techcafeteria

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.

Photo by smemon

Facebook announced that, on October 3rd, our profiles will all turn into “Timelines” that describe our lives (as Facebook knows them) in a glossy, magazine like format. And, as of right now, you can enable magazine apps (for WaPo and Guardian, more to come) that will randomly post what you’re reading to your wall without asking your permission first.I have two thoughts on this:

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

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

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

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

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.

To my mind, this is how it always should have been—a fifth of the sessions dedicated to those of us who toil in the IT trenches, providing the tools, systems and platforms that enable mission-focused endeavors.

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.

Here’s a rant aimed at Apple and Microsoft.

Mac OSX Lion came out today, and it sports a lot of new features cribbed from IOS, the iPhone/iPad operating system. Steve Jobs has pretty much decided that the days of the PC are waning, and we want a mobile OS everywhere we go. He said that a year ago, and Microsoft was listening. Reports are that Windows 8 will be one operating system (that looks a lot like the boxy new Windows Mobile 7) for all platforms. I imagine that I’ll be running to Linux soon…

Don’t get me wrong: I’m a fan of convergence. I like watching TV on my laptop and I appreciate the ability to do email on my phone. I anticipate that, within a year, I’ll be commuting with a tablet (I’m waiting for the Android technology to mature a bit). But what’s wrong with letting the tools go with their strengths?

This is almost the reverse error that Microsoft made with the first Windows mobile, an OS for phones that had a start button, Programs folder and dropdown task list. And zero usability. Microsoft thought the same thing they’re thinking today: one size fits all; our users want standardization, and are willing to sacrifice usability in order to get the same interface on every device. WRONG. Users want tools that are good at getting jobs done. Neutering the PC, or making the phone too obtuse to navigate, in order to standardize the interface is more like servicing your branding needs at your customers expense.

Of course, what concerns me more about these moves are the fundamental differences between the sophisticated computer OSes (Windows 7, Snow Leopard) and the mobile OSes. Mobile OSes are, somewhat justifiably, rigid. You can’t offer the same level of customization on a low-powered, small screen device that you can on a powerful PC or laptop. Apple, of course, has taken this a step further by tightly controlling the flow of content via iTunes. And taking the additional, controversial step of censoring the content available via iTunes and the app store. While most of us (I think) aren’t upset by a vendor-imposed restriction on pornography, Apple has also censored Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonists, adaptations of classic literature, and magazines about competing products. We now have an app store for MacOS and one for Windows under development, and Microsoft has looked, once again, like an Apple-wannabee with their recent product moves.

So are we moving into an era where our major computing tools providers have graduated to content managers and censors? It sure looks that way. There’s a lot of easy money to be made—as Apple’s string of record-breaking profit quarters will attest—in taking the computing out of computing, and turning convergence into simply entertainment-delivery, while user content creation tools and environments get the back seat at the drive-in. I’m not happy with the trend.

Geoff Livingston of NPTech Strategic consulting firm Zoetica held a little contest yesterday, and I won a copy of his book. The challenge? Explain, convincingly, why Google’s latest attempt at social networking, Google+, is not just a shiny object. Or why it is one. I chose the former, here’s my winning post:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Join me for some nptech chatter on my first NYC trip in 30 years, Thursday night at the Heartland Brewery, Empire State Building location (350 5th Ave.), 6:00 pm to whenever.

This is a public service announcement (aka rant) intended for IT product and service reps. In a nutshell:

If your spam and cold calls haven’t resulted in a business relationship, tracking me down personally on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook won’t work either.

Let’s be clear: it’s not a secret that I have purchasing responsibility for IT at my company, and my business contact info is easy to find (or purchase). Mind you, I don’t hire companies based on their ability to locate that information and email or call me. I hire consultants and purchase products based on the recommendations in my communities. So cold contacting me might be inexpensive and easy for you to do, but all it tells me is that you don’t respect my time or privacy and you can’t sustain your business based on quality and word of mouth. Two strikes against you, whereas, before you cold-contacted me, you had none.

But, in failing to spam me into a relationship, taking it to LinkedIn or the contact form here is taking your pathetic and unprofessional approach to marketing into a whole new realm of sleaziness and creepitude. Cold-contacting me at my business email or on my business phone is annoying and pathetic, but far more appropriate that tracking down my personal, non-business addresses and contacting me at those. It’s called stalking.

I’m looking at you, Server Technologies. The fact that you’ve spammed me in the past does not mean that we have an established business relationship, as your LinkedIn invite falsely indicates.

And local IT Recruiters 58 and Foggy—you take the cake. Within two minutes, out of the blue, you cold-called my work number, emailed me personally via this blog, and sent me a LinkedIn invite. That was so over the top annoying that I not only will never do business with you, I’ll make sure that all of my professional acquaintances are warned away.

Because I seriously question what a company that violates my privacy as a means of introduction would do if I actually relied on them and dealt with them financially. Ethical behavior? Not a safe thing to assume. Professionalism? Already in the toilet.

Social networks offer a great avenue for the type of business promotion that works for me—word of mouth. Sincere recommendations from people who think you’re good at what you do because they’ve used your products or services. You can foster my business by doing well enough with your current customers that they will speak well of you online. You can also demonstrate your expertise by publishing materials and distributing them on Slideshare and other public repositories (including your web site, of course). If you put your energy into establishing your credentials, instead of shoving your uncertified opinion that you’re great into every channel that you can reach me through, you’ll get a shot at my business. But using these networks to harass and annoy potential customers is incredibly stupid and short-sighted.