techcafeteria

We are just under three weeks away from the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference and, as usual, it’s shaping up to be quite an event. It’s almost sold out, so grab your tickets if you haven’t yet! There are a bunch of fellow regular attendees that I missed last year when I had to sit it out, and there are lots of people I’ve met online that will be great to F2A*! So here’s a rundown of the places I know I’ll be if you want to meetup:

Monday, 4/2, pre-conference: #ntcbeer! As detailed in my prior post, the 4th annual get-together will be within walking distance of the hotel this year and it will run a little later, so that everyone with a dinner to go to can consider themselves un-conflicted. Details are on the official Facebook event page, visible to all (even FB haters, whom I often sympathize with).

Tuesday, 4/3: as always, I’ll be participating in the Day of Service, helping out some TBD nonprofit with some technical advice. In the afternoon I’ll be manning the Idealware table at the Science Fair. This is a great place to catch me and schedule a meetup.

Either 4/3 or 4/4, I’ll be presenting my “Doctor Who in A Tale Of Two NTCs” ignite, featuring many infamous NTENners in Lego format and a an exciting Sci-Fi story about daleks, time travel and technology.

Wednesday, 4/4: I’m participating in three sessions on Wednesday. First up, at 10:30, Tips and Tools for Technology Planning, with Carlos Bergfeld and Ariel Gilbert-Knight of Techsoup and Karl Robillard of the St. Anthony Foundation. At 1:30 I’ll co present on Only You Can Prevent Security Breaches with Legal Tech Expert Kate Bladow. And at 3:30 I’ll join common co-conspirators Matt Eshleman of CITIDC and Judi Sohn of Convio to talk about VOIP.

Thursday 4/5: My one session today, again with Matt from CitiDC,will be an oldie but goodie – the Virtualization Salon. Whether you’re about to dive in to the world of virtualized servers, or you’re an old hand with advanced questions or wisdom to share, this will cover the gambit in #ntctech style, with Powerpoint only on hand as an instructional aid and round the room wisdom sharing.

Thursday is also awards day, and as the honored recipient of last year’s NTEN Award, I get to present it to this year’s winner (no spoilers here!).

Sleep will wait until post-NTC. The best nonprofit tech party is almost here—see you there?

• Face to Avatar

NTEN’s new issue of Change is out and I got a chance to sound off to Idealware’s Chris Bernard about the dream of “one database to rule them all”—doing all of your organization’s Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) in a single system. My interview is on page 22, but the whole issue is a dream for NPO’s struggling with wrangling information.

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

NTEN Change, Issue 4

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

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

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

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

My friends in the Nonprofit Technology Network know that I have been championing a resurgence in plain old tech talk at NTEN’s annual conference for a few years now. While “technology” is part of the organizations name, it’s seemed to translate to “social media” for the last few years, to the point in 2009/10 that it seemed like the social media focus of NTEN might overwhelm the nonprofit one—the NTEN conference was trending on Twitter and more and more social media mavens were referencing “NTC” along with “SXSW“. Meanwhile, the tens of thousands of staff and consultants that deal with servers, routers, wireless, Windows and virtualization at nonprofit oprgs were finding little of interest in the NTC session list.

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

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

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

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

Terry Childs is Guilty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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

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

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

We’re all back from the Nonprofit Technology Conference, where nine of the ten Idealware bloggers congregated, along with some 1,440 of our peers in the nptech community. What a gas! NTC, as we call the conference, is what high school would have been like if everyone had been a member of the popular clique. The combination of peer education and celebration of our common interest in saving the world with heart and technology make for an exuberant occasion. And I can’t say enough about the awe and appreciation I have for Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett, Sarah and Karl, and the amazing event that they recreate year after year for us.

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

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

The Tech Track

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

Subject Matter

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

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


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


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


• Understanding the risks and benefits of virtualizing servers and desktops


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


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


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


• Assessing the cost of owned vs service-provided applications


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


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


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


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


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


• How do we get them to attend training?

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

[Oops! Forgot to publish this Idealware post from late January…]

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.

Details have come in for two exciting events in February:

On Thursday, February 4th, at 11:00 am Pacific/2:00 pm Eastern, don’t miss The Overhead Question: The Future of Nonprofit Assessment and Reporting. This panel discussion with represenatives from Charity Navigator and Guidestar will cover all of the questions I’ve been blogging about here. Join me with moderator Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, Bob Ottenhoff of Guidestar, Lucy Bernholtz of Blueprint R & D, Christine Egger of Social Actions, David Geilhufe of NetSuite, and host Holly Ross of NTEN. Free registration is here.

And on Wednesday, February 10th, from 10:00 to 2:00 Pacific (1:00 to 5:00 Eastern), NTEN and the Green IT Consortium are putting on the first Greening Your IT Virtual Conference. With a plenary by Joseph Khunaysir of Jolera Inc. and six tactical sessions explaining how your org can benefit yourselves and the earth, including the one I’m co-presenting with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC on Server Virtualization.  Registration is $120, and it looks well worth it.