Mozilla.org just released one of the most exciting Firefox add-ons to come down the pike – Ubiquity. This is very alpha – the user interface will definitely mature, so what’s there now is best suited for geeks like me who have always liked command shells and already do things like use the Mac’s Spotlight as their calculator (if you type 2 + 2 in Spotlight, it will tell you it equals 4).

Ubiquity is best described as a macro language for the web, or a personal mashup engine. You assign a hotkey (such as Alt-space or Option-space) and a box comes up, which you can enter ubiquity commands in. I’m not going to tell you all about them – just watch the video:

At this point, Ubiquity’s functionality pretty much requires a Google account – the email, calendar, maps and contacts integration is all with Google’s offerings. I expect that to change rapidly, as developing custom commands for Ubiquity is at a very basic programming level.

The case uses that are immediately apparent include adding maps and multimedia content to emails and blog entries (I use Scribefire – this assumption assumes that you compose your blog in your browser); having a lot of info available without having to tab away from the web page you’re on; and making some complex web tasks far more efficient. Mozilla is ambitious, though – they see Ubiquity as the ultimate personal web assistant, that will someday let you issue a command to book a trip; issue another to set up a multi-party meeting, and, who knows? Vacuum the house and feed the fish. Aza discusses that vision here.

Try Ubiquity out. Install it from here. Let me know what you think, and what case uses you envision for it.

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?

Over the weekend, I downsized Techcafeteria.com, something I probably should have done close to a year ago, when I started my job at Earthjustice. What’s left is pretty thin, and is less of a web site than it is a supplement to other things online.

Some say that we’re moving away from blogging to the next trend, dubbed “Lifestreaming“. But I wouldn’t call this a lifestream. “Stream-supplementing” might be more to the point. I hang out in a number of places online, the key ones being, in some kind of meaningful order:

LinkedIn – this is where I keep my resume and stay connected with people I know through work and community.

Twitter – This is where I do most of my online communication lately. My Twitter community is mostly made up of people I know through NTEN and other NPTech circles. You may think I’ve been pretty quiet in the two or three months since I last blogged, but I’ve published about 700 tweets.

NTEN, or, more accurately, the NTEN Groups like NTEN-Discuss and the SF-501TechClub. These are online lists, sponsored by NTEN. I’m also reasonable active on Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s excellent Information Systems Forum, a Yahoo Group.

Idealware – Laura’s made me a staff writer, of sorts, and I should be contributing more articles this summer. I also comment on the blog regularly. Some of my Idealware articles are also picked up by Techsoup.

So, those are great places to find me. And this is where you come to contact me, or catch up on where I’ve been. I can’t call it “lifestreaming” – my life isn’t a show, and if it was, it wouldn’t be a very interesting one. But I do publish he pieces of it that I think might be valuable to others, and I’d rather publish them in places that others go, so it makes sense to have a web site that serves more as an signpost than a destination.

Where do you live?  Where do you hang out?  Does your social life revolve around a particular location?  Presumably, your social life is only as geographically restricted as your travel budget allows.  You can meet your friends at a coffee shop, mall, park or home.  You don’t always meet them at the same place; and you don’t go to that place to call them..  So why should your online social life be any different?

This week, Google announced that their internet portal page, iGoogle, would be incorporating widgets, or, as they call them, Gadgets that perform the type of social networking functions that online social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace provide.  This comes at a time when Twitter, the group chat/micro-blogging tool has been rising up the social staircase and getting a lot of new users and attention.  Twitter, unlike the more established social networks, is more commonly accessed through third-party, desktop applications than the twitter.com web site.

I like this trend.  My primary social networking site isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn—  it’s GMail.  Twitter is the first thing to challenge that.  Because, for me, it’s not about the brand – it’s about communication.  So Facebook has it’s ouvre, it’s demographic market, and, like everyone else, it’s mission to learn everything there is to learn about my network’s shopping preferences, and the slow website and constant “spam your friends” requirements of their tools really puts me off.  LinkedIn has a cleaner, more professional aesthetic that I find a lot less annoying, but my favorite new feature of theirs is the ability to subscribe to the feed of my network updates in my RSS reader (something Facebook doesn’t provide).  So I’m rooting for the destruction of the social networking brands, and the ultimate incorporation of powerful social tools into my my desktop, RSS Reader and email.

At that point, I’ll be able to take advantage of the powerful interpersonal tools that the web enables. I’ll still travel to my friends and associates web sites; and I’ll still visit the Ning and Drupal communities that matter to me.  I won’t need a middle man like Facebook or MySpace.  That will be a happy day!

A sad, but all too common problem was presented on NTEN’s main discussion forum yesterday:

An IT Director in New York City, working for a large nonprofit (650 people, multiple locations, full IT platform), got approval from his boss to hire in a Systems Administrator (punchline here) at $40,000 annually.  Understand, System Administrators rarely make less than $75k a year at similarly sized for profits.  The boss pulled that number out of a salary survey, but, given the quality of it, I say he might as well have pulled it out of a hat.

Determining what’s fair—or, as we call it “market”—pay is an art in itself, and good salary surveys, like the one NTEN produces, offer far more than suggested wages – they provide context, like location, industry standards; they discuss trends, and the best ones frame the survey results in what the numbers should mean to us.

So, when I read the NTEN survey, and saw what were still ridiculously low salaries in comparison to the for-profit pay scales, I didn’t read it as “these are good numbers”.  I read it as “our industry doesn’t value technology.”  Literally.  If our salaries are at 50-75% of the rest of the world’s, how are we going to attract long-term, talented people?  And if we have a revolving door of mediocre (or, more accurately, some stellar, some miserable) sysadmins running our critical systems, how much money, productivity, and plain competence at our important work are we going to sacrifice?  What’s the cost of maintaining instability in order to save bucks on payroll?

So my pitch is that we have to stop thinking that there’s a metric called nonprofit wages.  There are market rates for positions, and there is a value in serving a mission.  So a nonprofit salary is a market salary (what a for profit would pay), less the monetary value of being able to serve the mission.

Nonprofits can’t keep thinking that they exist in some world within a world.   They complete with all businesses for talent, and, in the IT realm, for profits not only offer better compensation, they offer more toys, bigger staffs (which translates to more techies to pal around with, something a lot of my staff have missed in nonprofit), and, often, newer technology to learn and deploy.  In our field, it’s all about current skills.

So I feel for my compatriot in NYC, and hope that he can muster a case for his boss, for both his and his bosses sake.  If NTEN is reading, a great accompanying metric for the salary survey would be IT turnover tracking, as well as interims when key poisitions (CIO, Sysadmin) are unfilled.  Info on how that impacted business objectives.  We need to do more than just report on the pay – we have to document the impacts.

I took a brief trip to Second Life the other night, yet another web 2.0 trend that, like Facebook, sends my normally open-minded and curious instincts running for shelter.  I’ve never been into gaming, and I obviously don’t use the internet in order to do things anonymously – my username is based on my real name just about everywhere.  But I’m looking for any means possible to improve communication at my geographically diverse company, and to do it while reducing our carbon footprint.  So that’s quite a challenge – how do we improve communication while cutting down on flying, when we have offices in Honolulu, Juneau and D.C., among other places?

So it struck me that Second Life, as a virtual meeting place, has, at the very least, potential that should be vetted.  I have yet to do that vetting – I plan to give it a shot tonight by attending a virtual meeting with the Techsoup virtual community. On Wednesday, I created an account and figured out just enough about how Second Life works in order to get to the meeting later. Reactions:

Good:

• Second Life supports voice, if you have a microphone and stereo speakers, and does it well enough that, if you’re conversing with someone who is, in the Virtual Reality, standing to your left, their voice will come from the left speaker.


• It was easier than I thought it would be to move around and figure it all out.  Your mileage might vary.  It is, necessarily, a somewhat busy interface.

Bad:

• You are not only advised to not use your real name, you can’t.  The account creation process lets you create a first name (text input box) ad select a last name from about 25 in a drop down list.  After being advised to “pick my name carefuly, it’s permanent, and can’t be changed”, I had little option to actually pick a name that I identified with or took seriously.


• Big roots in the gaming community, obviously.  The account creation process offers you ten avatars to choose from (avatars being the cartoon images that will represent you in the virtual world).  Five female, five male – I was not going for the female impersonation thing, so that left me five.  Of those, one (“Boy Next Door”) was fairly innocuous, although it looked about as much like me as Fred from “Scooby Doo” does.  If I didn’t want to be Fred, my choices ranged from anthropomorphic fox people to what must be villains from the old “He-man, Master of the Universe” Saturday morning cartoon.  Mind you, I was able to customize Fred’s appearance, and while I was shooting to make him look like me (I know, completely unclear on the concept here), as close as I could get resembled my punk rock days in the late seventies.

So, I’ll do a follow up post after I get to do what I set out to do, and evaluate Second Life as a virtual meeting place.  But, already, I’m trying to imagine how I explain to the eighty or so Earthjustice Attorneys that step one is to pick a name like “John Vigaromney” that you’ll be known as, and step two is to decide whether you want to look like a furry animal or a grim reaper.  Then determine whether the avatars will reduce any serious meeting on global warming or mountaintop protection strategies to jokes and hysterical laughter.

I’m really not looking for Second Life, but there’s a huge—and maybe critical—application for Supplemental Life, which lets online collaboration more intuitively replace travel.

Everybody who enjoys calling tech support, raise your hand.

No one?

As a long-time IT Director, who came up through the system administration ranks, I dread those situations where the deadline is near, the answer is far, and the only option is to call the company’s support line.  Mind you, it’s never my first option – a well-phrased Google query, first sent to the web, then to Google Groups, is far more likely to get an answer quickly.  And there are those application manuals, gathering dust – the best ones will have good indexes. Also, decent applications have online support forums, and the best ones let you search without joining first.

What makes me crazy is this:  the chances that the $10/hr front line support person answering the phone will know more about the application than I do are slim.  This isn’t arrogance, it’s experience.  I’ve almost certainly installed more applications in my career than he or she has ever used.  And I know, for a fact, that that support person has a script—a series of questions that they have to ask me verifying that I’ve tried all of the things that I’ve already tried.

So my mission, should I be lucky enough to accomplish it, is to bypass all of this.  Sometimes I can, sometimes I can’t – kind of depends on how much independent thought the $10/hr type is willing to apply.  Here are my techniques:

1. Remember that I’m speaking with someone who makes $10/hr (or less, particularly if it’s outsourced to another country) to take all sorts of abuse.  I’m patient, polite, gracious.  It’s not their fault that I have the problem, whatever the problem is.


2. Appeal to their intelligence.  Experience, which I have the edge on, isn’t intelligence, and salary level isn’t an indicator, either.  If the support dude feels like I’m treating him or her respectfully, they’ll be more motivated to really help me.


3. That said, still be authoritative and a touch arrogant.   Let them know that you are not a novice.  “I’m IT Director for a national organization and have years of experience with all types of software.  I have a specific question about this feature; I have tried all of the standard debugging methods and have been through the manual and support forum.  If you are not the person most knowledgeable about this area, can you connect me to someone who can assist me?”  Goal here – skip to the higher level tech support, do not pass go, do not collect half an hour of aggravation.

I don’t vary any of this for U.S. based vs. outsourced support.  It’s the same job and territory.  If anything, based on experience, it does seem to me that the outsourced first-level support is often more knowledgeable than American counterparts, maybe because it’s not an entry level job in India or China, or one with high turnover, as it likely is here.

[This post is a shout out to friends in the NTEN IT Directors Affinity Group, a few of whom made the request]

As anyone who has kids, was a kid, or was an adult who has the good sense to read great kid books knows, Horton was an elephant who heard a tiny voice on a speck of dust and sought to protect the infinitesimally tiny population therein. His antagonist in Dr. Seuss’ classic “Horton Hears A Who” was a sour kangaroo who maintained “A person on that? ... Why, there never has been!”. Not to belabor the obvious, but we have Horton representing imagination and free thinking, and the kangaroo preaching narrow-mindedness and suspicion.

So, I took my family to see the movie yesterday. The movie takes the ten minute tale and strrrreeetttccchhess it into a 90 minute film with mostly topical humor. As father to a homeschooled son, I was pretty offended by one joke. Early on, the haughty, over-critical kangaroo, voiced by Carol Burnett, protests that Horton can’t be allowed to spread these horrible lies about tiny people, that he’ll corrupt the youth with his overactive imagination. But her little kangaroo will be all right – “he’s pouch-schooled”.

This promotes the sad, but popular stereotype of homeschool parents as over-protective and narrow-minded. It’s this type of stereotype that, last month, led a three judge panel to rule, in a case of possible domestic abuse, that children can’t be homeschooled in California unless the primary parent doing the homeschooling is an accredited teacher.

Three judges ruled on one case of possible neglect and abuse, and then took a giant club and swung it as wide and far as they could, hitting every one of the estimated 200,000 homeschooling families in California. We aren’t abusing our child; we aren’t hiding him from the world—quite the opposite! What we’re doing is working as hard as we can to provide the educational environment that he will soar in.The state government should respect that.

I’m blogging this because it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. While homeschooling wasn’t our first choice, public school isn’t an alternative that we would consider, even if our kid was one of the minority of children whose learning style meshes with that educational model. The No Child Left Behind Act is ravaging our school systems, and creating an environment where fear and threats determine the curriculum, much as fear and threats have dominated our political arena in the George W. Bush years. Children are taught to pass tests, and the ability to test well is a skill unrelated to the ability to think.

The kangaroos are in the classroom. What kind of world will my child grow up into, if all of his peers are taught only how to memorize, not to imagine and discern?

At the NTEN awards on Friday, Marnie Webb took the Person of the Year award, and rightly so!  In honor of Marnie, a key originator of the nptech community, I want to share the story of how I met her.  And try to make her blush a bit more. 

In 2004, I was reading Jon Udell’s Infoworld columns about a new technology called “Really Simple Syndication”, RSS.  The technology interested and thrilled  me a bit, because it looked like it might provide a much needed management tool for web-based information (which it did).  In early 2005, I was browsing through popular bookmarked web sites at Del.icio.us, a web site that made innovative use of RSS, and saw a link entitled “The Top 10 Reasons that Nonprofits Should Use RSS“.   I noted that the author, one Marnie Webb, of course, worked near me in SF at Compumentor/Techsoup. The next week, I ran across a  post by the same Ms. Webb to the del.icio.us mailing list.  Armed with the knowledge that there was someone else obsessed with the same technology trends and potential that I was, I emailed her and said “You don’t know me, but we have to have lunch”.

The rest is this story—this blog, Techcafeteria, my happiness in finding/joining NTEN, which Marnie introduced me to.  We started up the nptech aggregator web site, as the next logical progression in Marnie’s campaign to get people around the world referring useful information to each other via that ubiquitious tag.  But I am positive that my story is far from unique—Marnie is one of those people who, in her unassuming way, promotes ideas and community. So, good work NTEN, and great work Marnie! A well-deserved award.

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.