Here are a few updates topics I’ve posted on in the last few months:

Nonprofit Assessment

The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as “How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?” and “What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?” We’ll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:

• Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar


• Ken Berger of Charity Navigator


• Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D


• Christine Egger of Social Actions


• David Geilhufe of NetSuite


• and host Holly Ross of NTEN.

I’ll be participating as well. You can learn more and register for the free event with NTEN.

The Half-Life of Internet Explorer 6

It’s been quite a few weeks as far as headlines go, with a humanitarian crisis in haiti; a dramatic election in Massachusetts; A trial to determine if California gay marriage-banning proposition is, in fact, discriminatory; high profile shakeups in late night television and word of the Snuggie, version 2 all competing for our attention. An additional, fascinating story is unfolding with Google’s announcement that they might pull their business out of China in light of a massive cybercrime against critics of the Chinese regime that, from all appearances, was either performed or sanctioned by the Chinese government. There’s been a lot of speculation about Google’s motives for such a dramatic move, and I fall in the camp that says, whatever their motives, it’s refreshing to see a gigantic U.S. corporation factor ethics into a business decision, even if it’s unclear exactly what the complete motivations are.

As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here’s been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They’ve kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google’s analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user’s PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn’t mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won’t protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.

So, while their reasoning is suspect, it’s nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.

Google Wave: Still Waters

I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven’t seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that’s gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can’t give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I’m drawing is that, if Google doesn’t do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it’s going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I’ve said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it’s current state, it’s a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.
Similar Posts:

• NPTech Lineup Details
• Is Google Wave a Tidal Wave?
• Wave Impressions
• Won’t You Let me Take You On A Sea Change?
• Swept Up in a Google wave

Now, you might think that’s a crazy idea, but  I think Buzz is about 80% of the way there. Last week, in my Google’s Creepy Profiles post, I made a suggestion (that someone at Google has hopefully already thought of) that it wouldn’t take much to turn a Profile into a full-fledged biography/lifestreaming site.  Just add some user-configurable tabs, that can contain HTML or RSS-fed content, and add some capability to customize the style of the profile.  Since I wrote that, I’ve been using Buzz quite a bit and I’ve really been appreciating the potential it has to deepen conversations around web-published materials.

I think some of my appreciation for Buzz comes from frustration with Google’s previous, half-hearted attempts to make Google Reader more social. If you use Reader heavily, then you know that you can share items via a custom, personal page and the “People You Follow” tab in Reader. You also know that you can comment on items and read others comments in the “Comments View”.  But it’s far from convenient to work with either of these sharing methods.  But, once you link your reader shared items to Buzz, then you aren’t using Reader’s awkward ionterface to communicate; you’re using Buzzes.  And Buzz, for all of Google’s launch-time snafus, is an easy to use and powerful communications tool, merging some of the best things about Twitter and Facebook.

So, how is Buzz suitable for a blog?

• It’s a rich editing environment with simple textile formatting and media embedding, just like a blog.


• Commenting—way built-in.


• RSS-capable – you can subscribe to anyone’s Buzz feed.


• Your Google Profile makes for a decent public Blog homepage, with an “About the Author”, links and contact pages.


• It’s pre-formatted for mobile viewing

What’s missing?

• Better formatting options.  The textile commands available are minimal


• XML-RPC remote publishing


• Plug-ins for the Google Homepage


• As mentioned, more customization and site-building tools for the Google Homepage.

Why is it compelling?

• Because your blog posts are directly inserted into a social networking platform.  No need to post a link to it, hope people will follow, and then deal with whatever commenting system your blog has to respond.


• Your blog’s community grows easily, again fueled by the integrated social network.


• Managing comments – no longer a chore!

This is the inverse of adding Google or Facebook’s Friend Connect features to your blog.  it’s adding your blog to a social network, with far deeper integration that Twitter and Facebook currently provide. Once Google releases the promised API, much of what’s missing will start to become available.  At that point, I’ll have to think about whether I want to move this island of a blog to the mainland, where it will get a lot more traffic.  I’ll definitely be evaluating that possibility.

• Why Google+ Will Succeed Where Wave And Buzz Failed
• Google’s Creepy Profiles
• The Buzz Factor
• Google Reader Reaches Out
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing

The new metrics will assess:

• Financial health and sustainability;
• Accountability, governance and transparency; and
• Outcomes.

This is very good news. That overhead metric has hamstrung serious efforts to do bold things and have higher impact. An assessment that is based solely on annualized budgetary efficiency precludes many options to make long-term investments in major strategies.  For most nonprofits, taking a year to staff up and prepare for a major initiative would generate a poor Charity Navigator score. A poor score that is prominently displayed to potential donors.

Assuming that these new metrics will be more tolerant of varying operational approaches and philosophies, justified by the outcomes, this will give organizations a chance to be recognized for their work, as opposed to their cost-cutting talents.  But it puts a burden on those same organizations to effectively represent that work.  I’ve blogged before (and will blog again) on our need to improve our outcome reporting and benchmark with our peers.  Now, there’s a very real danger that neglecting to represent your success stories with proper data will threaten your ability to muster financial support.  You don’t want to be great at what you do, but have no way to show it.

More to the point, the metrics that value social organizational effectiveness need to be developed by a broad community, not a small group or segment of that community. The move by Charity Navigator and their peers is bold, but it’s also complicated.  Nonprofit effectiveness is a subjective thing. When I worked for a workforce development agency, we had big questions about whether our mission was served by placing a client in a job, or if that wasn’t an outcome as much as an output, and the real metric was tied to the individual’s long-term sustainability and recovery from the conditions that had put them in poverty.

Certainly, a donor, a watchdog, a funder a, nonprofit executive and a nonprofit client are all going to value the work of a nonprofit differently. Whose interests will be represented in these valuations?

So here’s what’s clear to me:

This isn’t easy. This will require that NPO’s who have have never had the wherewith-all to invest in technology systems to assess performance do so.  But, I maintain, if the world is going to start rating your effectiveness on more than the 990, that’s a threat that you need to turn into an opportunity.  You can’t afford not to.

And I look to my nptech community, including Idealware, NTEN, Techsoup, Aspiration and many others—the associations, formal, informal, incorporated or not, who advocate for and support technology in the nonprofit sector—to lead this effort.  We have the data systems expertise and the aligned missions to lead the project of defining shared outcome metrics.  We’re looking into having initial sessions on this topic at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

As the world starts holding nonprofits up to higher standards, we need a common language that describes those standards.  It hasn’t been written yet.  Without it, we’ll escape the limited, Form 990 assessments to something that might equally fail to reflect our best efforts and outcomes.Similar Posts:

• Won’t You Let me Take You On A Sea Change?
• The Road to Shared Outcomes
• Paving the Road – a Shared Outcomes Success Story
• My Full NPTech Dance Card
• The NPTech Lineup

Public Domain image by Takada

Last week, I shared a lengthy piece that could be summed up as:

“in a world where everyone can broadcast anything, there is no privacy, so transparency is your best defense.”

(Mind you, we’d be dropping a number of nuanced points to do that!)

Transparency, it turns out, has been a bit of a meme in nonprofit blogging circles lately. I was particularly excited by this post by Marnie Webb, one of the many CEO’s at the uber-resource provider and support organization Techsoup Global.

Marnie makes a series of points:

I’ve made the case before for shared outcomes reporting, which is a big piece of this. Sharing and transparency aren’t traditional approaches to our work. Historically, we’ve siloed our efforts, even to the point where membership-based organizations are guarded about sharing with other members.

The reason that technologists like Marnie and I end up jumping on this bandwagon is that the tech industry has modeled the disfunction of a siloed approach better than most. early computing was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. If you regularly used Lotus 123, Wordperfect and dBase (three of the most popular business applications circa 1989) on your MS-DOS PC, then hitting “/“, F7 or “.” were the things you needed to know in order to close those applications respectively. For most of my career, I stuck with PCs for home use because I needed compatibility with work, and the Mac operating system, prior to OSX, just couldn’t easily provide that.

The tech industry has slowly and painfully progressed towards a model that competes on the sales and services level, but cooperates on the platform side. Applications, across manufacturers and computing platforms, function with similar menus and command sequences. Data formats are more commonly shared. Options are available for saving in popular, often competitive formats (as in Word’s “Save As” offering Wordperfect and Lotus formats). The underlying protocols that fuel modern operating systems and applications are far more standardized. Windows, Linux and MacOS all use the same technologies to manage users and directories, network systems and communicate with the world. Microsoft, Google, Apple and others in the software world are embracing open standards and interoperability. This makes me, the customer, much less of an innocent bystander who is constantly sniped by their competitive strategies.

So how does this translate to our social service, advocacy and educational organizations? Far too often, we frame cooperation as the antithesis to competition. That’s a common, but crippling mistake. The two can and do coexist in almost every corner of our lives. We need to adopt a “rising tide” philosophy that values the work that we can all do together over the work that we do alone, and have some faith that the sustainable model is an open, collaborative one. Looking at each opportunity to collaborate from the perspective of how it will enhance our ability to accomplish our public-serving goals. And trusting that this won’t result in the similarly-focused NGO down the street siphoning off our grants or constituents.

As Marnie is proposing, we need to start discussing and developing data standards that will enable us to interoperate on the level where we can articulate and quantify the needs that our mission-focused organizations address. By jointly assessing and learning from the wealth of information that we, as a community of practice collect, we can be far more effective. We need to use that data to determine our key strategies and best practices. And we have to understand that, as long as we’re treating information as competitive data; as long as we’re keeping it close to our vests and looking at our peers as strictly competitors, the fallout of this cold war is landing on the people that we’re trying to serve. We owe it to them to be better stewards of the information that lifts them out of their disadvantaged conditions. Similar Posts:

• Paving the Road – a Shared Outcomes Success Story
• Get Ready For A Sea Change In Nonprofit Assessment Metrics
• NTC08 Part 2: In Honor of Marnie Webb
• Security and Privacy in a Web 2.0 World
• Should Non-profits Seed Software Development?

Photo by Mrjoro.

Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google’s aspirations, will supersede email.  There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve.  We’ve gone from:

• The Yahoo! Directory model – a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to


• The Google needle/haystack approach – the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to


• Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.

For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we’re looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it’s being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks.  Much of what we refer to eachother is  content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.

Google Wave might well be “Web 3.0“, the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure.  Data isn’t stored as much as it is shared.  You don’t browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves.  Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.

Looking at Wave in light of Google’s mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world’s information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called “robots”. Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response.  The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they’re going to give patient “John Doe” a peanut butter sandwich.  The robot has access to Doe’s medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe’s medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.

This doesn’t invalidate the use of Wave, by any means—a wave that is housed on the Doctor’s office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone “replying to all” when they didn’t mean to. If it’s that easy to forget who you’re talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we’re revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?

The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave’s combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend.  If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to sue the net, then it has culture-changing potential.  It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
————
A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable’s Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here’s a tutorial on how to build a robot.

Beta Google Wave accounts can be requested at the Wave website.  They will be handing out a lot more of them at the end of September, and they are taking requests to add them to any Google Domains (although the timeframe for granting the requests is still a long one).Similar Posts:

• Wave Impressions
• Google Reader Reaches Out
• Is Google Wave a Tidal Wave?
• More RSS Tools: Using Google Reader for Research and Sharing
• More RSS Tools: Sharing Feeds

“The Great Wave off Kanagawa” by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849).

Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we’re willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level.  My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer’s preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.

Google’s introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious.  As opposed to saying “We have a new web mashup tool” or “We’ve taken multimedia email to a new level”, they’re pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email.  My question, after seeing the demo, is “Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?”.

The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and “wave” list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail’s two.

A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time.  This means that, if we’re both working in the same wave, you can see what I’m typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It’s a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it’s also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.

Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google’s personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them—or things like them—in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.

You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with.  User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.

Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google’s being kind of coy when they call it an email killer – it’s a Sharepoint killer.  It’s possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer.  It’s certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying “I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share” says “I want to share, and, once we’re sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever”.  Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features.  Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It’s Google Docs inverted.

So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:

• Adopt it;


• Feel comfortable with it; and


• Trust Google.

Next week, I’ll spend a little time on the gotcha’s – please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.Similar Posts:

• Wave Impressions
• Swept Up in a Google wave
• NPO Evaluation, IE6, Still Waters for Wave
• Why Google+ Will Succeed Where Wave And Buzz Failed
• Evaluating Wikis

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

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.Similar Posts:

• Bit by Bitly!
• Useful Tools and Tips
• Adventures In Web Site Migration
• Swept Up in a Google wave
• Earthjustice Blogging

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

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

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

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

• Two Thoughts On The New FaceBook Timeline
• Losing Facebook
• Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook
• Why Google+ Will Succeed Where Wave And Buzz Failed
• Why Google Buzz Should Be Your Blog

The article went through a lot of rewrites, and we had to cut out a fair amount in order to turn it into something cohesive, so I hope to blog a bit on some of the worthwhile omissions soon, but my day job at Earthjustice has been keeping me pretty busy.Similar Posts:

• Here, There and Idealware
• RSS Article is up
• Pop Quiz: PCI Compliance
• Complying with Data Security Regulation
• Salesforce Show and Tell

I’ve managed CRM rollouts at two large companies: most recently, Salesforce at SF Goodwill; years earlier, an obscure but awesome CRM called Interaction at Lillick & Charles, a San Francisco law firm. My take on it is that CRM can be business-model altering software. Mind you, it doesn’t have to be—- it can be a simple contact and/or donor management system—but maybe it should be. Because properly deployed CRM gives your organization the ability to operate in a relationship-centric fashion. Instead of having isolated departments and functions that, of course, are heavily involved in relationships with other people and organizations, CRM centralizes all of the information and history of your organizational contacts and allows you to far better understand and manage those relationships. Vendors can be donors. Donors can be volunteers. If you have that overlap occurring today, you might not even be aware of it.

Zooming down to earth, my experience is also very hands on when it comes to the actual technical work involved in moving to a centralized CRM platform. I can share a lot about the tools and methods available for integrating and migrating data from other systems.

The webinar will focus mostly on best practices for implementing CRM. But we’ll start with some of the high-level, what this means for your org; spend the bulk on the project planning and implementation practices; and, if there’s time and interest, dive into some of the techie stuff. My approach to these things is to have half the session prepared and half of it open to the group interests, and I think I’ll make it worth the $50 ($25 for NTEN members) if moving to new donor databases and CRM platforms is something you’re likely to be involved in.Similar Posts:

• Buying Software is like Buying a House (Part 1)
• Complying with Data Security Regulation
• Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?
• What happened?
• Looking for a nptech job?

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

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

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

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

• Should Non-profits Seed Software Development?
• Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?
• Buying Software is like Buying a House (Part 1)
• The future of Salesforce
• Why I won an Anonymous Blogger award at NTC

1. Why isn’t there more collaboration between non-profits and open source software developers?

2. Should non-profits seed software development?

You’d think that open source and mission-focused organizations would be a natural fit, given that both share some common ethics around openness, collaboration, sharing and charity, and, let’s face it, both have challenging revenue models that often depend on the charity of others. And I think that’s the rub—simpatico they may be, but non-profts need partners to satisfy their needs, not share them. So when Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco or some other high-powered tech company throws a significant bone (and these companies are very supportive), they can take it without putting their sustainability at risk. And I like to think that their charity is returned in more ways than the obvious support of our missions. Non-profits can take risks and do some creative things that profit-oriented companies shouldn’t. When it became strikingly clear to me that Salesforce had data management goals way beyond CRM (The evening that Marc Benioff told me that he was very interested in Goodwill’s inventory management challenges), it pretty quickly occurred to me that there would be a mutually beneficial opportunity if Goodwill wanted to pilot some of Salesforce’s development in that new territory.

The Roadmap session was stimulating on a number of levels – if I weren’t about to get extremely busy on my own sustainment pursuits, I could probably blog non-stop on it. One of the fun things was systematically determining exactly how non-profits are different in our software needs from the software-consuming world at large. There are clear needs for fund development, case management, grant reporting/management, and advocacy that aren’t germaine to the standard business world. And the general market for non-profit specific software has some limitations, as I often mention. At Goodwill, I searched high and low for a Workforce Development case management system that sat on an open platform. It doesn’t, to my knowledge, exist – every option out there limits the clients ability to integrate data from and to other systems. Most of them have severely limited reporting capabilities. Ironically, one of the worst offenders is the system that Goodwill International commissioned and sold to the members.

If the time hasn’t come, then it’s about to – non-profits can no longer afford to lock up their data in inflexible systems. Business management is not about silos. Success lies in your ability to learn from the data you collect, and inter-relate data between disparate systems. It’s not about how many clients you served. It’s about the cost of serving each of those clients and the effectiveness of your methods. You need systems that talk to each other and affordable ways to correlate data. So if the existing vendors don’t value this—or, worse, have built their business models on keeping you locked into their platforms by limiting your access to the data—then you need alternatives. And since Microsoft will discount their own software, but won’t fund other vendors, you need to consider if you shouldn’t be putting aside some of your hard-earned donations toward funding that development.Similar Posts:

• Buying Software is like Buying a House (Part 1)
• Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?
• Mapping NP Salesforce
• Instant Open API with Rails 2.0
• What does OpenID mean to Non-Profits?

A lot of the talk focused on ways that we can—or will be able—to get around Salesforce’s core assumption that we deal with companies and contacts when, in fact, donation management is about individuals and households. And a big topic was integration, with a lot of questions centered on what can or should be done in Salesforce and what should be programmed on top of it. Two technologies that popped up a lot were Facebook and Ruby on Rails. I learned about (and immediately grabbed) a Salesforce library that has been developed for rails, and Alan Benamer sang the praises of Facebook both as a compelling social network and a fundraising tool, via their new “Causes” feature. Facebook has been in the news for opening up a powerful API, which makes them pretty much the “Salesforce of Social Networks”.

In the afternoon, we got to th fun stuff – showing off what we’ve done. Six of the participant’s showed off projects big and small.

Ben Munat showed us ChipIn, a fundraising widget that currently is available as a wep page plug in, but will soon be integrated with Salesforce, Facebook, and other application platforms.

• Sonny Cloward showed us a very clean and elegant Salesforce template for fund development created using Salesforce’s Person object. The Person object, which can be used in lieu of Accounts and Contacts, was introduced late last year to a somewhat underwhelming response, the problem being that it’s an either/or choice. If you use Person objects, you can’t use Accounts and Contacts, and, in most cases, you have both companies and individuals among your constituents. All the same, Sonny’s template transformed Salesforce into a clean and simple CRM that would be far easier to teach and support, and maybe quite suitable for small organizations.


• Rem Hoffman demoed the very sophisticated case management system that his company, Exponent Partners, has put together. This was a real ooh and aaher, as he demoed how a Mental Health agency, swamped in paper, could use it to track cases and print all of the paperwork with about a quarter of the effort that had been required. I’m very intrigued by Rem’s work, as I believe that case management options in the workforce development industry are all pretty painful. As far as I know, Social Solutions is the only company talking about opening up their application; most are the worst examples of grabbing a company’s data and locking them out of it.


• Ryan Ozimak of PicNet demoed his Joomla/Salesforce integration, which is also very cool and clean, and promising. At present is is likely the fastest and easiest way to develop a web site with Salesforce Contact integration, and the next steps will open up other objects for clean integration. Ryan (who is sitting next to me as I type) has just let me know that this is around the corner.


• As usual, Steve Anderson of One/Northwest had an amazing demo, showing how he has developed Apex code that completely masks the Account/Contact model so that a user can easily add and remove individuals from households. This was very slick, as his automation made tasks that take multiple screen views and actions today and almost magically integrated them. For example, if you have the household of John Doe and the house hold of Jane Doe, and you want to combine them, then you add Jane Doe to John Doe’s household and – poof! – the household is automatically renamed to “John and Jane Doe” and Jane Doe’s household is deleted. This completely removes the limitation that use of Person accounts involves – you can still have accounts and contacts. The problem being that Apex is only available in the sandbox for now.


• Finally, Evan Callahan of NPower Seattle demoed a simple translator lookup app that he created for a client. What was cool about this was both that he put together a very intuitive and functional tool for finding a translator with the proper skills and availability, and he did it with some very simple code and a web form. In both Steve and Evan’s cases, they took innovative and undocumented approaches that produced powerful results. Must be something in that moist Seattle air.

Today we dive into how the Salesforce community can better operate as a cohesive support infrastructure and wrap up at noon. If you are a Salesforce license donee, keep your eyes open for a survey that will let you in on this critical input. And look for a bigger event next year—this was a great exercise for all parties.Similar Posts:

• Mapping NP Salesforce
• The future of Salesforce
• Filling the Communication Gaps
• Free as in "Hurricanes"
• The Death of Email (is being prematurely reported)

So, what are they?

Templates. In 2005, Salesforce developed a template for non-profits that everyone admits was pretty lame. Most of the consultants advised against using it. In 2006, Tucker MacLean, at the time a Fellow with the Foundation, redesigned it into something far more substantial – but still problematic, the problem being that non-profits are far too diverse in their structure and needs to fit a single template. The template in place transforms Salesforce into a donation management application. But I would argue that deploying Salesforce strictly as a fund development tool is short-sighted, and possibly disadvantageous when there are so many choices for software that is developed to that purpose, not twisted to it. The reason to deploy Salesforce is because it can handle the fund development and do so much more.

So, roadmap 1 is to move away from the one-size-fits-all template to something far more modular.

Road map 2 is around the community, or eco-system that supports the non-profit Salesforce adopters. And I think this is where the most meaningful changes can occur. This is about shared development—should NP Salesforce have an Appexchange of its own, one that acts more like Sourceforge? Can the consultant community adopt standards for how we deploy, and can Salesforce support us in any innovative ways? And can best practice, case studies, and non-profit specific training and documentation be collected in one place?

Third was the product itself, which I really don’t think non-profits can or should influence all that heavily. I don’t believe that our platform issues are unique. But we do want to see that new things (document management, Google Apps integration); we would really appreciate a customer portal and stronger ties to CMS’s and web sites, and stronger integration with our external applications.

What interests me is the dual need for this very open, malleable platform and the dire need non-profits have for out of the box functionality. Currently, Salesforce is a very worthwhile investment, but it’s not a light investment for a tech and cash strapped organization. The integrators working with it are frustrated by how much programming they have to do to support some very basic functionality.

But it says worlds that Salesforce is approaching this by inviting the community to advise them. This somewhat techy gathering will be followed up by a survey for the non-profit users at large. Ask yourself, how often does a large, corporate software company ask you directly to give input into their development? Or, if they do, do you think they actually listen? Once again, Salesforce is modeling an approach to doing business that has far more in common with the open source world than the for-profit. More on this later.Similar Posts:

• Salesforce Show and Tell
• Should Non-profits Seed Software Development?
• The future of Salesforce
• Free as in "Hurricanes"
• Are there barriers to effective non-profit management?

Salesforce appeals to me because it lives up to many of the standards I look for in an online database:

• It’s open. Any Salesforce customer can download their entire database into Excel pretty much at any time. There are no technical or contractual walls separating me from my information as a Salesforce customer.


• It has a community around it extending, developing and integrating the product. While Salesforce is far from the only commercial application with such a community, it is far more analogous to the open source communities around applications like Joomla and Drupal than it is like their commercial counterparts. Salesforce has provided excellent forums and support, nurturing their partners in ways that most commercial developers are far too guarded to allow.


• Sharing and philanthropy are part of the corporate ethic, fairly deeply ingrained. I like to joke that their stated policy of “one percent of people, product and profits goes back to the community” is not that big a deal, given that 100% of a non-profit’s revenues are recycled back into their missions, but the truth is that they do a lot more than just give away software, and I’m certain that it ends up being much more than 1%.


• Salesforce is audacious and ambitious in all the right ways. They want to do away with your infrastructure and change the way that technology is deployed, and they are by far the most sophisticated example of how that can and should be done. And don’t ever mistake them for a CRM company just because that’s what they’ve primarily been – they’re a shard data and computing platform, and the next few years are going to see them break out of the CRM neighborhood into a new role as a data management middleware provider. Store your data and build your processes, they’ll handle the hardware.

Finally, in this era, when internet business is shaking up traditional business models in dramatic fashions—just ask the RIAA, or the telecoms, or your local newspaper’s classifieds editor—Salesforce is the disruptor in our community. Blackbaud, Kintera and Convio, along with the other established donation-based business support vendors, are all rapidly changing their models to more closely match the open approach. And Social Solutions and the case management crowd are well aware that they’re next. This bodes well for the customers.

I’ll be blogging from the conference (as allowed) and hope to spread exciting news.Similar Posts:

• Mapping NP Salesforce
• Should Non-profits Seed Software Development?
• Salesforce Show and Tell
• Free as in "Hurricanes"
• Buying Software is like Buying a House (Part 1)

I started to learn a bit about Rails while considering joining a software start-up (in the non-profit space). I spent a month hammering away with a few O’Reilly books and a sample project, then got pulled away by real world concerns like starting up my new career fast so my family won’t starve. I got far enough to get the concepts and philosophy, master the innovative database management (activerecord), and start an app that I plan to finish and publish as part of Techcafeteria someday. Along the way, I loved the rapid development features and recognized Rails as a bit of a conceptual leap in programming/scripting, that values efficiency of following conventions over coding. Being oriented toward finding the fastest paths to the best results, I was also intrigued by how Rails builds Ajax functionality into the code (I just never bothered to get beyond the basics of Javascript, preferring server-side programming, I bias I now regret…) But I also grew concerned about the platforms speed and scalability, concerns that my friends at Social Source Commons (SSC) would second, I suspect.

So, the four areas that the conference could have helped me with, and how it did:

1. Learning more of the scripting language. Not so much—maybe a referral to the book I’m missing that will glide me right over that hump.


2. Ajax intro – pretty good. I attended a few sessions on Prototype and Scriptaculous that gave me a far better handle on how they work .


3. Ruby Scaling—an awesome session on the proxy cache and other options out there to speed up Rails, with pointers to what bottlenecks it. This was likely the most valuable thing, and I’ll be contacting Gunner to offer to take a look at the SSC platform and see if we can apply some of what I learned.


4. Where it’s going, as I reported on yesterday. Among web scripting languages, PHP and ASP/.NET are the kings today. My prediction is that Ruby on Rails will eclipse them, and gain broad adoption among web 2.0 developers and corporations looking for in-house app development tools. The main limitation – performance – is being addressed and will be fixed, no question.

The benefit of having a functional application roughly 60 seconds after you think of a name for it is phenomenal, and the developers are completely geared toward continuing to make it the out of the box solution for speedy delivery of standards-based, current tech web applications.Similar Posts:

• The Rails Thing
• Instant Open API with Rails 2.0
• OpenID Enabled
• Salesforce Show and Tell
• A Day of Joomla (live)

My main focus is on technology trends that allow us all to make better use of the vast amounts of information that we store in myriad locations and formats across diverse systems. The new standards for database manipulation (SQL); data interchange (XML) and data delivery (RSS) are huge developments in an industry that has traditionally offered hundreds different ways of managing, exporting and delivering data, none of which worked particularly well—if at all—with anybody else’s method. The technology industry has tried to address this with one size fits all options—Oracle, SAP, etc., offering Enterprise Resource Platforms that should be all things to all people. But these are expensive options that require a stable of high-paid programmers on hand to develop. I strongly advocate that we don’t need to have all of our software on one platform, but that all data management systems have to support standardized methods of exchanging information. I boil it all down to this:

It’s your data. Data systems should not restrict you from doing what you want to do with your data, and they should offer powerful and easy methods of accessing the data. You can google the world for free. You shouldn’t have to pay to access your own donor information in meaningful ways.

How can the software developers do this? By including open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that support web standards.

So what does this have to do with Ruby on Rails? At the Keynote this morning, David Heinemeier Hannson showed us the improvements coming up in Ruby for Rails 2.0. And he started with a real world example: an address book. Bear with me.

1. He created the project (one line entered at a command prompt).


2. He created the database (another line)


3. He used Rails’ scaffolding feature to create some preliminary HTML and code for working with his address book (one more line).


4. He added a couple of people to the address book.

At this point, with a line or so of code, he was able to produce HTML, XML, RSS and CSV outputs of his data. The new scaffolding in 2.0 automatically builds the API. I could get a lot more geeky about the myriad ways that Ruby on Rails basically insures that your application will be, out of the box, open, but I think that says it well.

Think of what this means to the average small business or non-profit:

• You need a database to track, say, web site members, and you want to further integrate that with your CRM system. With rails, you can, very quickly, create a database; generate (via scaffolding) the input forms; easily export all data to CSV or XML, either of which can be imported into a decent CRM.


• You want to offer newsfeeds on your web site. Create the simple database in Rails. Generate the basic input forms. Give access to the forms to the news editors. Export the news to RSS files on your web server.

This is powerful stuff, and, as I said, an instant API, meaning that it can meet all sorts of data management needs, and even act as an intermediary between incompatible systems. I still have some reservations about Rails as a full-fledged application-development environment, mostly because it’s performance is slow, and, while the keynote mentioned some things that will address speed in 2.0, notably a smart method of combing and compressing CSS and Javascript code, I didn’t hear anything that dramatically addresses that problem. But, as a platform, it’s great to see how it makes actively including data management standards a native output of any project, as opposed to something that the developer must decide whether or not to do. And, as a tool, it might have a real home as a mediator in our data integration disputes.Similar Posts:

• The Rails Thing
• Rails Wrap-up
• OpenID Enabled
• Buying Software is like Buying a House (Part 1)
• Does Your Data have a Bad Reputation?

Ruby on Rails, it turns out, is a controversial language, in a way that is very reminiscent of the Apple vs. everything else debate. Rails enthusiasts are very attached to the platform, and adherents of Java, C, and even PHP, tend to be very skeptical, with complaints that the structure is too rigid and that the language only goes so far. They might be right – I’m not fluent enough yet to know. But there are a few definite things that have me interested in Rails.

1. Rails abstrats the database creation and management process in a really fascinating way. Using the MVC framework—model, views, controller—you basically develop your database using plain english to describe the relationships between tables. This really works for me. To create the database, you write some very simple code that adheres to certain naming conventions, and then you can manage the database almost exclusively from the code.


2. Once the database is created, Rails uses a method called scaffolding to automatically create forms for database manipulation. With one line of code in your controller, you can very simply grab data from multiple tables using a simple syntax. Rails makes it all very, very easy.


3. I’m looking for a holy grail, of sorts, something that falls halfway between a programming language and a content management system (CMS), and this comes close. What can we use to rapidly develop interactive, web-based applications that doesn’t lock us into the type of assumptions that Drupal and (the current version of) Joomla do, but don’t require building the whole thing from scratch? Ruby on Rails is still a pretty complex thing for most techs at non-profits to budget the time to learn, but it’s intriguing, as is the move in the next release of Joomla to have it sit atop a Ruby on Rails-like framework (that, unfortunately, lacks the database routines).

I’m also looking at Javascript/ajax libraries – I’m in one right now on Prototype and scriptaculous, but the presenter is the developer of scriptalicious and his presentation style is somewhat coma-inducing…Similar Posts:

• Rails Wrap-up
• Instant Open API with Rails 2.0
• OpenID Enabled
• A Day of Joomla (live)
• Salesforce Show and Tell

I was somewhat surprized by the category I won in – “people most likely to be blogging anonymously”. I asked Holly which anonymous blog they suspected I was the author of, and she didn’t have one – they just thought that it roundly described me. So, what I take away from that is that people recognize that I have a lot of opinions and I’m not shy about jotting them down on public forums. But, clearly, my lack of attention to this blog has made it completely invisible.

Now, my last day, after six and a half years, as the lead technologist at SF Goodwill was Friday, March 30th. And the conference ran April 4th through 6th. The timing was great – I made a lot of good connections, and walked away with some serious referrals and opportunities to ply my new trade. It was really different attending the sessions, though, not as a representative of a large non-profit, but as an independent consultant, more interested in selling my services than buying others. I think I have a lot of chops that I can offer quality consulting with, and I’ve been picturing the work and looking forward to that. But the actual consulting is only half the job. The other half is business development, and that’s a bit of a stretch for me. At the conference, I conferred with a lot of other IT consultants and really started to work through what this career change means. It’s clear that I have to do what I pretty much did at the conference, and become a salesman. When all is said and done, it’s about paying off the mortgage and feeding the kid. But it’s also clear to me that the best way to sell my services is to be an active member and healthy contributor to the non-profit tech community, something which I’ve been unable to do successfully while working those 80 hour weeks at Goodwill. So I can’t afford to be an anonymous blogger. Heppy lend is going to pick up steam, and it will be republished at Techcafeteria, which I plan to build into a large resource and home for advocacy of sound technology practices at non-profits. The big issues, today?

• Data standards, data management, data planning. This was my theme at NTC, where I led a session on “Managing Technology 2.0” and participated in the live version of the Open API Debate.


• Breaking the myth that technology funding is overhead that drains mission-effectiveness. This is a battle-cry that needs to be brought to the technology-averse funders and CEOs who don’t understand that not investing in a technology strategy is equivalent to organizational suicide.


• Deployment planning and strategies. Orgs need to have a sustainable approach to technology purchasing, development and implementation that factors in how they will keep it running, not just how much it will cost to get it installed. My second bullet is meaningless if there aren’t effective strategies for using the technology that’s deployed.

Overall, I’ve just stepped out of a 21 year career as a technology startegist and implementer, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way (I’d say “hard lessons”, but, the truth is, I’ve managed to avoid a lot of fiascos in my career!). There’s a lot more to technology deployment than just buying the server and training the staff. If technology isn’t tightly aligned to organizational strategy, objectives, and business processes, it’s a sinkhole – you might as well stick with the typewriters. So look for this to be the meat of this blog and the message of Techcafeteria.com for the near future.Similar Posts:

• I’ve been busy
• Why I Won’t Be At NTC (And Why You Should Be)
• What I’ve been up to
• OpenID Enabled
• What happened?