techcafeteria

The last few weeks saw some big announcements in the smartphone world:

• Palm released the phone that they’ve been promising us for years, the Palm Pre, with it’s new WebOS, to reviews that were mostly favorable and summed up as “The iPhone’s baby brother“.


• Apple stole some of Palm’s thunder by dominating the press two days later with news of their relatively unexciting new phones and 3.0 software.


• In the weeks prior, news came out that about 18 more Android phones should be out in calendar 2009 and that, by early 2010, all of the major carriers will have them.


• And Nokia’s E71 hit our shores, an incredibly full-featured phone that you can get for just over $300 unlocked, and use the carrier of your choice. While this isn’t a touchscreen, and is therefore suspect in terms of it’s ease of use, it is an amazingly full-featured product.

Left in the wings were Blackberry, who keep producing phones, including their iPhone competitor, the Storm—to yawns from the press, and Microsoft, who are talking a lot about Windows Mobile 6.5 and 7.0, but seem to have really been decimated by the ugliness of their mobile OS when compared to just about anyone else’s.

What’s clear is that a few things differentiate smartphones these days, and the gap between the ones that get it and the ones that don’t are huge. They are:

Responsive Touchscreen Interfaces. The UI’s of the iPhone, Android and Palm’s WebOS get around the sticky problem that phones were just to small to support anything but simple functionality without requiring an oppressive amount of taps and clicks. This is why Microsoft has fallen down the smartphone food chain so far and fast—their mobile OS is just like their desktop OS, with no flagship phone that does the touchscreen nearly as well as the new competition.

Desktop-Class Web Browsers. This is where Apple and Google have drawn a huge line, and it looks like Palm might have joined them. All three use browser’s based on Webkit, the same technology that fuels Safari and Chrome. On a 3G phone, this makes for a fast and complete experience that puts the Blackberry, Mobile Internet Explorer and the Treo’s hideous Blazer. Add Google’s voice activation (native on Android and available for iPhone), and their smartphone-optimized results (which don’t work on the non-webkit browsers) and the task of finding a Starbucks or hotel on the road takes seconds, instead of the average ten to 15 minutes on the old, lousy browsers, which simply choke on the graphics.

Push Email. If you connect to Exchange servers, the iPhone and Pre have Activesync built in. If your mail is with Google, you’re connected to it as soon as you tell an Android phone your login and password. And the Android phone app is the best out there, with Apple’s mail running close behind it. What’s ironic is that Microsoft targeted their biggest threat with Activesync—the Blackberry’s kludgy, but, at the time, unparalleled email forwarding—and gave it wings by licensing it to Palm, Apple and others. This is fueling corporate acceptance of the iPhone and Pre, meaning that this Blackberry-beating strategy might have worked, but more likely it did it for Apple and Palm, not Microsoft.

Music. The iPhone is an iPod; everything else isn’t, meaning that, if having a high quality phone and music experience on one device is a priority, you’re not going to go wrong with the iPhone. I love my G1, but I weigh my value of the real keyboard and awesome, open source OS on T-Mobile over the iPhone’s built-in iPod and Activesync on AT&T. As OSes go, Android is only marginally better than Apple, but the Apple hardware is much better than the G1. Newer Android phones are going to show that up.

People make a lot of noise about the apps available for the iPhone (and Windows/Blackberry) as opposed to the newer Android and Pre. I think that’s a defining question for the Pre, but it looks like companies are jumping on board. For Android, it’s quite arguably a wash. All of the important things are available for Android and, given that it’s open source, most of them are free. And with those 18 phones due out by year end on every carrier, the discrepancies will be short-lived.

I have to wonder how long it will take Microsoft to “get” mobile. They have a heavy foot in the market as the commodity OS on the smartphones that can’t get any buzz. But the choice to bring the worst things about the Windows Desktop experience to their mobile OS was unfortunate. Should I really get a pop-up that has to be manually dismissed every time I get an email or encounter a wireless network? Do I have to pull out the stylus and click on Start every time I want to do anything? What’s even more worrisome is that Windows Mobile is a separate OS from Windows, that merely emulates it, as opposed to sharing a code base. Apple’s OS is the same OSX that you get on a MacBook, just stripped down, and Google’s OS is already starting to appear on Netbooks and other devices, and will likely fuel full desktops within a year or two—it is, after all, Linux.

So, the state of the smartphone market is easily broken into the haves and have-nots, meaning that some phones have far more usable and exciting functionality, while most phones don’t. There’s a whole second post dealing with the choice of carriers and their rankings in the race to offer the most customer disservice, and it does play into your smartphone decision, as Verizon might be a very stable network, but their phone selection is miserable, and AT&T might have the best selection but, well, they’re AT&T. I love Android, so, were I looking, I’d hold out until four or five of those new sets are out. But I don’t know anyone with an iPhone who’s unsatisfied (and I know lots of people with iPhones).

Let’s get a bit geeky. Many Idealware visitors come here for advice on purchasing and deploying data management systems, such as donor databases, constituent relation management systems and content management systems. And, more often than not, are replacing older systems with new ones, meaning that one of the trickiest tasks is data migration. If any of this work has ever fallen to you, then you might have found yourself doing tedious editing and corrections in Excel, pouring over data screens or rows in Access trying to formalize non-formalized data entry, and generally settling for some lost or incorrect data moving from old system to new.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a magic wand that can instantly reformat the data to the proper format? Well, I have one for you. But, just as Harry Potter had to go to school before he could effectively wave his wand, mine comes with a lesson or two as well.

The wand in question is a search/replace language called regular expressions. Regular expressions are a set of terms that can be used, in supported software, to perform advanced search and replace functions. They were originally popularized in the Unix Stream Editor (SED), but are now standardly found in text editors, word processors, scripting languages (such as PHP) and other software, usually as an advanced option.

The reason to use them instead of a regular search and replace function is simple: they can search for things that regular search tools can’t. For example:

• the first three characters at the beginning of each line


• the three at the end of each line


• one or more spaces

Regular expressions can also do multiple replacements in one phrase, allowing you to either remove the first comma encountered in a sentence, or all commas. Here are the basics:

A regular expression takes the form of /Search Phrase/Replacement/. A simple search to replace all instances of the word “fish” with the word “bird” would look like:

/fish/bird/

But regular expressions only prove their worth when you learn their special characters:

. (any character)

• (one or more characters)

^ (the beginning of a line

$ (the end of a line)

() (parentheses surrounding characters in the search phrase can be recalled in the replacement)

$1, $2 (substitute in the replacement for characters saved by parentheses in the search phrase)

(backslashes treat the next character literally, even if it’s a Regular expression special character)

[a-z], [0-9], [A-Za-z] (groupings search for all of the characters specified between the brackets, using dashes to identify ranges

Examples:

If you have a text printout of a document that you want to whittle into something more useful, like a CSV file, step one might be to remove any dead space.

/ */ /

will search for one or more spaces (the asterisk means “any number of the preceding character) and replace them with one space.

/^$/d

will remove all blank lines (lines with nothing between the beginning and the end of the line)

If you are moving data from one system to another, you might have to reformat dates for the new system. Say the old system exports dates as MM/DD/YYYY and the SQL database you’re importing them to expects YYYY-MM-DD. This Regular Expression will convert all dates to the new format:

/([01][0-9])/([0-3][0-9])/([12][0-9][0-9][0-9])/$3-$1-$2/

Let’s break this down:

/ – a slash starts the search phrase section.

( – parentheses surround things that we want to remember, so this starts a section we’ll remember.

[01][0-9] – a month (MM) will be a number between 1 and 12, so, if your system is exporting dates with leading zeros (if not, you can do this with a series of regular expressions to get around that), then the [01] set will match either a leading zero or a one. The [0-9] set will match any digit following that one or zero.

) – this will be remembered in the replacement as $1, because it’s the first thing we remembered.

/ – since the slash is a regular expression special character (the delimiter), we precede it with a backslash, telling the parser to treat it a a slash, not a delimiter.

([0-3][0-9]) – this will find any pair of numbers between 01 and 39, which we know as the day, and remember it as $2, because it’s enclosed in parentheses.

/ – next slash

([12][0-9][0-9][0-9]) – this catches the year. You see how, right? It is specifying that the year will be in this millennia or the last by limiting the first character to one or two. We use parentheses to remember this as well.

/ – this slash signifies that the search phrase is done, and the replacement will follow.

$3-$1-$2 – this takes our three remembered phrases and reorders them from month, day, year to year ($3), month ($1), day ($2), placing dashes in-between them.

/ – finally, we close the command with a slash.

One of my standard uses is to take a list – which could be an Excel spreadsheet, or a database dump, or a Word table—clean it up, and then format it into SQL statements that can then be pulled into a database. Most databases can import in CSV files, but Excel, while good at doing some reformatting, can’t do the fancy cleanup tasks that my regular expression-enabled editor can. Once my specific clean-up chores are done, if I’m left with a tab-delimited file, I can do the following three simple searches to turn it into a SQL input file that can just be run in my SQL interpreter.

/t/’,’/—searches for all tabs (t is a symbol that means “tab”) and replaces them with ‘,’

/(.)$/$1’);/ – searches for the last character in a line and replaces it with that character followed by a close quote, close parens and semi-colon.

/^(.)/insert into players (name, title, company) values (‘$1/ – searches for the first character in any line and prepends the front end of the SQL statement.

If we had an input file with lines like this:

Joe NamathQuarterbackForty-niners

It would become

insert into players (name, title, company) values (‘Joe Namath’,’Quarterback’,’Forty-niners’);

There are plenty of excellent resources for learning about regular expressions on the web, but many of them are targeted at programmers, making them a bit thick to read through. For more friendly introductions, I recommend The regular-expressions.info quickstart. While many text-processing tools, including Microsoft Word, support regular expression search and replace, I recommend using a good text editor over a word processor, because it will likely include supporting functionality, such as block copying/pasting, and they’ll handle very large files with far more speed and grace. I’ve been happy using TextPad and EditPlus on Windows, and TextMate and TextWrangler on the Mac. Wikipedia publishes an incomplete list of applications that include regular expression functionality.

Photo by StarbuckGuy

As you probably know, the U.S. Congress has been having a big debate about what went on behind closed door briefings on the treatment of detainees in the war on terrorism. At issue is whether House Leader Nancy Pelosi was told about the use of harsh interrogation tactics, which many of us define as torture, in 2002 and 2003 briefings, when the tactics were actually in use. Rep. Pelosi maintains that they weren’t discussed; The CIA, responsible for the briefings, maintains that they were, but neither of them has yet provided documentation that might settle the matter. Meanwhile, Rep. Pelosi’s Democratic colleague, Rep. Bob Graham, who, as head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was also to be briefed on such actions, reports that the CIA’s assertions are in error. Dates that they claim he was in briefings on the subject are wrong. His his meticulous notes, which he has traditionally been kidded about keeping, establish that only one of four CIA-alleged meetings actually occurred, and, in it, the harsh interrogation tactics weren’t discussed.

At this point, you might well be asking why I’m bringing this up on the Idealware blog. And the answer is, because it’s about data, or, more to the point, the integrity of data and data keeping systems, and that’s a topic close to our hearts here at Idealware. This example was inspired by some great reporting by the frivously-named, but thought-provoking blog BoingBoing, and a post of theirs on May 21st titled “Bob Graham’s much-scoffed-at little notebooks are more reliable than the CIA’s records“. They quote Gary Wolf’s post (which I highly recommend reading) about the intriguing fact that the CIA backed off of their record keeping claims rather quickly upon learning that they didn’t jibe with Graham’s personal notes. Consider this for a minute: Bob Graham’s personal note-taking has more authority than the record keeping of the Central Intelligence Agency. The killer line from Wolf’s post is:

“Personal data, kept by a dedicated and interested party, even using yesterday’s technology, will trump large scale collection systems managed by bureaucrats.”

You can find some really excellent advice here at Idealware on what to buy and how to implement the software that will manage the critical information that your organization lives and dies by. You can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars deploying it. But it, too, might be outclassed by the scribbling of a person who’s scribble-keeping habits are far less impeachable (to keep the political allegory going) than the data integrity securing processes that you build around your system.

When you deploy that software, one thing to consider is “who owns this data? Who has the most respect for it?”. Distribute the data entry duties in ways that insure that the people who first put that data into the system care about it, and are invested in seeing that it goes in correctly. Then, integrate your systems in ways that eliminate duplicate entry of that data. Set up triggers that push data from the authoritative systems of record (the ones that the people who care enter the data into) to the auxiliary systems, insuring that no donor or client’s name is misspelled one place, but correct in another; and that a $50 donation via the web site isn’t recorded as a $500 entry in your donor database.

Doing this will insure that your data-keeping systems have the upstanding reputations that your organization depends on.

At the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference, I attended a somewhat misleadingly titled session called “Cloud Computing: More than just IT plumbing in the sky“. The cloud computing issues discussed were nothing like the things we blog about here (see Michelle’s and my recent “SaaS Smackdown” posts). Instead, this session was really a dive into the challenges and benefits of publishing aggregated nonprofit metrics. Steve Wright of the Salesforce Foundation led the panel, along with Lucy Bernholz and Lalitha Vaidyanathan. The session was video-recorded; you can watch it here.

Steve, Lucy and Lalithia painted a pretty visionary picture of what it would be like if all nonprofits standardized and aggregated their outcome reporting on the web. Lalithia had a case study that hit on the key levels of engagement: shared measurement systems; comparative performance measurement and a baked in learning process. Steve made it clear that this is an iterative process that changes as it goes—we learn from each iteration and measure more effectively, or more appropriately for the climate, each time.

I’m blogging about this because I’m with them—this is an important topic, and one that gets lost amidst all of the social media and web site metrics focus in our nptech community. We’re big on measuring donations, engagement, and the effectiveness of our outreach channels, and I think that’s largely because there are ample tools and extra-community engagement with these metrics—every retailer wants to measure the effectiveness of their advertising and their product campaigns as well. Google has a whole suite of analytics available, as do other manufacturers. But outcomes measurement is more particular to our sector, and the tools live primarily in the reporting functionality of our case and client management systems. They aren’t nearly as ubiquitous as the web/marketing analysis tools, and they aren’t, for the most part, very flexible or sophisticated.

Now, I wholly subscribe to the notion that you will never get anywhere if you can’t see where you’re going, so I appreciate how Steve and crew articulated that this vision of shared outcomes is more than just a way to report to our funders; it’s also a tool that will help us learn and improve our strategies. Instead of seeing how your organization has done, and striving to improve upon your prior year’s performance, shared metrics will offer a window into other’s tactics, allowing us all to learn from each others’ successes and mistakes.

But I have to admit to being a bit overwhelmed by the obstacles standing between us and these goals. They were touched upon in the talk, but not heavily addressed.

• Outcome management is a nightmare for many nonprofits, particularly those who rely heavily on government and foundation funding. My brief forays into shared outcome reporting were always welcomed at first, then shot down completely, the minute it became clear that joint reporting would require standardization of systems and compromise on the definitions. Our case management software was robust enough to output whatever we needed, but many of our partners were in Excel or worse. Even if they’d had good systems, they didn’t have in-house staff that knew how to program them.


• Outcomes are seen by many nonprofit executives as competitive data. If we place ours in direct comparison with the similar NPO down the street, mightn’t we just be telling our funders that they’re backing the wrong horse?


• The technical challenges are huge—of the NPOs that actually have systems that tally this stuff, the data standards are all over the map, and the in-house skill, as well as time and availability to produce them, is generally thin. You can’t share metrics if you don’t have the means to produce them.

A particular concern is that all metrics are fairly subjective, as can happen when the metrics produced are determined more by the funding requirements than the NPO’s own standards. When I was at SF Goodwill, our funders were primarily concerned with job placements and wages as proof of our effectiveness. But our mission wasn’t one of getting people jobs; it was one of changing lives, so the metrics that we spent the most work on gathering were only partially reflective of our success – more outputs than outcomes. Putting those up against the metrics of an org with different funding, different objectives and different reporting tools and resources isn’t exactly apples to apples.

The benefits of shared metrics that Steve and crew held up is a worthwhile dream, but, to get there, we’re going to have to do more than hold up a beacon saying “This is the way”. We’re going to have to build and pave the road, working through all of the territorial disputes and diverse data standards in our path. Funders and CEOs are going to have to get together and agree that, in order to benefit from shared reporting, we’ll have to overcome the fact that these metrics are used as fodder in the battles for limited funding. Nonprofits and the ecosystem around them are going to have to build tools and support the art of data management required. These aren’t trivial challenges.

I walked into the session thinking that we’d be talking about cloud computing; the migration of our internal servers to the internet. Instead, I enjoyed an inspiring conversation that took place, as far as I’m concerned, in the clouds. We have a lot of work to do on the ground before we can get there.

Those of you familiar with my sideproject at http://nptech.info know that it has been trustworthily aggregating blog entries, photos and websites tagged with the term “nptech” for close to four years now.  It’s been a little negelcted of late, but after Annaliese over at NTEN gave it a shout-out, I figured it was due for some clean-up. Here’s what’s new:

• About 25 blogs added to the NPTech Blogs section, and a broken link or two corrected on the existing ones;


• Information from Twitter added to the main “Tagged items” feed that already grabs nptech items from Delicious, Flickr and Technorati;


• New additions to the general tech section from sites like ReadWriteWeb and Mashable


• A simple Facelift, primarily adding a little color and going for a more attractive font (fancy design is not a big priority here, particularly since my last big effort to pretty it up got creamed in a Drupal upgrade).

As usual, if you have a blog focused on Non-Profit Technology that you’d like added to the mix, let me know, but rest assured that, if you can find your blog on Technorati, we’re already grabbing the items that you tag or categorize as “nptech”.

The technology trend that defines this decade is the movement towards open, pervasive computing. The Internet is at our jobs, in our homes, on our phones, TVs, gaming devices. We email and message everyone from our partners to our clients to our vendors to our kids. For technology managers, the real challenges are less in deploying the systems and software than they are in managing the overlap, be it the security issues all of this openness engenders, or the limitations of our legacy systems that don’t interact well enough. But the toughest integration is not one between software or hardware systems, but, instead, the intersection of strategic computing and organizational culture.

There are two types of silos that I want to discuss: organizational silos, and siloed organizations.

An organizational silo, to be clear, is a group within an organization that acts independently of the rest of the organization, making their own decisions with little or no input from those outside of the group. This is not necessarily a bad thing; there are (although I can’t think of any) cases where giving a group that level of autonomy might serve a useful purpose. But, when the silo acts in an environment where their decisions impact others, they can create long-lived problems and rifts in critical relationships.

We all know that external decisions can disrupt our planning, be it a funders decision to revoke a grant that we anticipated or a legislature dropping funding for a critical program. So it’s all the more frustrating to have the rug pulled out from under us by people who are supposed to be on the same team. If you have an initiative underway to deploy a new email system, and HR lays off the organizational trainer, you’ve been victimized by a silo-ed decision. On the flip side, a fundraiser might undertake a big campaign, unaware that it will collide with a web site redesign that disables the functionality that they need to broadcast their appeal.

Silos thrive in organizations where the leadership is not good at management. Without a strong CEO and leadership team, departmental managers don’t naturally concern themselves with the needs of their peers. The expediency and simplicity of just calling the shots themselves is too appealing, particularly in environments where resources are thin and making overtures to others can result in those resources being gladly taken and never returned. In nonprofits, leaders are often more valued for their relationships and fundraising skills than their business management skills, making our sector more susceptible to this type of problem.

The most damaging result of operating in this environment is that, if you can’t successfully manage the silos in your organization, then you won’t be anything but a silo in the world at large.

We’ve witnessed a number of industries, from entertainment and newspapers to telephones and automobiles, as they allowed their culture to dictate their obsolescence. Instead of adapting their models to the changing needs of their constituents, they’ve clung to older models that aren’t relevant in the digital age, or appropriate for a global economy on a planet threatened by climate change. Since my focus is technology, I pay particular attention to the impacts that technological advancement, and the accompanying change in extra-organizational culture (e.g., the country, our constituents, the world) have on the work my organization does. Just in the past few years, we’ve seen some significant cultural changes that should be impacting nonprofit assumptions about how we use technology:

• Increased regulation on the handling of data. We’re wrestling with the HIPAA laws governing handling of medical data and PCI standards for financial data. If we have not prioritized firewalls, encryption, and the proper data handling procedures, we’re more and more likely to be out of step with new laws. Even the 990 form we fill out now asks if we have a document retention plan.


• Our donors are now quite used to telephone auto attendants, email, and the web. How many are now questioning why we use the dollars they donate to us to staff reception, hand write thank you notes, and send out paper newsletters and annual reports?


• Our funders are seeing more available data on the things that interest them everywhere, so they expect more data from us. The days of putting out the success stories without any numbers to quantify them are over.

Are we making changes in response to these continually evolving expectations? Or are we still struggling with our internal expectations, while the world keeps on turning outside of our walls? We, as a sector, need to learn what these industrial giants refused to, before we, too, are having massive layoffs and closing our doors due to an inability to adapt our strategies to a rapidly evolving cultural climate. And getting there means paying more attention to how we manage our people and operations; showing the leadership to head into this millennia by mastering our internal culture and rolling with the external changes. Look inward, look outward, lead and adapt.

My esteemed colleague Michelle Murrain lobbed the first volley in our debate over whether tis safer to host all of your data at home, or to trust a third party with it. The debate is focused on Software as a Service (SaaS) as a computing option for small to mid-sized nonprofits with little internal IT expertise. This would be a lot more fun if Michelle was dead-on against the SaaS concept, and if I was telling you to damn the torpedos and go full speed ahead with it. But we’re all about the rational analysis here at Idealware, so, while I’m a SaaS advocate and Michelle urges caution, there’s plenty of give and take on both sides.

Michelle makes a lot of sound points, focusing on the very apt one that a lack of organizational technology expertise will be just as risky a thing in an outsourced arrangement as it is in-house. But I only partially agree.

• Security: Certainly, bad security procedures are bad security procedures, and that risk exists in both environments. But beyond the things that could be addressed by IT-informed policies, there are also the security precautions that require money to invest in and staff to support, like encryption and firewalls. I reject the argument that the data is safer on an unsecured, internal network than it is in a properly secured, PCI-Compliant, hosted environment. You’re not just paying the SaaS provider to manage the servers that you manage today; you’re paying them to do a more thorough and compliant job at it.


• Backups: Many tiny nonprofits don’t have reliable backup in place; a suitable SaaS provider will have that covered. While you will also want them to provide local backups (either via scheduled download or regular shipment of DVDs), even without that, it’s conceivable that the hosted situation will provide you with better redundancy than your own efforts.


• Data Access: Finally, data access is key, but I’ve seen many cases where vendor licensing restricts users from working with their own data on a locally installed server. Being able to access your data, report on it, back it up, and, if you choose, globally update it is the ground floor that you negotiate to for any data management system, be it hosted or not. To counter Michelle, resource-strapped orgs might be better off with a hosted system that comes with data management services than an internal one that requires advanced SQL training to work with.

Where we might really not see eye to eye on this is in our perception of how ‘at risk” these small nonprofits are, and I look at things like increasing governmental and industry regulation of internal security around credit cards and donor information as a time bomb for many small orgs, who might soon find themselves facing exorbitant fines or criminal charges for being your typical nonprofit, managing their infrastructure on a shoestring and, by necessity, skimping on some of the best practices. It’s simple – the more we invest in administration, the worse we look in our Guidestar ratings. In that scenario, outsourcing this expertise is a more affordable and reliable option than trying to staff to it, or, worse, hope we don’t get caught.

But one point of Michelle’s that I absolutely agree with is that IT-starved nonprofits lack the internal expertise to properly assess hosting environments. In any outsourcing arrangement, the vendors have to be thoroughly vetted, with complete assurances about your access to data, their ability to protect it, and their plans for your data if their business goes under. Just as you wouldn’t delegate your credit card processing needs to some kid in a basement, you can trust your critical systems to some startup with no assurance of next year’s funding. So this is where you make the right investments, avail yourself of the type of information that Idealware provides, and hire a consultant.

To me, there are two types of risk: The type you take, and the type you foster by assuming that your current practices will suffice in an ever-changing world (more on this next week). Make no mistake, SaaS is a risky enterprise. But managing your own technology without tech-savvy staff on hand is something worse than taking a risk – it’s setting yourself up for disaster. While there are numerous ways to mitigate that, none of them are dollar or risk free, and SaaS could prove to be a real bang for your buck alternative, in the right circumstances.

Non Profit social media maven Beth Kanter blogged recently about starting up a residency at a large foundation, and finding herself in a stark transition from a consultant’s home office to a corporate network. This sounds like a great opportunity for corporate culture shock. When your job is to download many of the latest tools and try new things on the web that might inform your strategy or make a good topic for your blog, encountering locked-down desktops and web filtering can be, well, annoying is probably way to soft a word. Beth reports that the IT Team was ready for her, guessing that they’d be installing at least 72 things for her during her nine month stay. My question to Beth was, “That’s great – but are they just as accommodating to their full-time staff, or is flexibility reserved for visiting nptech dignitaries?”

The typical corporate desktop computer is restricted by group policies and filtering software. Management, along with the techs, justify these restrictions in all sorts of ways:

• Standardized systems are easier, more cost-effective to manage.


• Restricted systems are more secure.


• Web filtering maximizes available bandwidth.

This is all correct. In fact, without standardization, automation, group policies that control what can and can’t be done on a PC, and some protection from malicious web sites, any company with 15 to 20 desktops or more is really unmanageable. The question is, why do so many companies take this ability to manage by controlling functionality to extremes?

Because, in many/most cases, the restrictions put in place are far broader than is necessary to keep things manageable. Web filtering not only blocks pornography and spyware, but continues on to sports, entertainment, politics, and social networking. Group policies restrict users from changing their desktop colors or setting the system time. And the end result of using the standardization tools to intensively control computer usage results, most often, in IT working just as hard or harder to manage the exceptions to the rules (like Beth’s 72, above) than they would dealing with the tasks that the automation simplifies in the first place.

Restricting computer/internet use is driven by a management and/or IT assumption that the diverse, dynamic nature of computing is either a distraction or a problem. The opportunity to try something new is an opportunity to waste time or resources. By locking down the web; eliminating a user’s ability to install applications or even access settings, PC’s can be engineered back down to the limited functionality of the office equipment that they replaced, such as typewriters, calculators and mimeograph machines.

In this environment, technology is much more of a controlled, predictable tool. But what’s the cost of this predictability?

• Technology is not fully appreciated, and computer literacy is limited in an environment where users can’t experiment.


• Strategic opportunities that arise on the web are not noticed and factored into planning.


• IT is placed in the role of organizational nanny, responsible for curtailing computer use, as opposed to enabling it./

Cash and resource-strapped, mission-focused organizations only need look around to see the strategic opportunities inherent in the web. There are an astounding number of free, innovative tools for activism and research. Opportunities to monitor discussion of your organization and issues, and meaningfully engage your constituents are huge. And all of this is fairly useless if your staff are locked out of the web and discouraged from exploring it. Pioneers like Beth Kanter understand this. They seek out the new things and ask, how can this tool, this web site, this online community serve our sector’s goals to ease suffering and promote justice? More specifically, can you end hunger in a community with a widget? Or bring water to a parched village via Twitter? If our computing environment is geared to stifle innovation at the cost of security, are we truly supporting technology?

As the lead technologist at my organization, I want to be an enabler. I want to see our attorneys use the power of the web to balance the scales when we go to court against far better resourced corporate and government counsel. In this era of internet Davids taking down Goliaths from the RIAA the the mainstream media, I don’t want my co-workers to miss out on any opportunities to be effective. So I need the flexibility and perspective to understand that security is not something that you maintain with a really big mallet, lest you stamp out innovation and strategy along with the latest malware. And, frankly, cleaning a case of the conflickr worm off of the desktop of an attorney that just took down a set of high-paid corporate attorneys with data grabbed from some innovative mapping application that our web-filtering software would have mistakenly identified as a gaming site is well worth the effort.

Flexibility has it’s own Return on Investment (ROI), particularly at nonprofits, where we generally have a lot more innovative thinking and opportunistic attitude than available budget. IT has to be an enabler, and every nonprofit CIO or IT Director has to understand that security comes at a cost, and that cost could be the mission-effectiveness of our organizations.

For my last followup to my RSS article, Using RSS Tools to Feed your Information Needs, I want to discuss OPML, the standard for RSS Reader feed information, and talk a bit about why RSS, which is already quite useful, is about to become an even bigger deal. Last week, I discussed sharing research with Google Reader; before that, filtering RSS feeds with Yahoo! Pipes, and I started with a post about integrating content with websites.

Admitting that I might represent an extreme case, I subscribe to 96 feeds in Google Reader. I started with Google Reader last December – prior to that, I used a Mac RSS Reader called Vienna. Moving from Vienna to Google Reader might have been a chore, but it wasn’t, thanks to Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML). The short story on OPML is that it was developed as a standard format for outlining. While it is used in that capacity, it’s more commonly used as a format for collecting a list of RSS feeds, with last read pointers, that can then be processed by other feed-reading software. So, I exported all of my feeds from Vienna to a .opml file, then I imported that into Google Reader, and all of my feeds were instantly set up. If you run a Wordpress blog, you can rapidly build your blogroll by importing an .opml file.

In addition to sharing feed information with applications, OPML can be used to share a group of feeds with a co-worker, friend or constituent. Say your org does advocacy on a particular issue, and you’ve collected a set of feeds that represent the best news and commentary on your issue. You could make the OPML file available on your web site for your constituents to incorporate in their readers.

At this point, you might be saying to yourself, “what are the odds that my constituents even know what a feed reader is? Wouldn’t making this available be more likely to confuse than help people?” As good as a question as that is, here’s why I think that you won’t be asking it soon. RSS has seen quick and steady adoption as a standard web service. Four years ago, it was obscure; today every content management system and web portal supports it. It features prominently in the strategic plans of tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo!. But it’s not as well-known by the general computing public—RSS still has yet to become a real household concept, like search and email have. The game-changer is underway, though. Last month, The Seattle Post-Intelligenser, one of Seattle’s primary daily papers, ceased print publication. The San Francisco Chronicle announced last month that they are making one last ditch effort, with a redesign and new printing presses, to stem the growing budget deficit that they face. Competition from TV and the web is driving newspapers out of business, and the hope that something will reverse this trend is thin.

As the internet becomes the primary source of news and opinion, RSS is a natural fit as the delivery medium. You can see that all of the Seattle PI sections are available as RSS feeds, and they have an option to customize the news and features that you see on your homepage. How long before they offer your customized paper as an OPML file, allowing you to instantly replicate your web experience in a reader?

In 1995, internet email was an arcane, technical concept. I figured out that I could send mail to an Internet address using my company’s MCI Mail account. My email address was 75 characters long. RSS may seem similarly oblique today, but it’s well on the road to being a mainstream method of internet information delivery. Your partners and constituents won’t just appreciate your support for it; they’ll start to expect it. I hope that my article and these follow-ups in the blog can serve as a good starting point for understanding what RSS can do and what you might do with it.

Google Reader gets a good mention in my RSS article, Using RSS Tools to Feed your Information Needs, but deserves an even deeper dive. This is a follow-up to that article, along with my recent posts on Integrating content with websites, and Managing Content with Pipes. We’ve established that an RSS Reader helps you manage internet information far more efficiently than a web browser can; and we’ve talked in the last few posts about publishing feeds to your web site. This post focuses on using tools like Google Reader to share research .

Out of the box, GReader (as it’s affectionately known) is a powerful, web-based reader that lets you subscribe, mark and share items in two significant ways. Shared Items are items that get published to a public page that you can point your friends and co-workers to. Further, this page can be subscribed to via RSS as well, so it can be republished to your web site, or integrated into a Facebook feed. Using (fake) bill 221b as an example, if you monitor for and selectively share articles related to the bill, you can easily point co-workers and constituents to your shared page, and or republish those items in places where your audience will see them.

Shared Items are also made available to other GReader users who choose to share with you. This offers a greater level of convenience for teams working with shared research; it can also afford a level of confidentiality if you don’t want to publicize a public page. Not only can you share the items you find; you can also tag them, much like you would with Delicious or Flickr, and add a note, if you have thoughts or context-setting notes to share. A function recently added GReader takes this even further – shared items can be commented on, much as a blog post can.

The last bit to add to this arsenal is a very powerful, but not terribly obvious GReader feature. The Note in GReader bookmarklet (which you can drag to your web browser’s quick links or bookmarks toolbar from the GReader “Notes” page) lets you share, with comments and tags, pages that you find on the web as GReader shared items. So if you run across something that isn’t in your feeds (and there’s plenty of web content that can’t be subscribed to), this lets you add it to your shared items.

What I’ve found is that, as much as I admire social bookmarking sites like Delicious, they become a lot less useful when I can store all of the pages that I find via RSS or browsing, with tags and an option to share them, in the same convenient place.

It’s important to note that, as powerful as all of this is, it still lacks some functionality that similar tools have. One great advantage of using Delicious as a link-sharing tool is that you can share links specific to any tag (or set of tags). Google Reader doesn’t offer multiple shared pages based on filtering criteria. And while you can add notes to your feed (without adding links), it’s not as flexible a repository as a tool like Evernote, which lets you save web pages, ODFs and all sorts of documents to a single web-based folder.

Also, Google Reader isn’t the only game in town. The Newsgator family of RSS readers offer similar sharing functions; some of which overcome the limitations above, as do other readers out there (please share your favorite in the comments).

What it boils down to, though, is that we now have powerful, integrated options for online research, as individuals, as teams, and as information agents for our constituents. The convenience of publishing as you discover is a significant advancement over earlier schemes, which usually involved either sending a lot of easily-lost links by email, or submitting your finds to a webmaster, who would then add them to a page on your site. This is a publish as you find approach that incorporates sharing and communication into the research process.

Next week, I’ll finish up the “More RSS Tools” series with a post about OPML, the way that you make your collection of feeds portable.