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

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

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

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

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

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

• Virtualization Webinar

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

• Software Purchasing article

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

• BDP Website

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

What are you up to?

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

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

Good:

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


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

Bad:

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


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

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

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

Everybody who enjoys calling tech support, raise your hand.

No one?

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

• a bigger crowd than the prior year;


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


• great speakers; great food; great networking.

I participated as a panelist in three sessions:

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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

My article “XML, API, CSV, SOAP! Understanding the Alphabet Soup of Data Exchange” is up at idealware.org.  This is intended as a primer for those of you trying to make sense of all of this talk about Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and data integration. It discusses, with examples, the practical application of some of the acronyms, and suggests some recommended practices around data system selection and deployment.  Credit has to go to Laura Quinn, webmaster at Idealware, who really co-wrote the article with me, but didn’t take much credit, and our reviewers,  Paul Hagan, Steve Anderson and Stephen Backman, who added great insights to a pretty heady topic.

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.

If you missed the announcement, I’m giving a webinar titled “Preparing for Your New Database: Making the Transition as Painless as Possible” on Tuesday at 11:00 am Pacific time. Registration details are at http://nten.org/webinars (It’s not free). If you saw the announcement, note that Holly or someone at NTEN wrote all of that copy – shame on me for not getting them a description on time! But it’s pretty close. What it lacks is the specification that we are talking about Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) databases, not just any database.

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.

There were a ton of interesting side topics that came up at the Salesforce Non-Profit Roadmap event, but a few hit on some related themes that have long interested me, and they can be summed in two basic, but meaty questions:

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.

Day one of the Salesforce Roadmap session was a well-crafted, but fairly standard run at typical strategic planning. Hosted by Aspiration’s ever-able Gunner (who I seem to run into everywhere lately), we had a group of about 40 people: five or six from Salesforce/Salesforce Foundation, five to six NP staff, and an assortment of Salesforce consultants. While I’m a consultant these days, I maintain a bit of a staff perspective, as my primary experience with Salesforce was to roll it out for SF Goodwill. The day consisted of breaking up into small teams and hammering out what works for our sector, what doesn’t, what could be done, and building all of this into a set of possible roadmaps that would address non-profit needs. The most striking thing about the outcome was that we had six groups design those roadmaps, and we largely all came up with the exact same things.

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.