the geeky thoughts!

The decision to homeschool our kid wasn’t a slam dunk, but it was the right one. We made it after thoroughly investigating everything—our son’s learning style, both through the school system and via our local Children’s Hospital; every public, private, and non-public school within about a six town radius; and conversations with educators, administrators, parents and other experts. Given what we now know about how our son learns and what options are out there, we aren’t guessing that this is the best route.  We’ve verified it.

But we are constantly questioned about the decision.

We are conscientious, aware parents who value our son’s education and happiness highly (just like you!) and we have identified and followed the path that will work out best for him.

There is no need to be offended if your child’s best environment is a different one, like a public school.

There is no need to be panicked about his psychological well-being:  He has lots of friends, makes new friends easily, and is well-behaved, polite and happy.

There is no need to worry about our qualifications:  We know what we can teach him and we know where to find museums, extra-curricular programs and classes, qualified tutors and other external resources in order to get him what he needs.

Do we have opinions about public schools, and what they’re like under the testing-obsessed No Child Left Behind act, in a system where the key educational decisions are made by the middle-management bureaucrats and local politicians?  Sure.  But our opinion isn’t that children can’t succeed in those schools.  It’s that children who are conducive to that learning environment do well, and we have it on good, credentialed authority that our kid won’t.

Do we think our curriculum, which mixes standard K-12 materials with lots of trips, history and science classes, arts, gymnastics (circus school!) and hands-on activities is, in many ways, superior to the brick and mortar experience?  Of course! We can do a lot of  training that is targeted to our son’s learning style, as opposed to mostly desk-bound training generalized for a 20 to 40 child audience.  We appeal to his creativity, and let his interests guide an appropriate percentage of the curriculum. Schools can’t afford to provide this level of individualized attention and responsiveness to their students.

Are we sheltering and insulating our child from a heathenous, corrupting culture that would steer him away from the path of God and righteousness? No, we own a TV and he watches it.  And we rest pretty heavy on the heathenous side of the scale in the first place.  We are protecting him from a lot of character-building bullying, peer pressure and anxiety, but we are extremely reassured that he has plenty of character all the same.  My friend Jane has a joke about this:  “Yeah, in order to give my  homeshcooled kid the school social experience, once a week I take her  into the bathroom, beat her up and steal her lunch money.”

I think that last one is the big one—I think a lot of the well meaning questions about socialization (a word that every homeschooler has ample reason to simply loathe) boil down to a concern that our child won’t be able to cope as an adult because he missed out on the sheer brutality of spending five days a week with a slew of other children, experiencing all of the social confusion and frustration that they experience and inflict on their peers.  Our kid experiences self doubt and frustration.  He knows what it feels like to be criticized, and he can be critical of others.  He might not get kicked and ridiculed with the intensity that we were when we went to public schools; he might remain a quirky, individual who doesn’t take fashion cues from The WB; but homeschooling him has not resulted in some sort of avoidance of human doubt and discomfort.  In that, he’s a lot like every other kid. And he’ll deal with it, learn from it, and become an adult that shows no external signs of having been homeschooled.

It’s just getting to be a bit much, being constantly questioned about something that we did the work to identify as the right thing for our child.  It is not an affront on society.  It’s what’s best for someone who we not only care incredibly about, but are actually responsible for.  So, please, if you know us, have a little faith—we show pretty good judgment and intelligence in the other things we do, why would we be any different about something as important as this?Similar Posts:

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• If you hate visiting this web site, and believe that RSS is dead (I don’t!), then you’re welcome to ditch both and follow Techcaferia and nptech.info on Twitter.

• The Techcafeteria Twitter feed will post links to blog entries like this one, and topically-related articles from around the web, much like you see here under the “Stuff” tab.  Note that this is simply my Google Reader Shared items; if you use Reader you can just share with me there, as well.

• The nptechinfo Twitter feed will post links to items tagged with “nptech” from around the web.  Note that ntech.info also aggregates a bunch of nptech blogs, general tech info, and nptech tagged tweets, which are excluded from the Twitter feed because they create redundant links. The nptech.info blogs are well worth following, and you can subscribe to the feed there, but I have no care to compete with Joe Solomon’s awesome nptechblogs feed, which he is better about maintaining, anyway.

• With well over 100 posts on this blog, I took some advice and I’m going to make some improvements here to better locate particular content.  I’m surprised to see how quickly I’ve built up a body of work. This is the 119th post here.  And I’m happy to see that it meets goals for the blog that I articulated back in April of 2007 fairly well.

• On a different topic, NTEN’s Online Technology Conference starts Wednesday. You can still register, and, if you tell them that you heard it here, they’ll give you a 25% discount. Who’s says it doesn’t pay off to read my blog?

• NPTech.Info Updated
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In addition to my fulfilling work at Earthjustice and the quality time at home with my lovely wife and Lego-obsessed 10 year old, here are some of the things that are keeping me busy that might interest you as well:

• Blogging weekly at Idealware, as usual. This is one of those rare entries that shows up here at Techcafeteria, but not there.  And I’m joined at Idealware by a great group of fellow bloggers, so, if you only read me here, you might get more out of reading me there.
• I recently joined the GreenIT Consortium, a group of nonprofit professionals committed to spreading environmental technology practices throughout our sector.  I blog about this topic at Earthjustice.  Planned (but no dates set) is a webinar on Server Virtualization; technology that can reduce electrical use dramatically while making networks more manageable.  This will be similar to the session I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in April, and I’ll be joined again by Matt Eshleman of CITIDC. I’m also helping Ann Yoders, a consultant at Informatics Studio, with an article on green technology for Idealware.
• On September 9th, I’ll be recording another episode of Blackbaud’s Baudcast with other friends, including Holly Ross of NTEN. The topic this time is technology management, a subject I don’t ever shut up about.
• Saving the big ones for last, NTEN’s first Online Conference is themed around the book, Managing Technology To Meet Your Mission. This one takes place September 16th and 17th, and I’ll be leading the discussion on my chapter: How to Decide: Planning and Prioritizing.
• In early 2010, Aspiration will bring my pitch to life when we hold a two day conference that is truly on nonprofit technology, geared towards those of us who manage and support it. I’ve been known to rant about the fact that the big nptech shindigs—NTEN’s NTC and Techsoup’s Netsquared—focus heavily on social media and web technologies, with few sessions geared toward the day to day work that most nptechs are immersed in.  The goal of the event is to not only share knowledge, but also to build the community.  With so many nptech staff bred in the “accidental” vein, we think that fostering mentoring and community for this crowd is a no-brainer.
• Further out, at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference, I’ll be putting together a similar tech-focused sub-track.  Since the Aspiration event will be local (in the SF Bay), this will be a chance to take what we learn and make it global.

My nptech friends will forgive me for declaring my extra-curricular dance card otherwise closed—this is enough work to drop on top of my full-time commitments!Similar Posts:

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Google Voice is on the Horizon

When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.

Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!Similar Posts:

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Here it is Saturday, and I’m still reeling from the awesome event that was the Nonprofit Technology Conference, put on by org of awesomeness NTEN. First things first, if you attended, live or virtually, and, like me, you not only appreciate, but are pretty much astounded by the way Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett and crew get this amazing event together and remain 100% approachable and sociable while they’re keeping the thing running, then you should show your support here.

We had 1400 people at the sold-out event, and if that hadn’t been a capacity crowd, I’m pretty sure we had at least 200 more people that were turned away. What does that say about this conference in a year when almost all of us have slashed this type of budget in response to a dire economic situation? I think it says that NTEN is an organization that gets, totally, and phenomenally, what the web means to cash-strapped, mission-focused organizations, and, while we have all cut spending, sometimes with the painful sacrifice of treasured people and programs, we know that mastering the web is a sound strategic investment.

Accordingly, social media permeated the event, from the Clay Shirky plenary, to the giant screen of tweets on the wall, and the 80% penetration of social media as topic in the sessions. As usual, I lit a candle for the vast majority of nonprofit techies who are not on Twitter, don’t have an organizational Facebook page, and, instead, spend their days troubleshooting Windows glitches and installing routers. My Monday morning session, presented with guru Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, was on Server Virtualization. If you missed it, @jackaponte did such a complete, accurate transcription, and you can feel like you were there just by reading her notes (scroll down to 10:12) and following along with the slides.

My dream—which I will do my best to make reality—is that next year will include a Geek Track that focuses much harder on the traditional technology support that so many NPTechs need. I stand on record that I’m willing to put this track together and make it great!

I was also quite pleased to do a session on How to Decide, Planning and Prioritizing, based on my chapter of NTEN’s book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.  It was really great to start the session with a question that I’ve always dreamed I’d be able to ask: “Have you read my book?”.  I’m in debt to NTEN for that opportunity!

The biggest omission at this event (um, besides reliable wifi, but what can you do?) was the addition of a twitter name space on our ID badges. Twitter provided a number of things to the—by my estimation—half of the attendees who hang out there.

• Event anticipation buildup, resource sharing, session coordination and  planning, ride and room sharing and other activities were all rife on Twitter as the conference approached.


• Session tweeting allowed people both in other sessions and at home to participate and share in some of the great knowledge shared.


• For me, as a Twitter user who has been on the network for two years and is primarily connected to NTEN members, Twitter did something phenomenal. Catching up with many of my “tweeps”, we just skipped the formalities and dived into the conversations. So much ice is broken when you know who works where, what they focus on in their job, if they have partners and/or kids, what music tastes you share, that catching up in person means diving in deeper. The end result is clear—#09ntc is still an active tag on Twitter, and the conference continues there, and will continue until it quietly evolves into #10ntc.

One thing, however, worries me. This was the tenth NTC, my fifth, but it was the first NTC that the online world noticed. Tuesday, on Twitter, we were the second most popular trend (the competing pandemic outranked us). NTEN’s mission is to help nonprofits use technologies to further their missions. But, as said above, this conference was, in many ways, a social media event. I’m hoping that Holly and crew will review their registration process next year to insure that early spots in what is sure to be an even more popular event aren’t filled up by people who really aren’t as committed to changing the world as they are to keeping up with this trend.

But, concerns aside, we need to send that team to a week-long spa retreat, and be proud of them, and proud of ourselves for not only being a community that cares, but being one that shares. I urge even the most skeptical of you to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, we’re not on there discussing what we had for breakfast. We’re taking the annual event and making it a perpetual one, with the same expertise sharing,  querying, peer support and genuine camaraderie that makes the nptech community so unique – and great. Come join us!Similar Posts:

• NTC Wrap-up
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The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate.  All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can’t tell people what you’re doing, what you’re doing won’t be well-received.  And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you’re doing, whether it’s taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007.

Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read:

1. Let no acronym go unexplained.

   The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that

   “The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server” or

   “The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane”.

   Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible.  But if it’s relevant, speak english: “In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections.”

2. Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects

   Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance.  If your message is titled “Technical Information”, it might as well be titled “You are getting sleepy…”  But, if it’s titled “Network Availability” or “Database Maintenance Scheduled”, your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don’t worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability.  The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff’s attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points to the email (see rule 4).

3. Keep it short and simple

   It’s about what the staff needs to know, not what you’d like to tell them.  So, the network maintenance email should not read:

   “The systems will be down from 4:30 to 9:00 tonight while we replace drives in the domain controllers and run a full defrag on the main document server”

   It should read:

   “The network will be unavailable from 4:30 pm until 9:00 pm while we perform critical maintenance”.

   If it’s only a portion of the network, but something useful will be up – as when the file servers are being repaired, but email is still available, make a note of that: “While the main servers will not be available, you will still be able to send and receive email”.

4. No ALL CAPS, no exclamation points and go sparingly on the bold

   System downtime might be urgent to you, but it’s never urgent to the staff.  It’s a fact of life.  A reply from the Director of Online Giving that the downtime will jettison a planned online campaign is urgent; not your routine announcement.

5. Tell the whole story

   ...even if this sounds like it conflicts with rule 3.  Because there are two types of people on your staff:

   • The majority, who want simple, non-techie messages as described above
   • The rest, who want the gory details, either so they can rest easy that you aren’t making anything up, or because they’re actually interested in what you’re up to.
   
   

   My approach is to do the simple message and, below it type, “Technical Details (optional reading)”.  In this section I might explain that we’re replacing the server that processes their network logins (I won’t use “DHCP” or “Domain Controller” if I can help it) or that we’re upgrading to the new version of Outlook.

The key concepts here are consistency, simplicity, and a focus on what impacts them regarding what you’re doing.  Stick to it and, miraculously, people might start reading your all staff emails.Similar Posts:

• Keys to the Kingdom
• The Sky is Calling
• Smartphone Follies
• Colossus vs. Cloud – an Email System Showdown
• NTC Wrap-up

Saturday—I’ll be home prepping, on email and Twitter, and then off to Jupiter in Berkeley (2181 Shattuck, right at Downtown Berkeley BART) at 6:00 pm for the Pre-NTC Brewpub Meetup I’m hosting. We have a slew of people signed up at NTConnect for the event. If you’re coming, get there promptly so you can help me reserve adequate space!

Sunday morning is Day of Service. I’ll be advising a local education nonprofit on low cost options for enhanced voice and video. NTC kicks off with the Member Reception, and I suspect that there will be lots of talk about our book at that event – if we’ve never met, this will be a good chance to figure out which of the 1400 attendees I am.

The Science Fair – NTEN’s unique take on the vendor show – is always a blast. If you’re at a booth, I’ll be coming by, but I’ll also be spending some time manning the Idealware booth, so that’s another good place to catch up. Dinner Sunday? I haven’t made plans. What are you doing?

Monday I keep busy hosting two sessions:

• 10:30, Franciscan C: Virtualization: The Revolution in Server Management and Why You Should Adopt It with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC.


• 1:30, Franciscan C: How to Decide: Planning and Prioritizing is my session based on Chapter 4 of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.

At 3:30, I’m at a loss, with excellent sessions by Peter Deitz, Allen (Gunner) Gunn, David Geilhufe, Dahna Goldstein, Jeff Patrick, Robert Weiner and Steve Wright all competing equally for my attention. If Hermione Granger is reading this, perhaps she can help me out.

On Tuesday, my tentative plan includes these breakouts: Google Operations: Apps and Analytics; Evolution of Online Communities : Social Networking for Good; and Measuring the Return on Investment of Technology. I caught a preview of the last one, led by Beth Kanter, at a Pre-NTC get together we did at Techsoup last month; it’s going to be awesome.

As a local co-host of the 501 Tech Club and a member of this year’s planning committee, I consider myself one of your hosts and am happy to answer any questions I have about what there is to do in the Bay Area, where I’ve lived since 1986. The best way to reach me is always on Twitter – if you’re attending the conference, following me, and I don’t figure that out and follow you right back, then send me a quick tweet letting me know you’re at NTC and I will (although, disclaimer required, I will quickly block people who use Twitter as a means to market products to my org). If you haven’t already gotten this hint, Twitter is an awesome way to keep connected during an event like this.Similar Posts:

• NTC (Just) Past and Future
• What I’ve been up to
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• Administrivia
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)

Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue—things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You’re a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn’t your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you’ve learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.

My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I’ve gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it’s risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia’s experience are:

• You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But “the cloud”, in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don’t be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor’s infrastructure.
• You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn’t an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.
• Don’t sign any contract that doesn’t give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.
• Focus on the data. Don’t bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It’s robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it’s recoverable.

Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it’s the type of cloud that your data won’t fall through.Similar Posts:

• Administrivia
• The Sky is Calling
• SaaS and Security
• Putting The Tech Back In Nonprofit Technology
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook

I was with Dotable, a nice outfit out of Australia run by a guy named “Aussie Bob”, and it was a good place to be – decent pricing, really responsive support, mostly stable. I recommended Dotable often because the problems were minimal in relation to the great communication and supportive attitude of the staff.

A few months ago Bob announced that he was retiring and handing over management to another company. In short order, the new service deleted a (dormant) Drupal site off of one of my domains without telling me; and changed my mail records to point to a new spam filtering service, without informing me. Since one of my “client” domains routes his mail through EasyDNS (on my recommendation), this resulted in two days of mail being completely lost. During the crisis, every support ticket I put in got a “we’re forwarding this to our admin” answer. The admin had a backlog, I bet, because I wasn’t getting responses for days, and the responses I got were not helpful, and ducked the ones like “why did you change my MX record without telling me?”

Anyway, my friend/client is active on Green America’s forums (they used to be Coop America), and he’d heard very good things about Canvas Dreams, an Oregon hosting service with a wind-powered server farm and the exact plans and setup that I was looking for. So I made the move, and Techcafeteria,NPTech.info and Krazy.com, along with my other projects, are all a bit greener and happier today. And it does seem to me that this server is faster than the one I was on with Dotable. Those of you who actually visit the site (I assume that most of you simply subscribe) might have noticed some weirdness this morning as I adjusted a few things, but the blog came over without a noticeable hitch.

So, welcome to the same site, at it’s new green home.Similar Posts:

• Dealing With Domains – Part 1
• Dealing with Domains – Part 2
• Administrivia
• State of the Smart(phone)
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So it was a blow to my sense of immortality when I was rushed to the hospital on the possibility that I’d had a heart attack Monday night. The actual diagnosis, as I suspected, was heartburn. Really bad heartburn, that had me doubled over for close to five minutes, throat constricted in a way that made it a little difficult to breathe. My wife called 911; the EMTs insisted that I get it checked out. Probably the worst part of it was seeing my boy on the front stoop watching them wheel me away on a stretcher.

So, between Monday night and this morning, when I went for (and passed) a full stress test, I’ve had five doctors tell me that the concern was well-justified and it was worth the disruption, discomfort and expense of treating a case of heartburn as if it were cardiac arrest. My take on it is this: my grandfather died of a heart attack at age 45. His daughter, my Mom, has had chronic heart trouble throughout her 70’s. For me, it’s not a question of if I’ll have heart problems; it’s one of when. I really hope that the when is, at a minimum, two decades away, preferably three. I eat well, don’t smoke, am generally healthy.

Ironically, the guitarist for one of my favorite bands actually had a heart attack Monday night and passed away yesterday at 53. Other people might consider all of this some kind of wake-up call. I guess I’m too pragmatic for all of that—I’ll consider it incentive to work more exercise into my routine, but I’ll stop short of writing a bucket list or finding religion. All the same, it’s sobering. I’ve got a lot of things that I still want to do before I go, like raise my son to adulthood and write that book I’ve always dreamed of writing. Here’s hopin’.Similar Posts:

• Meetup in New York City Thursday
• NPTech Phase 2
• Managing to have a disaster
• NPO Evaluation, IE6, Still Waters for Wave
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC

Anyway, this plugin apparently had a bug. If you had the 1.1 version installed, and you edited anything in a rich text editor (like, um, the one I’m writing this post in), it would toss a little javascript code in after your text. The code wasn’t malicious – it was pretty ineffectual – but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, versions 6 and 7, were completely dumbfounded by it (MS admits that this is a bug and say that they’ve fixed it in IE8). Anyone visiting the blog in those browsers recently has been hit with a pop-up error complaining that the page can’t be displayed. This blog is not the biggest destination site on the web, and I’m pretty sure that most of you are reading this in the comfort of your own RSS reader (you should be – look for my upcoming Idealware article explaining how and why, if you aren’t).

Anyway, the fix was to remove or upgrade the bitly plugin; load up PHPMyAdmin on my server and run the query:

select * from wp_posts where post_content like ‘%bitly%’;

then, since I only had a handful of matches (my last five posts), select them all and remove the line at the bottom of each post, which was a script containing the text:

s.bit.ly/bitlypreview.js

Definitely one of the odder glitches I’ve experienced!Similar Posts:

• Blogging from my phone
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1. Should my Facebook community include everyone I know from work, professional circles, friends and childhood acquaintances? That’s a lot of communities slammed into one. I already wrestle a bit with the fact that most of what I talk about on Twitter is probably not interesting to some of the family and non-nptech friends who follow me. My online persona is my professional one. I’m not pretending to be someone else—the personal things that come through are authentic—but I really don’t want to bring every aspect of my life and interests online.

2. One of the main things that I dislike about Facebook is the applications. I keep pretty busy, with a demanding job; my family; active blogging/writing/presenting and volunteering duties; friends and relatives; an appreciation for movies, music and television; an unhealthy addiction to news, culture and technical info; and a love of crosswords. I’m not sure how I do all of this—and sleep—in the first place. So filling out Facebook movie comparison quizzes (and the like) does not qualify for a spot on my schedule. If you are connected to me on Facebook, and you’re hurt that I haven’t responded to the numerous gifts, games and trivial pursuits that you’ve invited me to, please don’t be. If you message or email me directly you’ll get a reply!

3. I think the people who run Facebook are unabashedly doing it in order to mine marketing info from the membership. And, since the main thing that you do on Facebook is connect with old friends and family, they’re using some fairly extensive personal history and interaction as fodder for their advertising streams. This is the nature of the net, of course, as I have Google ads in my email and a slew of ad tracking cookies no matter how often I clear them. But Facebook manages to be ten times creepier than any other web site I visit when it comes to this stuff. I just don’t trust them.

I’ve seriously considered doing whatever it takes to delete my account. I even emailed everyone and warned them of that intention at one point. But it’s getting to the point where deleting Facebook is kind of like boycotting food—you might have good reasons, but you’ll probably hurt yourself more than help, particularly since there is real value in having the place to connect, and, sadly, it isn’t LinkedIn that’s grabbed the zeitgeist.
Similar Posts:

• Feed Fight
• Losing Facebook
• Now that Mom’s on Facebook…
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Shlock and Oh! Facebook’s social dysfunction

The contact form is back, with an annoying little verification routine that will hopefully be enough of an annoyance for my spammer friend that I won’t have to upgrade it to a full-blown captcha (which I have the code for, but I hate those things – they always take me three tries).

This interesting research article suggests that phishing scammers make such a ridiculously low amount of money at it that it’s insane that they bother. They could deliver newspapers or beg in the street and be much more profitable. I have to think that the same kind of dogged stupidity is a trait of my spammer, as he obviously spent some time perfecting his script, maybe up to three or four hours work, that sends messages with links to, um, nature sites – or sites where wildlife and humans, if I’m guessing correctly, do inappropriate things together—to me. Only me. I don’t click on them, reply to them, or forward them to my Mom.

Anyway, I’m ready to continue the battle, and I’ve fired a salvo by restoring the form. But I hope this idiot is as bored with it all as I am!

• Uncommunicative
• Wanna play with OpenID?
• Message to the Krazy.com Spammer
• Managing to have a disaster
• The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)

• Communicative
• Tweaking Twitter
• Things You Might Not Know About…
• Twitiquette
• Google’s Creepy Profiles