Donate to IdealwareSimilar Posts:

• The Years Of The Kat
• The NPTech Lineup
• The Idealware Research Fund
• Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?
• Current Projects

Suggestion: use a big monitor to view this. Change is a great magazine, but the Bluetoad viewer is somewhat tough to use on small screens.

NTEN Change, Issue 4Similar Posts:

• Media and Mediums
• A Sane Proposal Regarding Climate Change
• NTEN Connected
• Get Ready For A Sea Change In Nonprofit Assessment Metrics
• What I’ve been up to

Yesterday I joined my frequent collaborators John Kenyon and Susan Tenby at the Marin Nonprofit Conference, where we presented a 90 minute panel on nptech, from servers to tweets. John deftly dished out the web strategy while Susan flooded us with expert advice on how to avoid social media pitfalls. I opened up the session with my thesis: You have too many servers, even if you have just one”. I made the case that larger orgs can reduce with virtualization tech and smaller orgs should be moving to the cloud. The crowd in Marin was mostly from smaller orgs, so I focused the talk more on the cloud option, and that’s where I got all of the conversation going. My goal with the slides was to do a semi “ignite”, given that I only had 25 minutes and I value the Q&A over the talking head time.Similar Posts:

• Putting The Tech Back In Nonprofit Technology
• The Sky is Calling
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• Both Sides Now

Photo by

First, I feel sorry for the early adopters. I came to Facebook late, long after I had reason to distrust Zukerberg and co, in response to the cajoling of some of my more notorious nptech friends. I never believed that anything I posted there was private, and I had been well trained in online reputation management by my prior years of activity on bulletin boards, Usenet, mailing lists and Twitter. For many of you, all of your early mistakes are about to be unearthed and offered for everyone to see, from new friends that you’ve made since you got your FB voice modulated, to advertisers who are eager to know that, three or four years ago, you were really into SpongeBob.

Second, this new API feature that allows an app to post your activity when it wants strikes me as the epitome of anti-social networking. I really appreciate that I can peruse my wall and see articles, pictures and clips that my friends, co-workers and family thought I might like to see. This is, perhaps, the biggest boon and focus of social networking: curated sharing. It’s not random; it’s not based on a metric; it’s based on someone I like enough to call a friend saying “I found this worthwhile”. But, were I to install the WaPo app, it would decide which articles I want to share with my community for me. So I might click on some very boring report on a White House policy effort, or a review of some TV Show that I’m checking to verify that I was right to ignore it, and WaPo will happily tell my friends that I’m reading about this or that. This sucks the value out of social networking and turns me into a spammer.

Reports came in today that Spotify, the popular online music service, now defaults to posting every song that you listen to to your FB profile. If I have twenty friends who listen to Spotify all day and do this, I’m afraid that I’ll never bother to read my FB feed again. It’s cool if you’re listening to that awesome Gillian Welch cover of Radiohead’s “Black Star” and want to share the occasion; it’s not if you follow it up with the Hall and Oates hit, the Eddie Veder Beatles cover and the Indigo Girls or Beyonce or Five for Fighting song that follows. I’m not THAT interested.

So Facebook is apparently about to take sharing into the realm of spamming, and make all of us the perpetrators. Nice move…Similar Posts:

• Losing Facebook
• Now that Mom’s on Facebook…
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Shlock and Oh! Facebook’s social dysfunction
• Google Reader Reaches Out

For the three of you that noticed we were unavailable yesterday, my normally drama free (and wind-powered) hosting service, Canvas Dreams, had a nasty power failure and moved my domains to a new server. Since I follow what I consider to be a best practice of managing my DNS with a separate company from my hosting service (I’ve had to many unreliable hosting service experiences prior to finding Canvas Dreams), my site didn’t survive the transfer without a DNS update and, as usual, this all happened while I was out of town on a business trip. We’re back today.

In the Bay Area and still wrestling with the concepts of cloud computing? NTEN has you covered with a Cloud Computing mega event on Monday, August 29th. I’ll be presenting, along with such luminaries as Holly Ross, Allen Gunn, Donny Shimamoto and more.

And, finally, a bit of bragging about something I’m really excited about: we now have solar panels installed at our home (making this a very green blog indeed). We took a leasing deal from highly-rated Sungevity that should significantly reduce our energy costs along with our carbon footprint. Bill Gates might think home solar is a fad for the wealthy, but, hey, I work at a nonprofit and I not only can afford it, it will save me money. The picture above is our roof with the last panel being installed.Similar Posts:

• Here with the Wind
• NPTech Lineup Details
• The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine
• The Sky is Calling
• Where I’ll Be at NTC

So, in 2010, a group of us put together the first “tech tracK“. A subtrack of the IT Staff track of sessions, it included topics like Wireless Computing, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, Budgeting, and Change Management—the core things that IT staff are dealing with these days. The mini-track was conceived as a peer learning and community building subtrack. We eschewed Powerpoints and daises for a more informal discussion format, mining the attendees for both issues to discuss and expertise to share. It was a great success: five high-rated sessions with good attendance and a stated appreciation for the takeaways provided. In 2011, the Tech track was back (even though I didn’t attend that year) and was also a success.

So the 2012 NTC planning is well underway, and I’m declaring the ultimate victory. There will be no Tech Track this year. Instead, the IT Staff track definition has been narrowed to this:

IT Staff: This track is for staff and consultants who manage and support technology infrastructure. This is a resource-sharing track for all nonprofit techies, no matter how you arrived at your role, looking to share success stories, challenges, voice concerns, and glean wisdom from each other.

So now’s the time for you to speak up—if you’ve taken on the challenge of supporting your org’s use of technology, what do you need help with? What do you want to see on the 2012 NTC session list that you can bring to your CEO and say “send me to San Francisco, because this is information we need to know?” NTEN is seeking submissions for session topics. You can submit one without committing to present on it. The goal is to hear about what interests you, and they’ll match up the session submissions with speakers and/or facilitators later on. So, have at it! Click here to submit your sessions.Similar Posts:

• Putting The Tech Back In Nonprofit Technology
• NTC Wrap-up
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• NTC (Just) Past and Future

Here’s my take on why, after the shininess fades, Google+ will still be an active social network.

First, they’ve learned from mistakes, theirs and others. They learned a lot from the failed Wave and Buzz projects, making privacy front and center; doing uncharacteristically flashy UI design (even stealing one of the Apple guys to do it); and not being too heavy-handed in the rollout. They are leveraging the Google App ecosystem, as Buzz tried to, but this seems like a cleaner and more serious effort—instead of just pasting a social network onto GMail, they’re incorporating apps like Picasa into it. Those of us already drinking the Google Koolaid (and they say that Google Apps is a high priority) will find it very useful (as opposed to redundant, as Buzz largely was).

The biggest lesson they learned was to not let people stream pollute as easily as they could on Buzz. I maintain that Buzz is a great platform for communications. It’s the ultimate cross between a blog and blog comments that could foster great conversations and raise the art of information sharing, if we didn’t have to wade through 20,000 redundant tweets to get to the good stuff. Google opened a floodgate of noise there, and too many users—including very good friends of mine—were happy to add to the din.

Second, they’ve created something compelling. It out-Facebook’s Facebook for interpersonal sharing and it can stretch to Twitter functionality. What’s powerful here is that, unlike Facebook, where targeting subsets of your friends requires advanced knowledge of the platform and a lot of patience, this interface makes it easy to either have an intimate chat or broadcast info widely. It’s easy to follow strangers that I’m not really interested in conversing with, at the same time that I can have deep talks with my close friends. They really got it right with Circles—friend/follower management on FB and Twitter is ridiculously kludgy in comparison. So, unlike Wave, which was too obtuse, and unlike Buzz, which wasn’t compelling, this is elegant and compelling. It wins people over.

Third, they’ve nailed SEO. The early adopters are raving about the hits it’s generating and the great statistics available. That’s going to be a more sticky draw than the shininess.

Most of all, they’ve emulated the cool Facebook stuff while shedding all of the annoyances. You can friend strangers here without over-sharing with them. You can +1 a commercial entity (or NPO) without inviting them to flood your stream with ads. You can tell your best friend something without sharing it with your mom. And that’s all easy; there’s no complicated help screen or multi-level privacy settings to contend with. It just works.Similar Posts:

• Why Google Buzz Should Be Your Blog
• The Buzz Factor
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• Shlock and Oh! Facebook’s social dysfunction

I think it’s a combination of things. We’re big on disaster lately. Movies like 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow rake it in; shows like The Walking Dead are huge hits. Maybe it’s because disaster is easy to imagine in a world where scientists are all warning us about global warming and the magnitude of natural disasters does seem to be up with all of the recent flooding, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis.

But I think there’s another element to this: The rapture isn’t just about the pious getting their eternal reward. It’s just as much about the sinners getting their earthly torment. How mean-spirited is that? “I’m joining my lord in heaven while that awful next door neighbor dies in an earthquake, hah!”

These are people who can’t just rest assured that Christ will save them—they find the idea of salvation oh so much more delicious if they know that the unsaved will be left with fiery deaths and a zombie apocalypse to contend with while they wait in queue to be assigned their harps. So, maybe a lot of the snarky response to the rapture was spawned by an urge to respond to the insulting premise.

I’ve never taken Jesus in as my lord and savior, and it’s not going to happen, not even on my death bed. I believe that he likely existed, and said lots of good things. like “Judge not, lest ye be judged” and that golden rule of “Do unto others…”. I just stop short of the miracle birth and resurrection stuff—I’m far too good a Unitarian for that. So that makes me all the more dismissive of these people who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus while they snicker at the idea of their fellow humans writhing in a fiery hell. I think that anyone who would condone the mass suffering of others as a fitting counterpoint to their eternal reward as pretty undeserving of that reward in the first place.

So here’s my take: the rapture is a hoot, and those who wish to be raptured are morons who deserve every bit of the ridicule that they received this week. If Christ is their teacher, they’ve never passed the first grade. Here’s my real question for those who would welcome an apocalypse as their reward:

• How and Why RSS is Alive and Well
• SaaS and Security
• Talking Databases For A Change
• Free as in "Hurricanes"
• Dr. Rand Paul, The First Sign Of The Apocalypse

• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• Avalanche!
• NPTech Lineup Details
• Goodbye, Tommi Campbell (Mom)
• NPTech Phase 2

• Where I’ll Be at NTC
• Random Identity
• How to Send an All Staff Technical Email
• State of the Smart(phone)
• More RSS Tools: Managing Content with Pipes

NTEN hosted a record breaking 2000 people looking to be more effective in their use of technology to support good causes in D.C. last week. I wasn’t one of them.

So, why the wrap-up? Because the NTC (Nonprofit Technology Conference) is such a big event in my life that, even if I skip it, it doesn’t necessarily skip me.

Let’s get this out of the way first: Thank you so much, NTEN, for the award. And great thanks to all of my nptech peers for the kind words and overdone Star Wars references here —I think my 11 year old enjoyed the video as much as I did (although he dozed off during the part where I was talking). And a whole level of thanks to my dear friend Deborah Finn, who made sure that anyone within a ten mile radius of someone who knows what “NPTech” means heard about my award (and Deborah hates awards!).

Winning an award is great. Even better is knowing that personal efforts of mine to increase NPTech awareness of good technology and beer carried on undaunted in my absence. Carie Lewis, David Krumlauf and Jenn Howard possibly doubled attendance at the Pre-NTEN Beer Bash. Track Kronzak and a host of smart people pulled off the second Tech Track to good crowds and reviews. Look forward to an even bigger bash on April 2nd, 2012, on my home turf in San Francisco (official conference dates are 4/3-5), and Judi Sohn has stepped up to the plate as organizer for the 2012 Tech Track (now you’re officially on the hook, Judi).

Feedback on this year’s conference has only served to reinforce my opinion that we need to do more outreach to the technical staff at nonprofits and bring them more into the mix of fundraisers, web developers and social media strategists that make up the NTEN community. The tech staff attending are looking for deeper conversations, and it’s a challenge to offer beginning and advanced topics when the techie attendance (or perception of same) is still moderate to low. It’s a chicken and egg problem: it’s hard for a Sysadmin or IT Support person to look at session after session on using Twitter and 4Square and then explain to their boss why they need to go to NTEN. But the crowd-sourced session input is dominated by people who find subjects like virtualization and network security kind of dull. I might find myself challenging NTEN’s session selection methods this year, not in an attempt to hijack the content, only to make it more democratic. Nonprofit technical staff need a technology network, too.

See you in 2012. I won’t miss it!

• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)
• NTC08 Part 2: In Honor of Marnie Webb
• Web Site Update

What am I going to miss? Oh my word.

For me, the fun begins about a day before the conference does, with the annual NTC Beer Bash (that Carie Lewis will be organizing in my absence) kicking the conference off. Established two years ago, we get 30 to 50 of the early arrivers together at the brewpub with the best selection of craft beers we can find together and kick off the socializing early.

Day of Service. Another pre-conference tradition, the Day of Service links nptech professionals with local charities for four hours of expertise sharing and volunteer activities. There’s usually some big project, like installing wireless at a community center, and many opportunities for smal consulting sessions.

The Tech Track. Started last year, the Tech Track is a selection of breakout sessions designed for the people that do what i do for a living—install and support the technology that, in turn, supports the mission. NTC is a great place to develop a social media strategy or learn the latest online fundraising techniques, and it’s now also a reliable source for solid advice on how to virtualize your server room or move the whole thing to the cloud.

Holly Ross and the NTEN Staff. Simply put, Holly + Co are to nonprofit technology conference planning as Buffy and the Scoopy Gang are to vampire slaying. They not only nail it, but they do it all with wit, humanity and style. NTC is the best tech conference. Period. And that’s completely attributable to the brilliant work NTEN does combining awesome people, great knowledge, and a wealth of activities into three days of absolute fun. As I always say. you can’t go to NTC and not meet people. I make new friends every time.

Sadly, my ambitious agenda at work and some family matters have left no room for my favorite annual event this year. I’ve made the last six and I intend to be at the next six. So go and have a great time for me!
Similar Posts:

• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• NTC Wrap-up
• NTC (Just) Past and Future
• What I’ve been up to

This a month or so after a madman was stopped on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco with a car full of weapons, headed to kill people at the ACLU and the Tides Foundation. Both of these organizations work to protect people’s rights, the ACLU being the better known of the two. Lesser known Tides’ mission is to promote social justice and maintain a healthy, sustainable environment. Why did the killer target them?

Glenn Beck makes his living by standing in front of a blackboard and espousing paranoid-inducing theories about democratic cabals aimed at destroying the American way of life.  His rants have succeeded in getting White House officials, such as Van Jones, removed, and, along with other Fox News conspirators, ACORN, a voter registration organization, disbanded.  In the first case, the White House, shamefully, asked Jones to resign in the face of all of the ridiculous criticism.  In the second, Fox News aired doctored footage alleging that ACORN helped pimps and prostitutes, creating falsified scandals that drove the nonprofit under.  ACORN was investigated, and the investigation found some evidence of tax evasion and questionable destruction of documents, but, notably, absolutely no consulting on prostitution practices or, as was widely alleged, improper handling of voter registrations. But all of this started when Beck chose them—as he did with Tides—as fodder for his unsubstantiated and false conspiracy theories.

I sum up Limbaugh’s comments as his standard, poorly-thought out rambling.  He meant some particular nonprofit or sort of nonprofit, and chose far too broad a term to make a lucid point.  But I question whether Limbaugh is ever capable of making lucid points. If we didn’t have the evidence of the bust for Oxycontin abuse, it wouldn’t be hard to still recognize drug-addled behavior.

What Beck does is far more insidious and dangerous. Like Limbaugh, he’s not concerned at all with honestly portraying the people and groups he discusses.  He’s building a narrative, one that the viewers can watch and feel that they have a special stake in, relayed by his tear-filled eyes and cautioning tone. This intimate dialogue is really engaging.  But Beck is entirely unwilling to be accountable for the lies that he spreads, even when they come close to inspiring mass murder.

It’s completely unintuitive and bizarre that nonprofits—poorly resourced organizations that struggle to do the work that our government does less and less of—are lambasted and threatened by the people that rally loudest for eliminating government programs.  We’re the ones who are getting important work done with funding that is volunteered, not assessed.  Most nonprofits have no leftist or rightwing agenda—they have clearly stated missions that they’re trying to serve (as Egger’s video makes clear).  Maybe Beck and Limbaugh should be a bit more appreciative of the fact that we enable mouths to be fed, museums and parks to stay open, and air to continue to be breathable in a country where the government can get fewer and fewer social services funded.Similar Posts:

• NTENsity
• Where There’s Smoke (And Bullets)
• How Glenn Beck Incites Violence
• My Full NPTech Dance Card
• Succession Planning

As my nptech crowd knows, I just got too busy over the years with other things to properly grow and manage this web site. As much as I love Krazy Kat (and my son’s middle name is Ignatz, no lie!), I have to prioritize my current pursuits. I am blessed with the opportunity to do meaningful work at Earthjustice, to blog, and to help out the nonprofit community where and when I can, as a board member at Idealware, a contributor to Techsoup, and a steadfast supporter of NTEN. There are only so many hours in a day.

Krazy.com had the distinction of being a short, catchy, .com domain name, which means that it’s sale value ain’t hay, and, while my life’s pursuits are pretty rich, I’m not. I got an offer that matched what the domain is professionally valued at, and I couldn’t afford to turn it down. It’s a melancholy moment—one of those decisions that isn’t difficult to make, but is sad all of the same, like trading in a beloved car that will cost too much to keep running.

In the more than 15 years that Krazy.com got steady traffic, from visitors that included Herriman’s great grand-daughter and Krazy Kat book cover artist Chris Ware, I built my career, got married, had a child, built a house, and lived a life that continues to be happy and rewarding. Krazy Kat is fond of singing “There is a heppy lend, fur, fur away”. My heppy lend is right here, and I’m sorry that I have to move away from my beloved Coconino County.

Similar Posts:

• New plan for Content!
• Why blog?
• Message to the Krazy.com Spammer
• Current Projects
• Dealing With Domains – Part 1

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:

• Why blog?
• Web Site Update
• NPTech Update
• OpenID Enabled
• Blog Policy on Recent Racist Comments

Jon Loomer’s career has evolved from overseeing Fantasy Basketball product, content, marketing and promotion for the National Basketball Association to his current position as VP of Strategic Marketing for a non-profit. His focus is on social media strategy, Facebook and mobile development. You can follow him on Twitter @JonLoomer or read his blog focused on the subject of baseball atTippingPitches.blogspot.com. The following opinions are his only and do not reflect those of his affiliations.

It took a few weeks, but internet rage over Facebook’s Like button and latest privacy ramifications is in full swing. Bloggers swinging at Facebook’s knee caps with aluminum bats seem to outnumber those who come to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s defense 20:1. And if a blogger does post a defense, duck and cover as soon as you hit “publish” because the rage will bubble up from the comments section.

So when Peter asked me if I’d be interested in writing a guest post on his blog in defense of Facebook’s changes, I had mixed emotions. On one hand, I’m absolutely flattered that he’d ask. On the other, I’m uncomfortable taking a hugely unpopular stand. The position is so unpopular that it ventures into “controversial” territory. Can I post anonymously?

I’m not a controversial dude. And any controversial opinions I have, I tend to keep relatively private, restricted to my inner circle.

But here’s the irony: I share these “controversial” opinions on Facebook. And I only share them with a small group of friends by using lists. But to the outer circle, I’m a harmless guy without much flare for the dramatic.

You must be outraged!

I may avoid controversy, but Facebook feeds off of it. Everywhere I turn, I read another blog telling me how angry I should be with Facebook’s dangerous disregard for my privacy. And because of this, a small part of me is trying to convince the rest of me that I, too, need to be outraged. But I can’t conjure up the energy.

The Utility of Facebook
First a little background on me as a Facebook user. I’ve used Facebook since it rolled out to the non-student public in 2006. My company partnered with Facebook on an application for that initial launch. So I’ve been there from “the beginning.”

And I’ve also been there through a multitude of changes, some vertical and some lateral. No matter how major the changes were, they were controversial. And the uproars increased as the Facebook population screamed past 100, 200, 300 and 400 Million.

This undoubtedly has something to do with my lack of rage now. I’ve become numb to the anger. Whether it’s a Facebook change or any other controversial revelation, I try to remain level headed. Before I react negatively to Facebook’s changes in particular, I try them out for a while. Think about the end game and why they’d make the change. And when I read a rumor about how Facebook is going to charge a monthly fee, or that they allow pedophiles to access my profile, I research first.

While I haven’t agreed with every change Facebook has made, I still recognize that they have made gradual improvements over the course of the past four years that have resulted in a much better overall product. The navigation is vastly improved, and I have far greater control now over who sees what and when.

Sure, some things (name, profile photo, gender, current city, networks, friends, pages) are available to the public now. But these are not things that bother me. You could already pull up photos of my handsome mug (here, here, here and here) by running a Google search. I’d hope my gender is obvious. And although I did scale down my pages after they became publicly viewable, I am now comfortable sharing those interests with anyone who cares.

After that, I’ve always used my privacy settings. Status by status, link by link, photo by photo, I pick and choose my audience. There are times when I keep what I share to a small audience of “Good Friends.” There are others when I share with all of my friends, some of whom I don’t know. And still others, I’ll feel the need to share with “Everyone,” as in—shudder—everyone on the Internet.

But I also use Twitter. I maintain a blog. So there are certain things I’m used to sharing with everyone. And when I share with the world, I have a reason for doing so.

It’s because of this control that I find Facebook extremely useful. I can contact just about anyone from my 500+ connections in an instant. I can promote my blog or share my son’s lemonade stand to raise money for childhood cancer research. Or I can simply goof off casually with friends. But it’s all controlled.

I also control what it is that third party developers see and what my friends can share about me. Developers can access everything that is already available to the public (which isn’t a whole lot), and my friends can’t share much more than that about me either. So I leave enough available for most useful applications to work, but without giving away more than I am comfortable.

The New Features
So all that said, Facebook rolled out a few features recently that were said to impact my privacy. I personally found them to be brilliant. I knew there would be backlash (there always is), but I admit I didn’t expect anything at this scale.

The Like Button: This addition has essentially made millions of web pages an extension of Facebook. The collage of my friends’ faces acts as a welcome mat at the front door of sites that are new to me. My friend likes this? Let me check it out. My friend says I should go to this restaurant? Not a bad idea. These are things that I would have otherwise seen on Facebook, but now I see them at the source to provide more relevance.

Not only is the Like button good for me as a user, but it is also good for me from the business side—both on my blog (loosely defined as a business) and my organization’s web pages. I’ve quickly realized that users are much more inclined to click a Like button than go through the process of retweeting or even sharing through Facebook. It’s easy. It’s awesome.

Instant Personalization: Policies aside (we’ll get to this later), I love the idea. I can go to Pandora and immediately access music that I like or my friends like. I can go to Yelp and immediately find a restaurant that they recommend. There is so much to like here. It makes the web a warmer, more social, and more relevant place.

Updated Privacy Settings: This has caused a stir, but it really wasn’t a problem for me. As I mentioned before, I’ve always been on top of my privacy. So when the new privacy settings were rolled out, I took my time to make sure everything was set up the way I wanted. While some may claim that Facebook pulled a fast one on us, it’s not as if this was done discretely without you knowing. You were forced to go through the new settings and verify. Might it have been a bit overwhelming? Maybe. But if you care about your privacy like I do, it’s something you should understand.

Community Pages: This one has been run more on the down low because it is a beta product. Thousands of community pages have been created by Facebook and some general pages have been converted (often to the dismay of the administrator). Unlike the typical Facebook page, there is no admin control (at least for now) of the community page. It is, apparently, intended to be a wiki of some sort, with information fed by people’s content who like the page. It’s not clear yet what value, if any, these pages have, but the usage is likely to evolve.

The Confusion
Part of Facebook’s problem is that this new Facebook-centered web can be a bit startling at first. When you go to another website, you don’t expect to see a list of your Facebook friends who like something. You don’t expect a website you did not previously visit to know what you like and don’t like to make recommendations. But people need to simply look at the web as an extension of Facebook, particularly when using social plug-ins. Instead of viewing that your friend likes an ESPN article in your Facebook feed, you see it on ESPN.com. It’s not as if the world can see this information. What you see is different than what I see. And your privacy settings still apply, which may not be immediately obvious.

There is also confusion because there are very few blogs and articles being written on this subject that equally weigh the issue. Many make it seem as though all of our private content is at risk; that no matter how we adjust our privacy settings, everything is available to the world. They are biased towards negativity and rage because that’s what brings traffic. We are told to either delete our Facebook profiles or simply put them on lock-down, preventing everyone from seeing anything, disallowing instant personalization, and blocking as much information from third parties as possible.

The reality, at least as far as I can tell, is that the latest changes won’t harm you if you are already on top of your privacy settings and careful about what you share. But based on the media coverage, it would be easy for someone to overreact and go with the flock.

Show Me
This is my biggest problem with the outrage over Facebook’s changes: Almost everything I read is in abstract terms. Please, show me the danger of Facebook’s changes. You’ve probably seen this example of Facebook users who have told the world, knowingly or not, that they have cheated on a test. Well, I can do the same with Twitter users. What’s the point?

Maybe I should feel bad for people who unknowingly publish embarrassing information about themselves for the world to see, but I don’t. For many reasons.

First, let’s not fall for the claim that Facebook made this radical change from closed to open overnight. The latest change did allow search engine indexing of your public profile (if you kept the box checked to allow it) or of that information you shared with “everyone,” but keep in mind that the former definition of “everyone” was all users on Facebook. So you went from sharing embarrassing photos and information about yourself to 400 Million people to the entire world. Eh.

And again, Facebook forced us—all of us—to confirm our privacy settings. Did you ignore them? If you did, should I feel bad for you? Eh.

I understand that I don’t represent all Facebook users, and that’s a very good argument for anyone opposed to the changes. Most people do not spend the time refining their privacy. And many may simply be confused by the settings.

Still, if you’re confused, just restrict everything as much as possible. I keep seeing stats on number of settings and options, but if you just set everything to “Friends” (and your friends truly are your friends), you’ll be fine. Assuming, of course, you’re still careful about what you share.

Everyone needs their own global privacy policy, and this goes beyond Facebook. When you share, do so with the understanding that, even with the best possible settings, any friend can simply copy and paste your status; or save and repost your photo; or simply post a photo or story about something you did. No privacy settings can prevent stupid activity from being seen. It will eventually get out.

That said, I am leaving the door open slightly for the possibility that Facebook has given others far more access to my private life than I know. If this is the case, show me. Show me the application that could potentially harm me.

The Policies
While I enjoy using Facebook and am not in the “delete my profile” community, I admit that I’m not all that comfortable with the entire path that Facebook has taken. I enjoy the new features and am fine with the current privacy settings. However, I do think that they need to be better at communicating changes. They need to be better at communicating, from page to page, what is viewable and what isn’t. Go above and beyond to explain the user’s privacy. Smack them in the face with what audience they are sharing. While I do think Facebook has done a better job at communicating changes than they are given credit, they need to do more.

And I also agree that opt-ins instead of opt-outs are the best policy, particularly with a potentially controversial change. If you are so sure someone is going to want something, first make the compelling argument. Encourage them to check it. Show them what they’re missing if they don’t.

Even so, I firmly believe that putting too much focus on Facebook takes away the important focus on the user’s responsibility to do everything they can to protect themselves. As mentioned before, users needed to agree to each change. We need to be vigilant and understand the ramifications. And if you are too lazy to do the research to understand it, at the very least you need to be more careful about what you post.

How Facebook Can Get Out of this Mess
Just as I am not completely in Facebook’s corner on some of their policies, I also see ways for them to get out of this PR firestorm. While I don’t have much sympathy for the ignorant user, Facebook is still responsible for communicating that these are positive changes.

If I were Facebook, I’d do the following:

• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link on Community Page by “Related Posts by Friends”


• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link within social plug-ins, where feasible


• Put a My Privacy: Who Sees This? link on “trusted third party” sites that implement instant personalization


• Provide video and commentary explaining some of the changes, answering the criticisms, showing the user why the changes are good for them, and acknowledging that those changes are not for everyone, providing an easy explanation of how to protect themselves


• Provide regular webinars or tours on features and use of lists to everyone, not just those with the proper page connections


• Make Instant Personalization opt-in

The last item may be the trickiest since users have already technically opted in to instant personalization when they went through their new privacy settings for the first time. But considering this project is technically a pilot, there’s no need to automatically opt everyone in. Do what they did before. Bring up a box explaining what instant personalization is. Provide videos. Explain why it is good for them. Explain potential risks. Shoot down conspiracies. And then force the user to check the box if they want it.

In Conclusion
While I am not surprised by user backlash as a result of the most recent Facebook changes, I did not expect this level of outrage from mainstream media and technically savvy, intelligent people. With that in mind, it is important that we all do the following:

• Research and understand the benefits and risks involved


• Weigh those risks and benefits with the way that each person uses Facebook


• Understand and actively utilize Facebook’s privacy settings


• Establish a global “privacy setting,” understanding that if we are concerned about privacy we should always be careful about what we share

In the end, it’s personal. These changes are likely to affect me differently than they do you. Maybe Facebook is just too much of a hassle for you. Maybe Facebook does not offer enough benefit to you to actively manage a sometimes confusing control panel of privacy settings. Maybe you do have reason to be outraged. But I don’t believe this feeling is universal. We all need to rationally weigh the risks and benefits and decide what is best for us.Similar Posts:

• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Media and Mediums
• Drupal 101: Navigation
• Things You Might Not Know About…
• Why Google+ Will Succeed Where Wave And Buzz Failed

In mid-2008, Terry Childs, the (then) System Administrator for the City of San Francisco, was called into a meeting with the COO (his boss); the CIO of the SF Police Department; a Human Resources representative; and, unbeknownst to Terry, by phone, a few of the engineers he managed. He was ordered to share the system passwords for the network. He made them up. Subsequently challenged with this fact, he refused to reveal the passwords, ending up in a city jail cell.

Close to two years later, Childs has been found guilty of felonious computer tampering and faces up to five years in prison (he’ll likely be let off in two, with his racked time counting toward the total).

Open and shut, right?  The city claims, and the court found it believable, that Childs’ obstinate refusal to provide passwords resulted in over $200,000 lost city revenue.  He lied to his employer.  He held the city ransom.

Childs’ defense has always been that he was protecting the city’s network.  He wasn’t going to share sensitive passwords with people who, in his estimation, wouldn’t respect the sensitivity of those passwords, and would likely share them other employees and contractors.

To my mind, while that’s a valid concern, it doesn’t clear him.  He still works for the person who was asking for the passwords, and he was obligated to provide them.

The real crime here, though, is not that Childs’ hoarded the keys to the system. It’s that the meeting occurred at all, and the reasons that it came to the point of a stand-off are all too criminally common.  Was Childs guilty? Sure! But others shared guilt in bringing it to that point.  Consider:

• The System Administrator reported to the COO.  No CIO? No VPIT? No IT Director?  This means that there was a gap between the absolute tech and the non-technical businessperson, and that’s a critical layer, particularly for an organization as large as the government of a major U.S. city.


• There were no policies governing use of system passwords. The fact that Childs was allowed to be the sole keeper of the entire network was a lapse in operations that never should have been allowed.


• Childs was a city employee for ten years.  If there were concerns about his trustworthiness or reliability, shouldn’t they have been addressed earlier in that decade?

All too often, IT departments are isolated from the organizations they serve.  Part of this is due to the nature of technology work and techies—we speak a language of our own; enjoy working with the tools that many people find obstructive and confusing; and the majority of us are not very good at casual socializing. More of it is due to the fact that most people—including the CEOs and VPs—don’t get technology, and don’t know how to integrate technology tools and purveyors into the organization.

But that lack of comprehension shouldn’t be a license for persecution.  Everyone’s a loser here, most personally Childs, but the city suffered from a situation they created by not investing properly in technology.  And, by investing, I don’t just mean hiring the right amount of staff and equipment—I mean that CEOs, COOs and everyone up the chain has to step out of their comfort zone and either learn more; hire staff and consultants to vet and translate; or, optimally, both.  The CEO doesn’t have to be as knowledgeable as Bill Gates, but they have to have educated oversight on how IT is run that “gets” what IT is about and how the technology practitioners operate.

As much as Terry Childs is guilty of a crime, he’s tenfold a victim of one, and it’s a cautionary tale for any of us who work in environments where management is happy to let us build a big, isolated kingdom.

What drove Terry Childs to commit a felony was a crime unto itself.Similar Posts:

• Keys to the Kingdom
• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• How to Send an All Staff Technical Email
• Why I won an Anonymous Blogger award at NTC
• Paving the Road – a Shared Outcomes Success Story

Photo by nitot/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Facebook announced dramatic changes in their service at their annual “F8” conference on Wednesday. Facebook used to be a network where you could establish semi-private communities with family, friends and like-minded sets of people. Now it’s an internet-wide info-sharing platform that can keep your friends, and the businesses and advertisers that Facebook partners with, fully briefed on all of your internet-based activities and opinions.

The biggest announcement was the introduction of the Open Graph and the new “Like” buttons for the web at large. Yesterday, you could only “like” or “fan” something that appeared on Facebook’s web site. Now you can “like” things anywhere that the social graph and like buttons are implemented. What you “like” will be shared with Facebook, your Facebook friends, and all of the applications you subscribe to on Facebook, and, depending on your Facebook privacy settings, the world at large.

Also this week, and all of a sudden, despite what you might have confirmed a few months ago when Facebook started this paradigm shift, your likes, interests and job history are now Google searchable. That’s right: even if you went in and flagged them as private, your only way to protect this information, as of yesterday, is to remove it (and wait a month for it to fall out of Google’s cache).

Online privacy is a relative concept

Much of the Facebook privacy that we lost wasn’t real privacy to begin with, because any time you add an application (such as a quiz), that application’s developers have complete access to your entire Facebook profile. Worse, anytime a friend invites you to use an application, that application gets access to your profile. You don’t have to lift a finger to have data that you’ve marked as private shared with strangers; you just have to have friends on Facebook who aren’t thinking that, by inviting you to compare movie favs, they’re telling a complete stranger your gender, age, birthdate, job history, sharing all of your photos and publishing your wall to them.

Why “Love it or leave it” is unfair

I have friends who are somewhat blaze about all of this. After all, nobody put a gun to my head and ordered me to join Facebook. I just got so many requests from friends and family that I caved. And, once I caved, I connected to a bunch of “blast from the past” friends, extended family, former co-workers and current associates. So, now have a real investment in Facebook as a social connector. Sure, if I don’t like these changes, I can just delete my account and be done with it. But I’m throwing away far more than just a social network profile—I’m tossing out my connection to my communities of friends, family and professional associates, who are now expecting me to be on Facebook with them.

I could decide that I don’t like the policies of my local utility company, too, and just cancel my service. But the services they provide enable other services that I want/require as well—such as light, heat, computing, communication. Leaving Facebook wouldn’t be as extreme as canceling power services, but, with 40 million users and climbing, Facebook is like a utility in many people’s lives, and it supports services in such a way that relationships beyond our relationship with the service provider are centered there.

Change Management

This is what is so dishonest about CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s repeated assertion that Facebook is only following the direction of the Internet as an open sharing platform. He is right abut the trend. But this is the equivalent of saying that the trend is now for baggy pants and see-through tops, so all of your clothing has been swapped out in accordance with the trend. The internet is all things to all people, and there are plenty of places on it where privacy and closed community are the norm. Just because the internet is becoming more open, it doesn’t mean that Internet users need to be dragged into this new era.

It all boils into “Opt Out” vs. “Opt In”, and respecting rather than walking all over your customers. Facebook began with an assumption of privacy; changes in that assumption should be acknowledged by each user before they are enacted. Facebook could have easily developed their platform in ways that give users the choice of having open or private profiles. Instead, they’ve simply switched our private data to public without asking if that compromises our security, reputation or preferences. And it doesn’t escape my notice that there’s great money to be made in having more personal info about what I like and who I share that information with.

What you should do if this concerns you

If you went in and verified/altered your Facebook privacy settings a month or two ago, you should make another visit ASAP. Facebook has turned it around. Beth Kanter has a good write-up on what has changed. If you have any custom Facebook Pages, look out there as well—even if you’ve set profile data to private, if you link to any of your profile info from a Facebook page, it will default back to public. Whatever you do with your privacy settings, most of your basic profile data is now public and there is no option to make it private. So review your employment history, “about” and likes sections to make sure that it only has data that you don’t mind sharing with Google searchers and every advertiser on earth.

It all boils down to this

Facebook is now like Twitter and Google, with even less options for privacy than those big public networks offer. This doesn’t have to be a bad thing, it’s just a very different thing, and the crime here is mostly that “F8” and “social graph” are not terms that the vast majority of the 40 million Facebook users are paying any attention to. If you’re reading this, you know better, so you can set your profile up with information that you don’t mind being in the public domain, and you can decide if you’re willing to “like” things on the internet and, thereby, expose yourself and your Facebook community to the demographic analysis and actions that will ensue. I won’t be abandoning Facebook over this, but I’m very restrictive in my use of it, and will continue to approach it with great caution.Similar Posts:

• Now that Mom’s on Facebook…
• Void Rage: Unable to Muster Facebook Anger
• Losing Facebook
• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• Shlock and Oh! Facebook’s social dysfunction

• Techcafeteria Turns Five!
• More RSS Tools: Managing Content with Pipes
• Bit by Bitly!
• What I’ve been up to
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing

But, enough gushing. One of my (many) rants regards my concern that, although the biggest group of people that we call “nptechies” are the ones who support technology in their organizations, our biggest nptech conferences focus heavily on social media and the web (NTC, Netsquared, and now SXSW). It is true that the advent of social media and the interactive web is spawning a revolution in the way that we do advocacy and fundraising. But there is no less of a revolution in our server rooms, where virtualization, cloud computing and wireless devices are changing the entire way that we manage and deliver applications.

Our System Administrators, Support Specialists and Accidental Techies need to share in the peer support that can inform their efforts and help them feel more connected, both to their missions and the broader community. This year, in deference to a throat getting hoarse from ranting, I took a first stab at addressing this gap.

The Tech Track

The tech track was conceived as a six session “mini” track; five of the proposed sessions made the cut. The topics went from the basics to the broad overview:

• Tech Track 1: Working Without a Wire (But With a Net): Dealing with Wireless Networks, Laptops, and Cell Phones


• Tech Track 2: Proper Plumbing: Virtualization and Networking Technologies


• Tech Track 3: Earth to Cloud: When, Why and How to Outsource Applications


• Tech Track 4: Budget vs Benefits: Providing Top Class Technology in Constrained Resource Environments


• Tech Track 5: Articulating Tech: How to Win Friends and Influence Luddites.

Joining me in these sessions were fellow blogger Johanna Bates of OpenIssue, Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, Tracy Kronzak of Applied Research Center, John Merritt of the San Diego YMCA, Michelle Murrain of OpenIssue, Michael Sola of National Wildlife Federation and Thomas Taylor of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance.

Subject Matter

Instead of doing the usual Powerpoint presentations and talking to the crowd, we pulled the chairs into circles for these sessions and put the session agenda up for grabs, asking each group what issues, related to the session topic, were foremost in their minds. The conversation was rich, and served as a healthy catalogue of the challenges facing nonprofit technology practitioners. Some highlights:

• Supporting remote laptop use in a western state with very little wireless bandwidth available


• Securing our networks while making network data accessible on mobile devices


• Supporting use of and crafting fair policies to address the boom in mobile devices


• Understanding the risks and benefits of virtualizing servers and desktops


• Knowing how and when to virtualize, and how Storage Area Networks fit in the big picture


• Weighing the risk of cloud computing, which also entails weighing the risks of our non-cloud networks


• Knowing what to ask a cloud provider to insure that data is safe, even in the case of the provider going out of business


• Assessing the cost of owned vs service-provided applications


• Assessing the readiness of Cloud Computing, and moving large, complex server rooms to the cloud


• Chickens and eggs: what to do when IT is asked to budget, but is not part of the planning process prior?


• What strategies can be applied to provide good technology with limited budgets?


• What tools and resources are available to help with the budgeting process?


• How can we engage our users when we roll out new technology?


• How do we get them to attend training?

Next week, I’ll follow this up with some of the answers we came up with for these questions.Similar Posts:

• The Evolution Of The NTEN Tech Track
• The Sky is Calling
• Where I’ll Be At The 10 NTC
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)
• NTC Wrap-up