• 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).

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)

[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.

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.

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”.

How Technology Might Shape the Future of Our Cities is basically a tribute to Mitchell Joachim, a particularly visionary scientist/architect/artist who has brilliant ideas about how we might make our urban centers eco-friendly.

Flying in Place: Videoconferencing is basic advice about what to look for in videoconferencing software, a potentially green investment.

Photo: Gabriel White

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.

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.

So, what does NASA know that we don’t about the benefits of taking risks?

In my world of technology management, it seems to be primarily about minimizing risk. We do multiple backups of critical data to different media; we lock down the internet traffic that can go in and out of our network; we build redundancy into all of our servers and systems, and we treat technology as something that will surely fail if we aren’t vigilant in our efforts to secure it. Most of our favorite adages are about avoiding risk: “It it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” and “Nobody was ever fired for buying IB.. er, MicroSoft.”

On Monday, I’ll be presenting on my chapter of NTEN’s Book “Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission” at the Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco. My session, and chapter, is about mission-focused technology planning and the art of providing business-class systems on a nonprofit budget. That’s certainly about finding sustainable and dependable options, but my case is that nonprofits, in particular, need to identify the areas where they can send out those probes and gamble a bit. For many nonprofits, technology planning is a matter of figuring out which systems desperately need upgrading and living with a lot of systems and applications that are old and semi-functional. My case is that there’s a different approach: we should spend like a regular business on the critical systems, but be creative and take risks where we can afford to fail a bit, on the chance that we’ll get far more for less money than we would playing it “safe” with inadequate technology. It’s a tough sell, yes, but I frame it in my belief that, when your business is changing the world, your business plan has to be bold and creative. As I mention often, the web is, right now, a platform rife with opportunity. We will miss out on great chances to significantly advance our missions if we just treat it like another threat to our stability.

We need stable systems, and we often struggle with inadequate funding and the technical resources simply to maintain our computer systems. I say that, as hard as that is, we need to invest in exploration. It’s about maximizing potential at the same time as you minimize risk. And its all about the type of dust that you want to gather.

Here it is Saturday, and I’m still reeling from the awesome event that was the Nonprofit Technology Conference, put on by org of awesomeness NTEN. First things first, if you attended, live or virtually, and, like me, you not only appreciate, but are pretty much astounded by the way Holly, Anna, Annaliese, Brett and crew get this amazing event together and remain 100% approachable and sociable while they’re keeping the thing running, then you should show your support here.

We had 1400 people at the sold-out event, and if that hadn’t been a capacity crowd, I’m pretty sure we had at least 200 more people that were turned away. What does that say about this conference in a year when almost all of us have slashed this type of budget in response to a dire economic situation? I think it says that NTEN is an organization that gets, totally, and phenomenally, what the web means to cash-strapped, mission-focused organizations, and, while we have all cut spending, sometimes with the painful sacrifice of treasured people and programs, we know that mastering the web is a sound strategic investment.

Accordingly, social media permeated the event, from the Clay Shirky plenary, to the giant screen of tweets on the wall, and the 80% penetration of social media as topic in the sessions. As usual, I lit a candle for the vast majority of nonprofit techies who are not on Twitter, don’t have an organizational Facebook page, and, instead, spend their days troubleshooting Windows glitches and installing routers. My Monday morning session, presented with guru Matt Eshleman of CITIDC, was on Server Virtualization. If you missed it, @jackaponte did such a complete, accurate transcription, and you can feel like you were there just by reading her notes (scroll down to 10:12) and following along with the slides.

My dream—which I will do my best to make reality—is that next year will include a Geek Track that focuses much harder on the traditional technology support that so many NPTechs need. I stand on record that I’m willing to put this track together and make it great!

I was also quite pleased to do a session on How to Decide, Planning and Prioritizing, based on my chapter of NTEN’s book, Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.  It was really great to start the session with a question that I’ve always dreamed I’d be able to ask: “Have you read my book?”.  I’m in debt to NTEN for that opportunity!

The biggest omission at this event (um, besides reliable wifi, but what can you do?) was the addition of a twitter name space on our ID badges. Twitter provided a number of things to the—by my estimation—half of the attendees who hang out there.

• Event anticipation buildup, resource sharing, session coordination and  planning, ride and room sharing and other activities were all rife on Twitter as the conference approached.


• Session tweeting allowed people both in other sessions and at home to participate and share in some of the great knowledge shared.


• For me, as a Twitter user who has been on the network for two years and is primarily connected to NTEN members, Twitter did something phenomenal. Catching up with many of my “tweeps”, we just skipped the formalities and dived into the conversations. So much ice is broken when you know who works where, what they focus on in their job, if they have partners and/or kids, what music tastes you share, that catching up in person means diving in deeper. The end result is clear—#09ntc is still an active tag on Twitter, and the conference continues there, and will continue until it quietly evolves into #10ntc.

One thing, however, worries me. This was the tenth NTC, my fifth, but it was the first NTC that the online world noticed. Tuesday, on Twitter, we were the second most popular trend (the competing pandemic outranked us). NTEN’s mission is to help nonprofits use technologies to further their missions. But, as said above, this conference was, in many ways, a social media event. I’m hoping that Holly and crew will review their registration process next year to insure that early spots in what is sure to be an even more popular event aren’t filled up by people who really aren’t as committed to changing the world as they are to keeping up with this trend.

But, concerns aside, we need to send that team to a week-long spa retreat, and be proud of them, and proud of ourselves for not only being a community that cares, but being one that shares. I urge even the most skeptical of you to jump on the Twitter bandwagon, we’re not on there discussing what we had for breakfast. We’re taking the annual event and making it a perpetual one, with the same expertise sharing,  querying, peer support and genuine camaraderie that makes the nptech community so unique – and great. Come join us!

The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate.  All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can’t tell people what you’re doing, what you’re doing won’t be well-received.  And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you’re doing, whether it’s taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007.

Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read:

1. Let no acronym go unexplained.

   The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that

   “The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server” or

   “The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane”.

   Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible.  But if it’s relevant, speak english: “In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections.”

2. Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects

   Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance.  If your message is titled “Technical Information”, it might as well be titled “You are getting sleepy…”  But, if it’s titled “Network Availability” or “Database Maintenance Scheduled”, your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don’t worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability.  The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff’s attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points to the email (see rule 4).

3. Keep it short and simple

   It’s about what the staff needs to know, not what you’d like to tell them.  So, the network maintenance email should not read:

   “The systems will be down from 4:30 to 9:00 tonight while we replace drives in the domain controllers and run a full defrag on the main document server”

   It should read:

   “The network will be unavailable from 4:30 pm until 9:00 pm while we perform critical maintenance”.

   If it’s only a portion of the network, but something useful will be up – as when the file servers are being repaired, but email is still available, make a note of that: “While the main servers will not be available, you will still be able to send and receive email”.

4. No ALL CAPS, no exclamation points and go sparingly on the bold

   System downtime might be urgent to you, but it’s never urgent to the staff.  It’s a fact of life.  A reply from the Director of Online Giving that the downtime will jettison a planned online campaign is urgent; not your routine announcement.

5. Tell the whole story

   ...even if this sounds like it conflicts with rule 3.  Because there are two types of people on your staff:

   • The majority, who want simple, non-techie messages as described above
   • The rest, who want the gory details, either so they can rest easy that you aren’t making anything up, or because they’re actually interested in what you’re up to.
   
   

   My approach is to do the simple message and, below it type, “Technical Details (optional reading)”.  In this section I might explain that we’re replacing the server that processes their network logins (I won’t use “DHCP” or “Domain Controller” if I can help it) or that we’re upgrading to the new version of Outlook.

The key concepts here are consistency, simplicity, and a focus on what impacts them regarding what you’re doing.  Stick to it and, miraculously, people might start reading your all staff emails.

Saturday—I’ll be home prepping, on email and Twitter, and then off to Jupiter in Berkeley (2181 Shattuck, right at Downtown Berkeley BART) at 6:00 pm for the Pre-NTC Brewpub Meetup I’m hosting. We have a slew of people signed up at NTConnect for the event. If you’re coming, get there promptly so you can help me reserve adequate space!

Sunday morning is Day of Service. I’ll be advising a local education nonprofit on low cost options for enhanced voice and video. NTC kicks off with the Member Reception, and I suspect that there will be lots of talk about our book at that event – if we’ve never met, this will be a good chance to figure out which of the 1400 attendees I am.

The Science Fair – NTEN’s unique take on the vendor show – is always a blast. If you’re at a booth, I’ll be coming by, but I’ll also be spending some time manning the Idealware booth, so that’s another good place to catch up. Dinner Sunday? I haven’t made plans. What are you doing?

Monday I keep busy hosting two sessions:

• 10:30, Franciscan C: Virtualization: The Revolution in Server Management and Why You Should Adopt It with Matt Eshleman of CITIDC.


• 1:30, Franciscan C: How to Decide: Planning and Prioritizing is my session based on Chapter 4 of Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission.

At 3:30, I’m at a loss, with excellent sessions by Peter Deitz, Allen (Gunner) Gunn, David Geilhufe, Dahna Goldstein, Jeff Patrick, Robert Weiner and Steve Wright all competing equally for my attention. If Hermione Granger is reading this, perhaps she can help me out.

On Tuesday, my tentative plan includes these breakouts: Google Operations: Apps and Analytics; Evolution of Online Communities : Social Networking for Good; and Measuring the Return on Investment of Technology. I caught a preview of the last one, led by Beth Kanter, at a Pre-NTC get together we did at Techsoup last month; it’s going to be awesome.

As a local co-host of the 501 Tech Club and a member of this year’s planning committee, I consider myself one of your hosts and am happy to answer any questions I have about what there is to do in the Bay Area, where I’ve lived since 1986. The best way to reach me is always on Twitter – if you’re attending the conference, following me, and I don’t figure that out and follow you right back, then send me a quick tweet letting me know you’re at NTC and I will (although, disclaimer required, I will quickly block people who use Twitter as a means to market products to my org). If you haven’t already gotten this hint, Twitter is an awesome way to keep connected during an event like this.

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.

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.

The article provides numerous examples of RSS sources, but all in the form of web sites, blogs and web services that offer you one or more streams of information. If you want to narrow your view beyond the feeds available on a site, say, because you are only interested in Idealware posts about CRM tools or the ones written by Steve Backman, then you need a tool that will refine your search. Alternatively, you might want to put a section containing news stories relevant to a particular issue on your site, but want some control over the sources, as well as the subject matter. For this amount of control over the content you retrieve, you want to use something like Yahoo! Pipes.

Pipes is an RSS mashup editor. It’s a tool that looks a bit like Microsoft’s Visio, where you drag boxes onto a grid and draw relationships between them. But it’s not a layout or flowcharting tool; instead, it’s a visual mapping and filtering tool that lets you identify sources and then apply rules to those sources before merging them into an aggregated feed. To break that down, let’s say that your goal is to either monitor talk about a bill, or, maybe, to publish a section on your web site titled “What they’re saying about bill 221b” (I made that bill up). You have identified eight blogs that have good posts on the subject, and these are blogs that you trust to properly represent the issues and not, in any way, malign or confuse your efforts.

In Pipes, you can select all eight as sources, and then set up a filter to block any posts that don’t reference “221b”. The resulting RSS feed—which you can then subscribe to our republish— will isolate the posts that are relevant to the bill from your selected sources.

For example, here’s that pipe that will allow you to skip Michelle, Heather, Paul, Laura, Eric and my posts and just see Steve’s:

Another, more advanced example: You have an organizational Twitter feed that you want to republish to your site But you only want to publish your posts, not your individual replies. In Twitter, a reply is always identifiable by the very first character, which will be an “@” sign. Twitter RSS items arrive in the format “yourtwitterid: tweet”, so any reply will start with “yourtwitterid: @”. Setting up a Yahoo Pipe filter to block any result with “: @” in the text will isolate your posts from the replies. You can add a “Regex” (e.g. Search/Replace) command to replace “yourtwittername:” with nothing in order to publish just the tweet. The pipe will look like this:

If you play with Pipes (Yahoo! ID required, otherwise free), I highly recommend starting with an example like mine or this one by Gina Trapani to get the feel of it. Save your pipe, and you can subscribe to it—it updates automatically, and you don’t have to make it public for it to work.

Google has it’s competing Google Mashups tool in private beta, and similar tools are popping up all over the web. I talk a lot about how RSS is the technology that allows us to manage the information on the web. Pipes let us refine it. It’s great stuff.

Look for more RSS talk on OPML files and Google Reader in my upcoming posts.

My take is that each of these networks serve different purposes, and, while I am connected to a lot of the same people on all three, they each have distinct audiences and the communication I do on these networks is targeted to the individual networks.

• LinkedIn is a business network. This is a place where potential employers and business associates are likely to go to learn about me.  Accordingly, I sparingly use the status update feature there, and never post about what movie I took the kid to or how funny the latest XKCD strip was.


• Facebook is a casual network where I have some control over who sees my posts; it’s also the place where I find the most old friends and family. So, given that my potential employers and business associates aren’t likely to see my profile unless they have a personal or more collegial relationship already established with me, this is where I’ll give a status review of the Watchman movie or post a picture of the kid.


• For me, Twitter is the business casual network, where my nptech peers gather to support each other and shmooze.  I am mindful that my tweets paint a public picture, so I keep the ratio of professional to personal tweets high and I don’t say things that I wouldn’t want my wife or boss to see on the web.

The multiple, overlapping networks create some issues in terms of effective messaging.  One is the echo chamber effect – it’s ridiculously easy to automatically feed your tweets to Facebook and LinkedIn.  The other is the lack of ability to do more than broadly address numerous audiences.  I mean, my Facebook friends include co-workers, business associates, childhood friends and Mom; you’re probably in a similar boat.  For some people, this creates the “I really didn’t want Mom to hear about the party I attended last night” issue.  For most of us, it simply means that we don’t want to bore our old friends and family with our professional blogging and insights, any more than we really want our co-workers to see what sort of hippies we were when we were 17.

So I manage some of this by using Tweetdeck as my primary Twitter client, because the latest version lets me, optionally, send a status update to Facebook as well as Twitter, which I do no more than once a day with something that should be meaningful to both audiences.  What I won’t do (as many of my Facebook/Twitter friends do) is publish all of my tweets to Facebook—that’s cruel to both the friends who don’t need to see everything you tweet and the ones who are already seeing what you tweet on Twitter.

At first, I thought the idea of Facebook incorporating Twitter might be a good one.  Facebook has a big advantage over Twitter.  It’s hard to be new to Twitter; the usefulness and appeal are pretty muted until you have a community that you communicate with.  Facebook starts with the community, so it solves that problem.  But, for me, the amount of control I have over the distribution has a lot to do with the messaging, and I like that Twitter is completely public, republishable, and Google-searchable.  I communicate (appropriately) in that medium; and if you aren’t interested in what I want to communicate, I’m really easy to drop or ignore.  But my Mom is probably far less interested in both non-profit management and Technology than my Twitter followers, and I don’t want her to unfriend me on Facebook.  So I’d rather let Facebook be Facebook and let Twitter be Twitter.  Just because an occasional beer hits the spot, as does an occasional glass of wine, that doesn’t mean that I want to mix them together.

RSS is a big topic, and writing the article was, in one respect, a challenge: in order to write a solid, intermediate guide to RSS use, I had to narrow the scope a bit. My initial interest and eventual obsession with RSS was sparked by two things: The overall usefulness of a tool that brings the web info I’m interested in to me; and the possibilities of using RSS as a publishing platform. So the article covers the first use well, but omits many cool things, like RSS Pipes, OPML, web site integration, and aggregators/portals. I hope to take these on over the next few weeks here in the blog.

Let’s start with web site integration. If you manage a web site, then you know that the name of the game is fresh content. While RSS will not eliminate the need to actively maintain your site, it can supplement your content in an automatically refreshing stream, as well as serve as a publishing medium.

If your site is built with a content management system (CMS), then you are probably already most of the way there. Most CMS’s have built in RSS aggregators that allow you to select the relevant content and publish it to a section of your site. If it isn’t a standard feature of your CMS, then browse the catalog of add-ons and extensions and you’ll probably find it there. Of course, if you use a commercial CMS, as opposed to an open source product, you might have to pay more for the add-on.

If you don’t have a CMS, a minimal amount of PHP scripting expertise can accomplish the same thing by using pre-built RSS functions libraries like Magpie RSS. Magpie is a set of PHP routines that you copy to your web server, allowing you to write minimal, simple code that identifies the feed and publishes it to a page. the heavy lifting is done by the Magpie—all you do is reference the feed and format the appearance of the items.

The simplest use is in republishing content on the web that’s pertinent to your site. You can aggregate news relevant to your cause, or sample topics of related interest from blogs on the web. For an example, look at the nonprofit technology news aggregator that I set up at nptech.info. This uses Drupal’s built-in RSS aggregator to create a three-section web site republishing nptech blogs, items tagged “nptech” on the web, and general technology news.

But it doesn’t stop there—if you post open positions on Craigslist, you can eliminate the need to also update your web page by simply subscribing to a search for your open jobs. The strategy here is in using RSS not only to add content, but to maintain content that currently requires a Webmaster’s attention. If you post your events to a site like Upcoming.org, your events page can be a simple RSS feed. If you link to related sites and associates, you can automate that as well by setting up an account at a bookmarking site, such as Delicious, tagging sites that you want to be linked to your web site with a unique tag, and then subscribing to that tag. And this concept works just as well for graphical content at Flickr, or videos at Youtube.

I’ll be posting soon about additional ways to manage RSS feeds, and I want to take a deeper dive into Google Reader, which takes it all to another level. In the meantime, if you have great stories about integrating RSS feeds with your web site, please share in the comments.

Dear Mom, welcome to Facebook!  I’m glad you’re here, because we don’t talk enough, and this is an opportunity to be a little more present in each other’s lives.  Mind you, it won’t, and shouldn’t, replace any phone calls or visits.

Facebook is a bit like taking the big, wide, Internet, and narrowing it down to just the stuff that your friends would show you.  It’s nice because we get to catch up with a lot of old and new friends in one place, but that same convenience also makes it a bit superficial.  Since almost everything you say on Facebook is shared with all of your friends, you’ll be saying things that you don’t mind everyone hearing,  That puts a bit of a filter on some of the meaningful exchanges that are so much a part of our true friendships.

Another big thing about Facebook is that it is the product of a private company; not a big, amorphous set of connections like the Internet at large.  And, since it’s “free”, the business model is advertising.  So Facebook is a business that makes money off of your interests and relationships. If that doesn’t sound just a little bit scary to you, I think it should.

So here are some great things to do and some things to avoid on Facebook:

• Connect with people you know (ignore requests from people that you’ve never met!)
.
• Share links to useful information, but stop short of sharing stuff that says more about your personal interests than you would want the world to know.
• Ignore most of the applications.  Our friends and family are, in general, serious and active people who don’t have time to speculate on which of their Facebook friends they would like to be trapped on a desert island with.  I routinely ignore all of the non-existent gifts and requests to do things that I really don’t have any time to do, and, fortunately, my friends take the hint and stop bothering me with them.
• Keep in mind that, every time you include a friend in an application invite, you’re telling the company that made the application about them.  So it’s not just that so many of these things are insanely trivial—they’re also potentially nebulous.
• Don’t go crazy joining groups.  Every time you join a group, you open your profile to all of the members of that group.  It’s better to try and contain your exposure to people that you are fairly certain you would want to know.
• Finally, you have my email address – send me personal mail there, not via Facebook’s mail.  While the mail is useful for establishing communication with people you reconnect with, and the wall writing is fun because you share it with others and can start conversations, I much prefer keeping our personal communication in my regular email.

To my mind, Facebook is a fun place to catch up with old friends and share things with my community, but if I only know someone on Facebook, let’s face it, they’re not really a friend.  Friendship implies a level of intimacy that shouldn’t be subject to broad peer review and data mining for advertisers.  And Facebook should not be a place that you can’t forget to visit for a week, or more, without risking offending someone.  Used moderately, with moderate expectations on the part of youa nd your Facebook friends, it has its rewards.

The world is coming to Facebook – it’s not just my Mom; it’s also my Dad, sister, brother-in-law, co-workers, grade school friends, and an assortment of people from everywhere in my life.  What do you want to say to the people you’re connecting with?  Leave a comment!

Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue—things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You’re a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn’t your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you’ve learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.

My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I’ve gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it’s risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia’s experience are:

• You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But “the cloud”, in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don’t be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor’s infrastructure.
• You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn’t an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.
• Don’t sign any contract that doesn’t give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.
• Focus on the data. Don’t bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It’s robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it’s recoverable.

Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it’s the type of cloud that your data won’t fall through.

I was with Dotable, a nice outfit out of Australia run by a guy named “Aussie Bob”, and it was a good place to be – decent pricing, really responsive support, mostly stable. I recommended Dotable often because the problems were minimal in relation to the great communication and supportive attitude of the staff.

A few months ago Bob announced that he was retiring and handing over management to another company. In short order, the new service deleted a (dormant) Drupal site off of one of my domains without telling me; and changed my mail records to point to a new spam filtering service, without informing me. Since one of my “client” domains routes his mail through EasyDNS (on my recommendation), this resulted in two days of mail being completely lost. During the crisis, every support ticket I put in got a “we’re forwarding this to our admin” answer. The admin had a backlog, I bet, because I wasn’t getting responses for days, and the responses I got were not helpful, and ducked the ones like “why did you change my MX record without telling me?”

Anyway, my friend/client is active on Green America’s forums (they used to be Coop America), and he’d heard very good things about Canvas Dreams, an Oregon hosting service with a wind-powered server farm and the exact plans and setup that I was looking for. So I made the move, and Techcafeteria,NPTech.info and Krazy.com, along with my other projects, are all a bit greener and happier today. And it does seem to me that this server is faster than the one I was on with Dotable. Those of you who actually visit the site (I assume that most of you simply subscribe) might have noticed some weirdness this morning as I adjusted a few things, but the blog came over without a noticeable hitch.

So, welcome to the same site, at it’s new green home.

This incident prompted a fascinating post by Dr. Amanda French, comparing the license agreements of a variety of popular social networks. This is an important read, but the upshot is: Google services and MySpace have pretty clear terms; Facebook and LinkedIn claim a broad range of rights to content that we publish on their systems.

To me this is a bit like the separation of church and state. I expect that a social networking site, like an ISP, is a medium that I can use to communicate and share things, including things that i create and hold copyright to; not a magazine that licenses and retains ownership of works that I submit. If that’s not the case, then I want to know that and be very careful about what I’m putting up there. In my case, I’m trying to protect my works and personal reputation; a nonprofit should be just as concerned about how a business like Facebook might portray them as they repurpose their content.

There is media—content, that we create—and there are mediums, and in the print world the issues of content ownership are very clearly outlined in contracts. Facebook and their ilk should be applying the same standards, maybe even more so, since they are publishers on a much more massive scale than, say Ms. Magazine or Popular Mechanics.

So it was a blow to my sense of immortality when I was rushed to the hospital on the possibility that I’d had a heart attack Monday night. The actual diagnosis, as I suspected, was heartburn. Really bad heartburn, that had me doubled over for close to five minutes, throat constricted in a way that made it a little difficult to breathe. My wife called 911; the EMTs insisted that I get it checked out. Probably the worst part of it was seeing my boy on the front stoop watching them wheel me away on a stretcher.

So, between Monday night and this morning, when I went for (and passed) a full stress test, I’ve had five doctors tell me that the concern was well-justified and it was worth the disruption, discomfort and expense of treating a case of heartburn as if it were cardiac arrest. My take on it is this: my grandfather died of a heart attack at age 45. His daughter, my Mom, has had chronic heart trouble throughout her 70’s. For me, it’s not a question of if I’ll have heart problems; it’s one of when. I really hope that the when is, at a minimum, two decades away, preferably three. I eat well, don’t smoke, am generally healthy.

Ironically, the guitarist for one of my favorite bands actually had a heart attack Monday night and passed away yesterday at 53. Other people might consider all of this some kind of wake-up call. I guess I’m too pragmatic for all of that—I’ll consider it incentive to work more exercise into my routine, but I’ll stop short of writing a bucket list or finding religion. All the same, it’s sobering. I’ve got a lot of things that I still want to do before I go, like raise my son to adulthood and write that book I’ve always dreamed of writing. Here’s hopin’.

If you’ve been curious about Twitter, or you tried it, once, but couldn’t see the utility, now might be a good time to try again. Getting started with Twitter can be a bit of a challenge if you don’t know many people who are on it, but we have an active community that Idealware readers should fit right in with. The nonprofit Twitter pack gives you a quick index of people that you might actually want to follow. And as we move into nonprofit conference season, with NTEN’s big shindig up in April and Techsoup’s Netsquared a month behind it in May, there are a lot of people joining in. Just be sure that, before you follow a bunch of us, that you tell us who you are in your profile, and maybe post an introductory Tweet—most people will not automatically follow back a blank slate.

Convenience, simplicity, immediacy, camaraderie—these are the terms that I associate with Twitter. There are some features that I’d love to see, though. These could all be implemented by Twitter, or some by a clever third party.

First, I’d like to have the option, and for my followers to have the option, of typing an introductory note to appear in the email announcing that someone has a new follower. That way, if I follow you (assuming that you’re on Twitter), I can say “Hi, you, I’m following you because I can tell by your tweets that you read the Idealware blog, and that indicates a refined taste in blogs” or “Hi, you, I see that you have all sorts of tweets about Android and the T-Mobile G1. I’m a fellow G1 user.” Make this optional, sure, but the ability to set some context when I’m establishing a social relationship would be a welcome addition.

Second, please, make the user lists (followers and followees) into a manageable interface. Let me sort them by name, location, average number of tweets a day, whether they’re following me back, how long since they last tweeted, how many tweets they’ve posted total. These are all useful metrics, and I can gleam some of them on Twitter; others via useful tools like Tweepler, which takes a stab at this type of manageability. And let me add people to groups, something that I really appreciate in Facebook’s feature set. This can be done, in a fashion, by Tweetdeck, but only if you want to donate that much of your screen’s real estate to your Twitter client. Twhirl added spellcheck this week, so I’m not going anywhere soon.

Third, while we all appreciate innovations like “Mr. Tweet“, a service that analyzes your Twitter connections and makes additional recommendations, the main algorithm for this service seems to be “who are your friends following? You should follow them, too”. Seems logical. But the result is that Mr. Tweet tells me, and everyone else, that we should follow the Twitter superstars, mostly social media gurus with followers in the thousands. Analysis of my profile should reveal that I use Twitter to converse with friends and associates, and follow very few people like that to begin with. So a recommendation engine based on my behavior, as well as my friends lists, would be great—the current options are like a Google without the option to search on terms, just a button that returns the most popular sites on the web.

Those are my top three—add your Twitter wish list requests in the comments.

It’s T minus 67 days and counting to the annual Nonprofit Technology Conference, which has risen to THE social and professional peak event in any given year for me. The conference runs from Sunday, April 26th through Tuesday, the 28th this year, and it’s at the Hilton in downtown SF, quite convenient to Bay Area based Techcafeteria. Let me tell you how excited I am, then share a couple of recommendations on how you can have a great time and support the work that NTEN does.

You can sign up and choose a Bay Area charity to advise or help out at NTEN’s site. This is what it’s all about – not just talking, sharing and socializing with peers, but practicing what we preach while we’re at it. I can’t recommend this enough.

Second, if you are or aren’t going, but you recognize, as I do, the value that the most web-savvy group of socially minded techies can bring to nonprofits who are struggling to keep up in this economy, support the NTEN Scholarship fund. Holly is going as far as one foolis—er, brave woman can to inspire us to help her raise $10,000 by the end of the month. Convio will match what we give and send 57 people who can’t otherwise afford it to the event. Give right here!

Let me know if you plan to attend, and/or you want to party with us beforehand. I hope to see you there!

I love Gmail because it is designed to do a lot of my maintenance for me, and I can keep all sorts of mail (I’m up to 729 MB) and find anything instantly. Key to all of this is GMail’s gleeful abandonment of the file cabinet metaphor, an imposition on computing from the early days that is intuitive to humans, yes, but not the most efficient way to manage online information. And maybe this is why I’ve always appreciated Google – they got from the start that you don’t organize massive amounts of information by sorting it all into separate piles, an idea that most of their competitors have not let go of.

Here’s how I use Gmail: Using pop forwarding, I feed three separate email accounts into my primary GMail account. I have it set up to reply using the address that the email was sent to, and each account is automatically labeled with a specifically colored label identifying it’s origin. I have 36 labels defined, and 66 filters that primarily label messages as they come in. I “star” messages that relate to current projects, and I try to keep my inbox to less than 50 messages at any given time. Cleaning up the inbox is a matter of labeling the messages that aren’t accounted for by the filters, deleting the ones I don’t want, and archiving.

Offline, of course, simply gives me a local copy of my inbox for those rare times when I’m out of plugged in, wireless, or AT&T 3G range of a connection. But having a local backup of my inbox is, um, priceless.

Last week, Google introduced new dropdowns for labeling and “moving” messages. The “Move To” tab is somewhat ironic, because GMail doesn’t store messages in different places. It identifies them by their labels. New messages, on arrival, are labeled “inbox”, and “archiving” a message is simply the act of removing the “inbox” label. So the “Move To” menu was strictly a concession to those who can’t let go of the folder idea, so I have little use for it. But, in addition to the new dropdowns, Google also introduced a keyboard shortcut. Typing “l” (lowercase “L”) brings up the labels dropdown; typing the first few letters of a label takes you to that label, and hitting “Enter” applies it to the current message or the selected ones. This allows me to select and label messages far faster than was possible when the mouse was required to open and then scroll through the dropdown menu.

Multiple Inboxes allows you to put as many boxes of messages meeting specific criteria (“has label”, “is starred”, “is a draft”, any search criteria) on your GMail home page. For users with wide displays, these can be placed to the right or left of your inbox. Since I work a lot on my 15” laptop screen, I chose to add inboxes under the main inbox. To start, I’ve added starred items in a box under my inbox, which lets me keep things that don’t need immediate responses, but should be handy to refer to, right where I want them. Another creative use (as tweeted by Sonny Cloward) is to have a box with all items labeled “task”, but I actually use the recently-added “Tasks” function for that.

Regardless, you’ve heard me rave about Gmail here if you follow my communication posts, but that was all before they added these features, making GMail another 33% more awesome than the competition to an information management geek like me.

Of course, the healthy disclaimer is that I never worked for a nonprofit, or knew all that much about the culture, before I took a job at Goodwill in late 2000. But I did have enough sense to pick an NPO that ran more like a traditional business than most, at least in some ways, and I took some time to adjust to the culture before I tried to push through any changes. Which isn’t to say that I blend all that well – I’m one of the people complaining that we move to slowly and that consensus is not a value, it’s a tool that, like most tools, is better suited for some tasks than others.

Any business (and nonprofits are businesses) benefits from diversity, just as any business benefits by retaining internal expertise. Businesses suffer when they lean too far in one direction or the other. If your hiring policy is to only hire people who are lifetime nonprofit workers, you run the risk of stifling innovation and you court stagnation. The world doesn’t sit still around us, so we have to dynamically adapt to it. A key tool for managing that adaption is to maintain a diversity of experience and skills in your organization.

Think about it: ten or fifteen years ago, non-profits were largely unregulated. There was no HIPAA. There was no Sarbanes-Oxley, which, while not designed for NPOs, is generally agreed to impose guidelines on us. There was no PCI compliance, the next wave of external oversight that will demand that we modify our processes and investments. Beyond the 990 and what we chose to disclose about our outcomes, there was little demand for detailed metrics. These are all circumstances that the for-profit world, with traditional government oversight and accountability to shareholders has dealt with for decades. We need some of that expertise.

Of course, it’s a scale, and just as we can suffer from cultural insulation, we can suffer by turning over too dramatically. While I would steadfastly debate that we need some of that for-profit perspective on board, I’ve seen a few examples of for-profit executives that take over as CEOs and—because the nonprofit style is so antithetical to the big business style—quickly replace everyone that, to them, looked like they weren’t up to the task of running “a business”. This type of culture change, in a nonprofit, is deadly, because it is a misconception to think that we can run like normal businesses. When that happens, the nonprofit runs the risk of losing all of the internal historical expertise, as the people who aren’t squeezed out don’t stick around for the cultural change, and the new execs face the budgeting challenges with no perspective to draw on.

So, a businessman like me – and I absolutely consider myself a businessman—gets frustrated with the slow pace at the nonprofits that I work for. And I beg, moan and try and shame my boss into adopting more business-like practices. But I don’t sweat it too much, because, at the end of the day, even if we don’t do things in the efficient and productive ways that I’m so stuck on adopting, we still do an amazing job of defending the planet, or, you can fill your mission in here. I’d hate to see it fall apart because we didn’t properly comply with regulations or we simply didn’t manage our resources well, and we have to staff to address that. So my shoutback to Jay Love is that the bunker mentality is a bit much. Let a few for-profit types in the door. But, until they understand and value our culture, don’t let them drive.

What I assume Npower knows, though, and hope that other nonprofit technical support providers are aware of, is that this is the outdated approach. Nonprofits should be looking to simplify technology maintenance and reduce cost, and the cloud is a more effective platform for that. As ReadWriteWeb points out, most small businesses—and this can safely be assumed to include nonprofits—are completely unaware of the benefits of cloud computing and virtualization. If your support arrangement is for dedicated, outsourced management of technology that is housed at your offices, then you still have to purchase that hardware and pay someone to set it up. The benefits of virtualization and fast, ubiquitous Internet access offer a new model that is far more flexible and affordable.

One example of a company that gets this is MyGenii. They offer virtualized desktops to nonprofits and other small businesses. As I came close to explaining in my Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine post, virtualization is technology that allows you to, basically, run many computers on one computer. The environmental and financial benefits of doing what you used to do on multiple systems all on one system are obvious, but there are also huge gains in manageability. When a PC is a file that can be copied and modified, building new and customized PCs becomes a trivial function. Take that one step further – that this virtual PC is stored on someone else’s property, and you, as a user, can load it up and run it from your home PC, laptop, or (possibly) your smartphone, and you now have flexible, accessible computing without the servers to support.

For the tech support service, they either run large servers with virtualization software (there are many powerful commercial and open source systems available), or they use an outsourced storage platform like Amazon’s EC2 service. In addition to your servers, they also house your desktop operating systems. Running multiple servers and desktops on single servers is far more economical; it better utilizes the available server power, reducing electricity costs and helping the environment; and backups and maintenance are simplified. The cost savings of this approach should benefit both the provider and the client.

In your office, you still need networked PCs with internet access. But all you need on those computers is a basic operating system that can boot up and connect to the hosted, virtualized desktop. Once connected, that desktop will recognize your printers and USB devices. If you make changes, such as changing your desktop wallpaper or adding an Outlook plugin, those changes will be retained. The user experience is pretty standard. But here’s a key benefit—if you want to work from home, or a hotel, or a cafe, then you connect to the exact same desktop as the one at work. It’s like carrying your computer everywhere you go, only without the carrying part required.

So, it’s great that there are mission focused providers out there who will affordably support our servers. But they could be even more affordable, and more effective, as cloud providers, freeing us from having to own and manage any servers in the first place.

There are reasons why Microsoft has dominated the market. Exchange is a mature and powerful product, that does absolutely everything that an email system has to do, and offers powerful calendaring, contact management and information sharing features on top of it. A quick comparison to Google’s GMail offering might look a bit like “Bambi vs. Godzilla“. And, as Michelle pointed out the other day, GMail might be a risky proposition, despite it being more affordable, because it puts your entire mail store “in the cloud”. But Gmail’s approach is so radically different from Microsoft’s that I think it deserves a more detailed pro/con comparison.

Before we start, it’s important to acknowledge that the major difference is the hosted/cloud versus local installation, and there’s a middle ground – services that host Exchange for you – Microsoft even has their own cloud service. If you are evaluating email platforms and including GMail and Exchange, hosted Exchange should be weighed as an additional option. But my goal here is to contrast the new versus the traditional, and traditional Exchange installations are in your server room, not someone else’s.

Server Platform

Installing Exchange is not a simple task. Smaller organizations can get away with cheaper hardware, but the instructions say that you’ll need a large server for mail storage; a secondary server for web and internet functions, and, most likely, a third server to house your third party anti-spam and anti-virus solutions. Plus, Exchange won’t work in a Linux or Novell network – there has to be an additional server running Microsoft’s Active Directory in place before you can even install it. It can be a very stable product if you get the installation right, but getting it right means doing a lot of prep and research, because the slim documents that come in the box don’t prepare you for the complexity. Once you have it running, you have to run regular maintenance and keep a close watch – along with mailbox limits – to insure that the message bases don’t fill up or corrupt.

GMail, on the other hand, is only available as a hosted solution. Setup is a matter of mapping your domain to Google’s services (can be tricky, but child’s play compared to Exchange) and adding your users.

Win – GMail. It saves you a lot of expense, when you factor in the required IT time and expertise with the hardware and software costs for multiple servers.

EMail Clients

Outlook has it’s weaknesses – slow and obtuse search, poor spam handling, and a tendency toward unexplained crashes and slowdowns on a regular basis. But, as a traditional mail client, it has a feast of features. There isn’t much that you can’t do with it. One of the most compelling reasons to stick with Outlook is it’s extensibility. Via add-ons and integrations, Outlook can serve as a portal to applications, databases, web sites and communications. In a business environment, you might be sacrificing some key functionality without it, much as you often have to use Internet explorer in order to access business-focused web sites.

But where Outlook is a very hefty application, with tons of features and settings buried in it’s cavernous array of menus and dialog boxes, Gmail is deceptively uncluttered. The truth is that the web-based GMail client can do a lot of sophisticated tricks, including a few that Outlook can’t—like allowing you to decide that you’d rather “Reply to All” mid-message—and some that you can only do with Outlook by enabling obscure features and clicking around a lot, like threading conversations and applying multiple “tags” to a single message. Gmail is the first mail client to burst out of the file cabinet metaphor. Once you get used to this, it’s liberating. Messages don’t get archived to drawers, they get tagged with one or more labels. You can add stars to the important ones. It’s not that you can’t emulate this workflow in Outlook, it’s that it’s fast and smooth in GMail, and supported by a very intelligent and blazingly fast search function. Of course, if that doesn’t float your boat, you can always use Outlook – or any other standard POP3 or IMAP client – to access GMail.

Win – GMail. It’s more innovative and flexible, and I didn’t even dig deep.

Availability

Exchange, of course, is not subject to the vagaries of internet availability when you’re at the office. Mind you, much of the mail that you’re waiting to receive is. And Outlook – if you run in “Cached mode” – has had offline access down for ages. GMail just started experimenting with that this week. If you’re not in the office, Exchange supports a variety of ways to get to the mail. Outlook Web Access (OWA) is a sophisticated web-based client that, with Exchange 2007 and IE as the browser, almost replicates the desktop Outlook experience. OMA is a mobile-friendly web interface. And ActiveSync, which is supported on many phones (including the iPhone) is the most powerful, stable and feature-rich synchronization platform available. Exchange can do POP and IMAP as well, and also supports a VPN-like mode called Outlook Anywhere (or HTTPS over RPC).

GMail only supports web, pop and IMAP. There’s a mobile GMAIL app which is available on more phones than Activesync is, but it isn’t as robust or full featured as Microsoft’s offering.

So, oddly, the Win for remote access goes to Microsoft over Google, because Microsoft’s offerings are plentiful and mature.

Business Continuity

So, not to belabor this, Exchange is well supported by many powerful backup products. In cached mode, it mirrors your server mailbox to your dektop, which is additional redundancy.

GMail is in the cloud, so backup isn’t quite as straightforward. Offline mode does some synchronization, like Exchange’s cached mode, but it’s not 100% or, at this point, configurable. Prudent GMail users will, even if they don’t read mail in it, set up a POP email program to regularly download their mail in order to have a local copy.

Win – Microsoft

Microsoft also Wins the security comparison – Google can, and has, cut off user’s email accounts. There seem to have been good reasons, such as chasing out hackers who had commandeered accounts. But keeping your email on your backed-up server behind your firewall will always be more secure than the cloud.

But I’d hedge that award with the consideration that Exchange’s complexity is a risk in itself. It’s all well and safe if it is running optimally and it’s being backed up. But most nonprofits are strapped when it comes to the staffing and cost to support this kind of solution. If you can’t provide the proper care and feeding that a system like Exchange requires, you might well be at more risk with an in-house solution. The competence of a vendor like Google managing your servers is a plus.

Finally, cost. GMail wins hands down. The supported Google Apps platform is free for nonprofits. Microsoft offers us deep discounts with their charity pricing, but Dell and HP don’t match on the hardware, and certified Microsoft Administrators come in the $60-120k annual range.

So, in terms of ease of management and cost, GMail easily wins. There are some big trade-offs between Microsoft’s kitchen sink approach to features and Google’s intelligent, progressive functionality, and, in well-resourced environments, Microsoft is the secure choice, but in tightly resourced ones – like nonprofits – GMail is a stable and supported option. The warnings about trusting Google—or any other Software as a Service vendor—are prudent, but there are a lot of factors to weigh. And it’s going to come down to a lot of give and take, with considerations particular to your environment, to determine what the effective choice is. In a lot of cases, the cloud will weigh heavier on the scale than the colossus.

Some quick things I draw from this:

• The Obama campaign distinguished themselves by their smart use of modern, internet technology, and that use played a major role in their successful campaign.

• The shock they’re facing is less about the technology in place than it is about the culture they’re moving into. Political teams run freely and nimbly, and Howard Dean established the Web as the infrastructure of choice in 2004. Businesses, like the White House, do not drive so close to the cutting edge, for a variety of good reasons, such as the need for standardization and security.

• Over the next few months, the Obama-ans are going to compromise, and I’m dying to learn what choices they’ll make.

In my work, I’m on both sides of that fence every day, working with staff to understand why we have to standardize in order to manage our systems, stay a little behind the curve in order to avoid risk, and stick with applications like Microsoft Office because they have the mature feature set that we require. At the same time, I rally my staff to be creative in finding tools and solutions for our people, to stay abreast of which new tools are going to be worth the risk in terms of the benefits they offer, and understand that, should we get too far behind, it will be as risky as being too far out on the technological edge. We don’t want to fall off of any cliffs, nor do we want to stand still as all of the other cars race around us.

Some of us, like the leader of the free world, can’t imagine a day without a Blackberry; others, like a former free world leader, don’t even want an email account. Most of us live in this world where we have to creatively embrace the new while we tighten our grips on the traditional, because technology platforms thrive on stability while they obsolesce rapidly. Where the Obama White House winds up might be a good indicator of where we should all be. I hope we’ll have a window into that.

Anyway, this plugin apparently had a bug. If you had the 1.1 version installed, and you edited anything in a rich text editor (like, um, the one I’m writing this post in), it would toss a little javascript code in after your text. The code wasn’t malicious – it was pretty ineffectual – but Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, versions 6 and 7, were completely dumbfounded by it (MS admits that this is a bug and say that they’ve fixed it in IE8). Anyone visiting the blog in those browsers recently has been hit with a pop-up error complaining that the page can’t be displayed. This blog is not the biggest destination site on the web, and I’m pretty sure that most of you are reading this in the comfort of your own RSS reader (you should be – look for my upcoming Idealware article explaining how and why, if you aren’t).

Anyway, the fix was to remove or upgrade the bitly plugin; load up PHPMyAdmin on my server and run the query:

select * from wp_posts where post_content like ‘%bitly%’;

then, since I only had a handful of matches (my last five posts), select them all and remove the line at the bottom of each post, which was a script containing the text:

s.bit.ly/bitlypreview.js

Definitely one of the odder glitches I’ve experienced!

But I don’t see these alternatives as ships carrying the grim reaper onto email’s shores—I think they’re more likely the saviors of email. As I said a couple of weeks ago in my “Myth of KISS” post, email applications are heavily abused, and they’re not very good at managing large amounts of information. This hasn’t stopped a good 90% of the people online from using email as their primary information aggregator. We get:

• Personal emails


• Mailing List items


• ENewsletters


• Automated alerts


• Spam!


• and a host of other things

in our email inboxes every day. The inbox places new messages on top and older messages scroll down and out of sight. Almost every email program on earth lets you, as you make time for it, pull emails into named folders, mark them as important, order them by name or date or subject, search for them, and archive them to some other part of your storage space, but none of them do more than some basic filtering and prioritizing for you, perhaps IDing 90% of the spam and, if you’re a power user, allowing you to place messages from certain people in special folders.

The exception to the standard email processing rules is Google’s GMail, which does innovative threading and labeling, allowing for, in my opinion, a superior tool for information management, but it’s still a lot of work. The tools will improve, but it’s kind of like hiring a better maid service to clean up congress – they’ll make the halls shinier, but the same legislators will show up for work on the next day.

The answer is to acknowledge that email applications, as we know them, were never meant to process upwards of twenty or thirty messages a day. The information management defaults assume a manageable number of items, and many of us are way past that threshold. The power of alternative messaging mediums is that they are tailored to the types of messages they deliver, and their tools sets are accordingly more refined and targeted. If you get newsletters and alerts in your email, switch to RSS. If you do a lot of short messages or work coordination, look at IM. If you announce or broadcast information, or survey your contacts, use Twitter or Facebook. These mediums are, so far, much less susceptible to spam, and you can ignore messages once you’ve read them or skipped them, they don’t have to be deleted. The closer you get to only receiving personal email in your inbox, the easier it will be to keep up with it

So these new mediums aren’t gunning to eliminate our old, old electronic friend – they’re just allowing it to go on a long overdue diet.

A full time tech support job is, for the most part, an extended roller coaster ride with more down slopes than up. People who are drawn to this work are generally sharp, eager to assist, and take pride in their ability to debug. The down side is that, day after day, it’s grueling. There’s always a percentage of people who would just as soon smash the machine and go back to their trusty Selectrics. They aren’t always happy or polite with the friendly tech who comes to help them.

But the most debilitating aspect of the work is that support techs don’t manage their workload. It’s randomly and recklessly assigned by the varying needs of their co-workers and the stability of their systems. They never know when they’re going to walk in the office to find the donor database is crashed, or the internet line is down. The emails come in, the phone rings, and, to the people calling, everything is a crisis. Or it certainly seems that way. The end result is that career support techs often develop a sense of powerlessness in their work, and the longer it goes on, the less able they are to take proactive action and control of their jobs.

So here are two complimentary actions that can be taken to brighten the life and lighten the load of the support tech.

1. Deploy a trouble ticket system. And make sure that it meets these specifications:

• Incredibly easy for staff to use. Web-based, linked from their desktop, with, ideally, three fields: Name, priority and problem. The software has to be able to grab additional information automatically, such as the time that the ticket was submitted, and, optimally, the user’s department, location and title, but the key point is that people won’t use the system if the system is too annoying to use.


• Every update is automatically emailed to the user and the tech. This is critical. What an automated trouble ticket does best is to inform the customer that their issues are being addressed. Without this communication in place, what stands out in user’s minds are the tickets that haven’t been resolved. Confirmations of the fixes, sent as they occur, validate the high rate of responsiveness that most help desks maintain.


• Be clear that the scope of the problem will influence the response time. Fixes that require spending or input from multiple parties are not slam dunks. This communication might warrant additional checkboxes on the submission form for “requires budget” or “requires additional approvals”, but formalizing this information helps the customer know that their issue hasn’t just been dropped by the tech.


• Have a default technical staff view that puts open tickets on top. In environments where the telephone is the primary support funnel, things get forgotten, no matter how good and organized the tech is.

There’s more to it – good ticket systems feed into, and include links to additional support resources. And they don’t replace the telephone – IT has to be readily available. But there should be an understanding that users follow up phone calls with tickets. These are the key strategies that help the seemingly unmanageable stream of support calls fall in line.

2. Allow the support staff to breathe. There has to be an understanding, primarily understood by the support tech, but reinforced by his or her manager, teammates and staff, that only emergencies demand emergency response times. In fact, treating every call as an equally important, must be fixed immediately situation is a strategy for failure. Support Techs need to do effective triage, and put aside time to analyze and act proactively to solve user problems. If they deal with the same questions over and over, they have to write and publish the solutions. If the calls indicate a common problem that can be solved with a better application or an upgrade, they need to be able to step back and assess that. Smart managers will enforce this measured approach. At first, it will go against the grain of service-oriented staff, but it’s a must, because the measured response begets the more comprehensive solution to any problem.

The fact is, it’s not easy to manage even a home computer. It’s gotten better: they’re nice enough to color code the audio ports on a new PC, and put little labels below the connectors, and more and more things connect over USB, making the “where do I plug it in?” question a little easier to answer. And, wow, they even put a few ports on the front now. But we’re a long way from the day when operating a computer is as easy as operating a toaster, and I, for one, question whether that will be a happy day.

My biggest case in point is email. Email is the application that everyone in the family knows and uses. It’s compelling. Even the most technology-averse people can’t escape the argument that communicating with family, friends and associates electronically is inexpensive and convenient. But the problem I see is that, once most people learn email, they don’t want to learn anything else. Want online community? Sign me up for the email mailing list. Want news headlines and informational updates? Send it in the email. The problem with this is that email is an astonishingly useful application, but there’s a point where it breaks down, and that point is when the volume of email becomes greater than the capacity to keep up with it. Email has a huge flaw as an information management tool: important things scroll out of sight. It’s a FIFO medium (First In, First Out), that doesn’t prioritize information for you, so that message from Aunt Irma supercedes the spam from the travel agency which supercedes the alert that your home is in foreclosure which supercedes the announcement that dog food is on sale… you get my point. And managing the email, staying on top of it and storing it in folders is a job.

So I advocate for making an early investment that pays off later—learn a few more applications. Read RSS feeds in an RSS reader; visit your major social networks and online communities at their web sites; eschew the mailing lists—or subscribe using an alternate email account that you follow with another application. Do some research before investing in any application or gadget—there’s a powerful argument that digitizing your music will save you time and effort in the long run, but that’s of little use if, as happened with a friend of mine, you buy the iPod the day before you’re shipped out to an island on military duty, with no chance to get any music on it. Keep It Separated, Sally, and Knowledge Informs Strategy, Sam. Because the idea that funneling all of that information through one conduit is somehow simpler than doing some up front research, management, prioritization and segmentation of information is a self-defeating myth.

• Substitute your favorite subjective noun starting with the letter “S”.

1. Should my Facebook community include everyone I know from work, professional circles, friends and childhood acquaintances? That’s a lot of communities slammed into one. I already wrestle a bit with the fact that most of what I talk about on Twitter is probably not interesting to some of the family and non-nptech friends who follow me. My online persona is my professional one. I’m not pretending to be someone else—the personal things that come through are authentic—but I really don’t want to bring every aspect of my life and interests online.

2. One of the main things that I dislike about Facebook is the applications. I keep pretty busy, with a demanding job; my family; active blogging/writing/presenting and volunteering duties; friends and relatives; an appreciation for movies, music and television; an unhealthy addiction to news, culture and technical info; and a love of crosswords. I’m not sure how I do all of this—and sleep—in the first place. So filling out Facebook movie comparison quizzes (and the like) does not qualify for a spot on my schedule. If you are connected to me on Facebook, and you’re hurt that I haven’t responded to the numerous gifts, games and trivial pursuits that you’ve invited me to, please don’t be. If you message or email me directly you’ll get a reply!

3. I think the people who run Facebook are unabashedly doing it in order to mine marketing info from the membership. And, since the main thing that you do on Facebook is connect with old friends and family, they’re using some fairly extensive personal history and interaction as fodder for their advertising streams. This is the nature of the net, of course, as I have Google ads in my email and a slew of ad tracking cookies no matter how often I clear them. But Facebook manages to be ten times creepier than any other web site I visit when it comes to this stuff. I just don’t trust them.

I’ve seriously considered doing whatever it takes to delete my account. I even emailed everyone and warned them of that intention at one point. But it’s getting to the point where deleting Facebook is kind of like boycotting food—you might have good reasons, but you’ll probably hurt yourself more than help, particularly since there is real value in having the place to connect, and, sadly, it isn’t LinkedIn that’s grabbed the zeitgeist.

The contact form is back, with an annoying little verification routine that will hopefully be enough of an annoyance for my spammer friend that I won’t have to upgrade it to a full-blown captcha (which I have the code for, but I hate those things – they always take me three tries).

This interesting research article suggests that phishing scammers make such a ridiculously low amount of money at it that it’s insane that they bother. They could deliver newspapers or beg in the street and be much more profitable. I have to think that the same kind of dogged stupidity is a trait of my spammer, as he obviously spent some time perfecting his script, maybe up to three or four hours work, that sends messages with links to, um, nature sites – or sites where wildlife and humans, if I’m guessing correctly, do inappropriate things together—to me. Only me. I don’t click on them, reply to them, or forward them to my Mom.

Anyway, I’m ready to continue the battle, and I’ve fired a salvo by restoring the form. But I hope this idiot is as bored with it all as I am!

So we have postal mail, the telephone, the telegram, facsimile, short wave radio, walkie-talkie and intercom holding up the old guard. And we have email, cell phone, IM, chat, IRC, blogs, Twitter, forums and social networking services charging in as new(er) mediums. And I’m sure I’ve missed a bunch. The internet has opened up a Pandora’s box of communication mediums. So why use one over another? If we break it down to a manageable number of mediums, say, Phone, IM, email and Twitter, there are some intriguing differences. These differences don’t imply that one is better than another, but, certainly, one is more practical, courteous or efficient than another in a given circumstance. I evaluate the mediums on a few defining attributes:

Private or Social? While allowing that you can send group emails and IMs, and hold phone conferences, these mediums are primarily suited for one to one or a few conversations, whereas Twitter, and many of the web-based mediums, are social, with a large and partially unknown audience included.

Ambient or Invasive? A phone call is invasive, as is, to some extent, an IM. The sender is sitting there waiting for a response, so the courteous thing to do is to immediately re-prioritize whatever you’re doing and respond to them. Email and tweets, on the other hand, are casual mediums. Ignoring either one for an hour is within the bounds of the sender’s expectations.

Convenient or In Need of Management? I can send and receive IMs and Tweets and forget about them; phone calls as well, although voicemail needs to be dealt with. Email, on the other hand, is a demanding application. i have to manage it, sort it, categorize it, and clean it up.

Disposable or Archived? Phone calls and IMs, unless I record them, disappear after the conversation is ended. Emails and tweets are saved and searchable, giving me an always available archive of my communications (unless I delete them).

I suggested in a post last week that Twitter bridges the gap between email and IM, just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call. Since then, I’ve been trying to figure out if a social, ambient, archive-able and convenient medium like microblogging is compelling in my organization. I took a look at Socialcast, one of the many corporate Twitter clones popping up, and I was very impressed with their implementation, which breaks the messages into statuses, ideas, questions and links.

Selling my staff on a tool like this is proving to be a challenge. The argument for it is fairly nuanced, and urging anyone to try something new on faith isn’t easy. They’re asking why this is better than the Microsoft Messenger chat application, or a more full-featured Sharepoint site? Those are good questions. Micro-messaging software lacks some of the features that these other mediums sport, but it provides a very simple and powerful, approach to information sharing that is far more collegial and less invasive than chat, while it’s simpler and quicker to use than Sharepoint. And my bet is that, in the war of communications mediums, it will ultimately be the ones that are easiest to use and least disruptive that win. Or it should be.
We’ve come a long way since the Pony Express. It’s hard to imagine living in a time when your options for communication were limited to face-to-face, sllooowww mail, and, perhaps, carrier pigeon. Today, we have the opposite problem: there are so many mediums to choose from that a key communication skill is to gleam the method that the person you want to reach prefers.

Follow procedures: in tight budget and staffing conditions, the approach to IT management is often reactive and chaotic. Many key NPO IT Managers came into the role as “accidental techies”, which implies that many nonprofits only support technology by accident. In an environment where the Office Manager, Donations Clerk or a volunteer ends up deploying the servers and installing applications, it’s a safe assumption that there aren’t well-crafted IT policies in place. In this environment, losing critical passwords—or even failing to ever write them down—can be a regular occurrence.

Involve all stakeholders:Don’t assume that your It staff – who are already struggling to juggle the big projects with user support—are keeping good records. Audit them, assist them and back them up. Finance can take a role in tracking license keys along with purchase records. And far too many nonprofit executives don’t even ask for the system passwords. There is no good reason – no matter how many a tech might come up with – why the CEO or head of security shouldn’t keep an updated, sealed envelope with key passwords in the safe in case of sudden turnover or emergency. I’ve worked with a lot of techies who would scream about this. “The CEO can’t have the password! They’ll delete files! They’ll mess it all up!” Well, the CEO shouldn’t use the password. But they should definitely have it.

Foster a culture that allows technology staff to succeed: in two of my personal cases, the staff before me had left en masse and bitterly. They took the main network password with them and wiped out a lot of the IT records. Clearly, this is immature and unprofessional behavior. I wouldn’t think to defend it. But the circumstances that lead some immature techs to be resentful and abusive can be fostered by certain work conditions. If you are a nonprofit executive, there are some things that you can do to create an environment that is less conducive to bitterness and abuse.

• Have realistic expectations for IT. If you don’t know how easy or hard it is to, say, upgrade a server or roll out a CRM system, don’t make assumptions. Hire a consultant, get a sense of what’s required, and adjust your expectations accordingly.


• Participate. Have all staff participate in technology planning and adoption. There are people who install systems and there are people who use them. The installation has to be a joint process. Techs can not be held accountable for determining user’s needs, and users can not be solely responsible for evaluating technology. Whenever IT buys the system without user input, or users pick a system without technical oversight, the relationship between IT and staff becomes strained. Joint responsibility and accountability for system choices is required for a healthy environment.


• Be appreciative. Tech support can be a very thankless job, and the smaller the staff and budget, the less rewarding. When your computer stalls or malfunctions, it can be frustrating. Even if you, personally, don’t take that frustration out on the tech who comes to fix it, are the rest of your co-workers that patient?


• Don’t hire extremes. When hiring technical staff, assess their people skills. Make sure that their focus is on how technology supports the org, not strictly on the technology. At the same time, assess the non-IT staff for their technical skills, and hire people who are competent and appreciative of technology. We are long, long past the day when all computer support and expertise could be delegated to the IT Department.

It boils down to organizational culture and priorities. The hectic, resource-strained environments that many of us work in aren’t conducive to good record-keeping habits. This problem is bolstered by the general case where upper management is, for various reasons, ranging from misplaced faith to technophobia, not thinking of IT as a keeper of critical organizational records. But the truth is that a failure to keep it all written down is inevitably going to cost you, in dollars and productivity. The best solutions are holistic – create a culture where accountability for organizational assets is clear to all and shared by all, and, in particular, understand enough about the technical demands put on your IT staff – accidental and otherwise – to allow them to prioritize the small stuff along with all of the big projects and constant fires they put out. Being a career nonprofit IT type, I’ve repeatedly had the unpleasant experience of walking into a new job, only to find that critical information, such as software licenses and server passwords, are nowhere to be found. So before I can start to manage a new network, I have to hack it. This sort of thing happens in other industries as well, but it strikes me as something that plagues nonprofits.

Twitter is, at its core, a messaging service that is more immediate and casual than email, but less immediate and intimate than IM (Instant Messaging). Just as email bridged the gap between the letter and the phone call, Twitter bridges these digital extremes. But, unlike email – and more like, say, Delicious or Flickr, web sites that take what were traditionally private things – bookmarks and photo albums – and make them social, Twitter makes this messaging social. You can protect your tweets so that they can only be seen by people that you approve, but the majority of tweeters don’t do that.

I came to Twitter via NTEN. In 2007, as we were revving up for the annual conference in DC, a bunch of us signed up for Twitter accounts and used them—to mixed success—for casual announcements, off-agenda organizing and “Hey, what session are you in?” friend pinging. By the 2008 NTEN shindig in New Orleans, Twitter was an incredible asset. Even before the conference I was alerted to nationwide problems with flights, as I followed my friend @kariapeterson (and others) stories about being trapped in airports hours after their flights were due to leave.

Joining Twitter with a good chunk of my social/professional community was definitely a boon. If you sign up without a group of friends established, it can be a fair amount of work to identify and connect with people that share enough of your interests and motives for using Twitter. Because using Twitter involves more than just finding interesting people. It’s also about finding people who will interact with you on Twitter in ways that fit your needs and goals.

Margaret Mason’s wonderful blog entry on Twitter tips breaks down Twitter users into two camps:

“With the usual exceptions, people on Twitter tend to fall into two main camps. There are responders, who use Twitter as a channel to interact heavily with other users, and broadcasters, who use it primarily as a micro-blogging platform.”

But the real power comes from the crowd. For example, @johnmerritt, who works as IT Director for a SoCal YMCA, did a Twitter survey about email server message limits. He requested that survey response tweets include the tag “#inboxlimit”, and then he set up a web page subscribing to an RSS feed for that tag, so that we could share a growing list of responses. This survey helped me provide context to my staff about our email policies.

On Monday, @webb, co-Exec at an awesome San Francisco nonprofit, asked us all what non-financial giving we have planned for the coming months, with the request that we tag our answers with “#givelist”. If you want to be inspired, and learn a lot of ways that you can be philanthropically productive without increasing your budget for donations, then the responses are a worthwhile read. You can learn even more at this website.

The typical assumption about any social networking site is that it will allow you to market your mission and, possibly, increase donations. Twitter, of course, can do those things, as Facebook or MySpace can, under the right conditions. But it’s a far more natural tool for generating ideas and camaraderie than cash. If you’re writing it off as just another place to promote yourself or your cause, I’d say that it deserves a deeper look.

My current favorite maxim is Users own functionality, techies own platforms. This encompasses a couple of key concepts. First, technology isn’t owned by IT or the people they serve; it’s owned by both those who install it and those who use it. Therefore, technology can’t be evaluated and planned for solely by one group or another. But I’ve seen lots of cases of both – IT rolling out a fundraising database or point of sale system with no input from the people who will base their revenue goals on the systems’ capabilities; and staff rolling out equally complex systems with little or no IT guidance. Both situations are likely to be a big waste of funds and effort. Second, the breakdown is clear – IT might be wowed by the cool, Ajaxy interface on that web app, but if it doesn’t have the reporting capabilities that the users need, they might be better served by something less flashy. That’s for the users to decide. But IT will have a better read on how sound a database structure is for querying and reporting, or what will integrate successfully with other key systems. So IT should have sway over the technologies used, to a large extent.

If you build it, they won’t come is another favorite. Unlike some cinematic baseball greats, techies can’t build huge systems in anticipation of user’s needs and expect them to be adopted, no matter how great the systems are. Clearly identified needs and ample amounts of input and involvement are required for home-grown system development. At my job, I am pushing agile development, which includes user testing and input from early on in development. This means that I’m teaching my staff how to let go a bit, and be more open to feedback, as I’m teaching the non-techie staff how to evaluate functionality in unfinished, and possibly somewhat ugly systems. It’s not as much training as it is imploring all parties to have some faith in each other.

In business communications, you haven’t said anything until you’ve said it three times in three different mediums. This one was taught to me by one of my greatest mentors, an ED at a commercial law firm that I worked at in the 90’s. It boils down to the terser rule of thumb: Assume that they haven’t read your email. The biggest mistake that we all make is thinking that we’ve made our intentions and priorities clear by sending a memo or an all staff email. The truly important initiatives that you’re pushing through should be reiterated and the message diversified, to reach people who may not respond to your favorite medium. And, as Paul has well-pointed out, at least one of those mediums should be verbal, and hopefully in the same room.

What are the maxims that you manage and survive by? Leave your best ones in the comments.

Anyway, always good to have an excuse to keep those web skills up.

• Palm: PalmOS
  
• Nokia: Symbian*
• RIM: Blackberry OS
  
• Microsoft: Windows Mobile
• Apple: iPhone
  
• Google: Android

• App Support: C (lots, but not much new; Treos do Activesync)
• Ease of Use: C (functional, but not modern interface)
• Cost: C (Not sure if there’s much more than Palm Treo’s available, $200-200 w/new contract)

Nokia’s Symbian platform is notable for being powerful and open source.  It’s more popular outside of the US, I’m not sure if there are any Symbian smartphones offered directly from US carriers, which makes them pretty expensive.  They do support Activesync, the Microsoft Exchange connector, and have a mature set of applications available.

• App Support: B (Activesync, lots of apps, but missing some business apps, like Salesforce)
• Ease of Use: B (Strong interface, great multimedia)
• Cost: D (Over the roof in US, where contracts don’t subsidize expense).

The Blackberry was the first OS to do push email, and it gained a lot of market and product loyalty as a result.  But, to get there, they put up their own server that subscribes to your email system and then forwards the mail to your phone.  This was great before Microsoft and Google gave us opportunities to set up direct connections to the servers.  Now it’s a kludge, offering more opportunities for things to break.  They do, however, have a solid OS with strong business support – they are either on top or second to Microsoft (with Apple charging up behind them) in terms of number of business apps available for the platform.  So they’re not going anywhere, they’re widely available, and a good choice if email isn’t your primary smartphone application.

• App Support: A- (lots of everything except Activesync)
• Ease of Use: B (Solid OS that they keep improving)
• Cost: B (Range of models at decent prices)

Windows Mobile has broad third party support and powerful administrative functions.  It comes with Activesync, of course.  There are tons of smartphones running it, more than any other OS. But the user interface, in this writer’s opinion (which I know isn’t all that pro-Microsoft, but I swear I’m objective), is miserable.  With Windows Mobile (WinMo) 5, they made a move to emulate the Windows Desktop OS, with a Start Menu and Programs folder.  This requires an excessive amount of work to navigate.  If you use more than the eight apps (or less, depending on model/carrier), you have your work cut out for you to run that ninth app. And the notification system treats every event—no matter how trivial—as something you need to be interrupted for and acknowledge.  It’s hard to imagine how Microsoft is going to compete with this clunker, and you have to wonder how the millions they spend on UI research allowed them to go this route.

• App Support: A (tons of apps out there)
• Ease of Use: D (the most clunky mobile OS.  Period.)
• Cost: A (The variety of phones means you get a range of prices and hardware choices)

Apple’s iPhone represents a leap in UI design that instantly placed it on top of the pack.  Best smartphone ever, right out of the first box.  Apple clearly read the research they commissioned, unlike Microsoft, and thought about how one would interact with a small, restricted device in ways that make it capable and expansive.  The large, sensitive touch screen with multi-touch capabilities rocks.  The web browser is almost as good as the one you use on your desktop (and this is important – web browsers on the four systems above are all very disappointing – only Apple and Google get this right).  The iPhone really shines, of course, as a multimedia device.  It’s a full-fledged iPod and it plays videos as well as a handheld device could.  As a business phone, it’s adequate, not ideal.  While it supports Activesync and has great email and voicemail clients, it lacks a physical keyboard and cut+paste—features that all of their competitors provide (although the keyboard varies by phone model).  So if you do a lot of writing on your phone (as I do), this is a weak point on the iPhone.

• App Support: A (it’s still pretty new, but development has been fast and furious)
• Ease of Use: A- (Awesome, actually, except for text processing)
• Cost: B (since they dropped it to $199).

Android is Google’s volley into the market, and it stands in a class with Apple that is far above the rest of the pack.  The user interface is remarkably functional and geared toward making all of the standard things simple to do, even with one hand.  The desktop is highly customizable, allowing you to put as many of the things you use a touch away.  This phone is in a class with the iPhone, but has made a few design choices that balance the two out.  The iPhone makes better use of the touch screen, with multi-touch features that Google left out.  But the iPhone is has far less customizable an interface.  And, of course, the first Android phone has a full keyboard and (limited) cut and paste.  It is, however, brand new, and I’ll discuss the future below, but right now the third party app market is nascent.  Today, this phone is best suited for early adopters.

• App Support: C (it will be A in a year or so)
• Ease of Use: A
• Cost: A (G1’s are selling for as low as $150w/new plan)

“...I strolled into a college campus after three years of doing my strip, no one had ever read it. In fact they hadn’t read anything, unless it was something from 25 years ago that their parents had given them the books of. So I already saw that the window was closing, that it was just a matter of a few years.”

Breathed said his readership was 60 million to 70 million people in 1985, when Peanuts had a readership of 200 million to 300 million and Calvin and Hobbes, 200 million people. “That will never happen on the Web. Your readership drops to a couple thousand people – maybe, if you’re lucky, 10,000.”

It is a different medium. It has the disadvantage that Breathed points out – a fraction of the people who are delivered his strips in the paper they purchase will willingly subscribe. But how many of those people read them anyway? I’ve gotten Cathy in my paper for as long as I can remember, but I promise you, I never read it. For now, as we transition, his actual readership is probably down. But comic strips are far from down from the count. On the web, we can subscribe to—and only to—the ones we want to read, and brilliant strips that struggle for readership will stay in circulation. This is a big improvement for the medium. It’s really too bad that Berkeley Breathed, one of our most talented practitioners, won’t stick around for it.

But, if what you’re looking for is a cool phone, it’s important to point out that this is brand new, and, as an early adopter, I’m paying some early adopter dues. If you aren’t the pioneering type, you’ll do much better with an iPhone. The Android environment is open, but the number of apps available is pretty slim, with some glaring holes. Missing on G1 Day 1 (which, officially, is today, October 22nd), there is no Notepad/Text Editor; limited video playing, no secured storage (for passwords and the like) and very limited connectivity with Microsoft Exchange/Outlook. There’s no desktop sync program for Android—you can mount the phone as USB storage and drag files to and from it, but the only synchronization available, so far, is the built-in sync with GMail apps (Mail, Calendar and Contacts) and a couple of brand new apps that can sync contacts with Exchange, given the right conditions.

My situation is this: I work in a Microsoft environment. We run Exchange 2007. I have an active extra-curricular professional life that lives in GMail and Twitter, primarily. So the G1 handles the latter beautifully—there are already three Twitter apps available—but the web site works great as well. It handles GMail phenomenally. But what about my work email, calendar and contacts? Solutions should pop up eventually. Funambol is promising an ad-based service that will start with Contact Sync, then grow to include Calendar and Email. A Google ContactSync app is available at the Android Market (you can install it from your phone), but it requires Exchange 2007 with the Web Services Extension enabled. We’re not doing that at Earthjustice, and I made a vow not to ask my Sysadmin to reconfigure the server for me (she’s got enough to do!). Finally, Google does have a Calendar Sync app, but it only works on Windows; I’m on a Mac, and while I have VMWare Fusion and Windows installed, I only boot up Windows when I have to, not often enough to keep the calendar up to date. So here’s what I’ve done, which is immensely kludgy.

Email: I used an Administrator-only feature to forward a copy of my mailbox to GMail. If you aren’t, like me, an IT Director with admin rights to your Exchange server, you’ll have to buy the System Administrator a healthy Amazon gift certificate and grovel a bit, most likely. On the Gmail side, I created a filter that labels each message from work with “earthjustice” and set up my EJ email address as a valid one to reply with, along with the “reply to address sent to” default. Now all of my work mail arrives twice – once in Outlook, once in GMail. I am hesitant about replying in GMail, because the Sync is only one way, and those replies won’t land in my Outlook Sent folder. But I get all of my mail pushed, so I don’t miss anything, and I can always jump to Outlook Web Access if I want to reply “in country”.

Calendar: this was a real kludge. Again, if I used Windows daily, I’d use the Calendar Sync. But I use my Macbook at home and work and generally log onto Outlook over Citrix, which I can’t install the sync on without installing it for the whole company. I worked out a complicated solution by publishing my calendar in icalendar format to iCal Exchange, a free server for storing calendars, then subscribed to it at Google Calendar, only to learn that either iCal Exchange is not sending the proper refresh headers to GCal, or GCal is inept at refreshing them. I couldn’t get it to recognize an update in three days, so I ditched that plan. But then I noted that, when I received Outlook appointments at GMail, they came with “Add to GCal” options. Since my Calendar was synched (via Google Calendar Sync on my Fusion WinXP desktop), I realized that I can just accept each appointment twice to keep both calendars in sync. Again, kludgy, but suitable until something better comes along.

Contacts: As mentioned above, there’s a contact sync app available, but it requires Exchange 2007 with web services enabled. I’m going to hold off. I have about 200 work contacts, and about 350 more personal/Nonprofit contacts, so my GMail contacts list is much larger than the one at work. I’m going to maintain them separately for the time being. So, no definitive answer here, but keep your eye on Funambol, who promise to have this going quickly.

It’s only a matter of time before someone licenses and resells Microsoft Activesync for Android, and other sync options will pop up like crazy. But, if you’re like me, and couldn’t wait for this phone, I hope there’s enough here to get you going. Please be sure to leave additional and better ideas in the comments.

It seems like every month or two, I happen across a forum thread about project management tools. What works? Can you do it with a wiki? Are they necessary at all? Often, there are a slew of recommendations (Basecamp, Central Desktop, MS Project) accompanied by some heartfelt recommendations to stay away from all of them. All of these recommendations are correct, and incorrect.

Project software naysayers make a very apt point: Tools won’t plan a project for you. If you think that buying and setting up the tool is all that you need to do to successfully complete a complex project, you’re probably doomed to fail. So what are the things that will truly facilitate a project-oriented approach, regardless of tools?

• Healthy Communication. The team on the project has to be comfortably and consistently engaged in project status and decisions


• Accountability. Team members need to know what their roles are, what deliverables they’re accountable for and when, and deliver them.


• Clarity, Oversight and Buy-In. Executives, Boards, Backers all have to be completely behind the project and the implementation team.

With that in place, Project Management tools can facilitate and streamline things, and the proper tools will be the ones that best address the complexity of the project, the make-up of the team, and the culture of the team and organization.

Traditional Project Management applications, exemplified by MS Project, tie your project schedule and resources together, applying resource percentages to timeline tasks. So, if your CEO is involved in promoting the plan and acting as a high level sponsor, then she will
be assigned, perhaps, as five percent of the project’s total resources, and her five percent will be sub-allocated to the tasks that she is assigned to. They track dependencies, and allow you to shift a whole schedule based on the delay of one piece of the plan. If task 37 is
“order widget” and that order is delayed, then all actions that depend on deployment of the widget can be rescheduled with a drag and drop action. This is all very powerful, but there is a significant cost to defiing the plan, initially inputting it, and then maintaining the information. There’s a simple rule of thumb to apply: If your project requires this level of
tracking, then it requires a full-time Project Manager to track it. If your budget doesn’t support that, as is often the case, then you shouldn’t even try to use a tool this complex. It will only waste your time.

Without a dedicated Project Manager, the goal is to find tools that will enhance communication; keep team members aware of deadlines and milestones; report clearly on project status; and provide graphical and summary reporting to stakeholders. If your team is spread out geographically, or comprised of people both inside and outside of your organization, such as consultants and vendors, all the better if the tool is web-based. Centralized plan, calendar, and contacts are a given. Online forums can be useful if your culture supports it. Most people aren’t big on online discussions outside of email, so you shouldn’t put up a forum if it won’t be used by all members. The key is to provide a big schedule that drills down to task lists, and maintain a constant record of task status and potential impacts on the overall plan. Gantt Charts allow you to note key dependencies – actions that must be completed before other actions can begin—and provide a visual reporting tool that is clear and readable for your constituents, from the project sponsors to the public. Basecamp, Central Desktop, and a slue of web-based options provide these components.

If this is still overkill – the project isn’t that complex, or the team is too small and constricted to learn and manage the tools, then scale down even further. Make good use of the task list and calendar functions that your email system provides, and put up a wiki to facilitate project-related communication.

What makes this topic so popular is that there is no such thing as a one size fits all answer, and the quick answer (“Use Project”) can be deadly for all but the most complex projects. Understand your goals, understand your team, and choose tools that support them.

So how can you politely impose some sanity on the smartphone madness? People love THEIR devices; the choice of an Iphone vs a Blackberry is as heated as any political debate. But there are some commons sense arguments that IT can make for a modicum of standardization, without totally denying your users some choice.

It all boils down to email. While smartphones feature a range of operating systems, email platforms tend to support cross-smartphone access. So what’s your email system?

Microsoft Exchange includes ActiveSync. If you run an Exchange server, ActiveSync-capable smartphones can connect directly and wirelessly to it, providing contact, calendar, email and (on some phones) task synchronization. Any Windows Mobile phone includes Activesync, as well as Palm Treos and the newest iPhones (version 2 and above). Exchange 2007 also includes handy features like remote device wipes and access to network shares.

Google Apps/GMail Google makes a GMail for Mobile application that works on most smartphones capable of running java applications, which includes all of the major variants (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone and Palm).

If you don’t use GMail or have an Exchange server (you either run Outlook or Outlook Express without your own server, or you use a different system), Blackberries offer the ubiquitous solution. RIM, the company that makes them, runs their own server that can act as a gateway for your email service and forward the mail to your phone. Before Microsoft figured out how to support mobiles, this was a sweet, revolutionary offering, but my take is that, compared to Exchange/Activesync, it’s now a bit of a kludge. If you use Blackberries with Exchange, you can increase functionality by buying their Exchange add-in server, but that’s a significant investment that you’re not likely to make without a large fleet of phones. In the meantime, though, here’s a tip: when you set up that Blackberry to access Exchange, pick Outlook WebAccess, not Outlook (assuming you also run Webaccess). The integration through Webaccess updates the server when you read messages on the phone; the vanilla Outlook integration doesn’t. Outlook should be chosen when you don’t offer WebAccess with Exchange.

At my job, we have Exchange and a smartphone policy that states that we support Activesync, as opposed to any particular device. We recommend that our users get Treos or iPhones, because we like them, but don’t complain if they get Wings or MotoQ’s or whatever, because Activesync works the same way on any Windows Mobile device. The staff appreciates the guidance and flexibility; we enjoy the reduced time figuring every new phone out.

I have two things up on Idealware this week: My new article, “The Perfect Fit: A Guide to Evaluating and Purchasing Major Software Systems” and my first blog entry “Smartphone Follies“.

Needless to say, I’m honored and excited to be publishing regularly to Idealware, and urge you all to go there and subscribe to the articles and blog, which features some very sharp friends of mine, as well: Steve Backman, Heather Gardner-Madras, Paul Hagen, Eric Leland, Michelle Murrain, and, of course, Laura Quinn, the founder and genius behind Idealware. See you over there!

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.

• 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?

Some say that we’re moving away from blogging to the next trend, dubbed “Lifestreaming“. But I wouldn’t call this a lifestream. “Stream-supplementing” might be more to the point. I hang out in a number of places online, the key ones being, in some kind of meaningful order:

LinkedIn – this is where I keep my resume and stay connected with people I know through work and community.

Twitter – This is where I do most of my online communication lately. My Twitter community is mostly made up of people I know through NTEN and other NPTech circles. You may think I’ve been pretty quiet in the two or three months since I last blogged, but I’ve published about 700 tweets.

NTEN, or, more accurately, the NTEN Groups like NTEN-Discuss and the SF-501TechClub. These are online lists, sponsored by NTEN. I’m also reasonable active on Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s excellent Information Systems Forum, a Yahoo Group.

Idealware – Laura’s made me a staff writer, of sorts, and I should be contributing more articles this summer. I also comment on the blog regularly. Some of my Idealware articles are also picked up by Techsoup.

So, those are great places to find me. And this is where you come to contact me, or catch up on where I’ve been. I can’t call it “lifestreaming” – my life isn’t a show, and if it was, it wouldn’t be a very interesting one. But I do publish he pieces of it that I think might be valuable to others, and I’d rather publish them in places that others go, so it makes sense to have a web site that serves more as an signpost than a destination.

This week, Google announced that their internet portal page, iGoogle, would be incorporating widgets, or, as they call them, Gadgets that perform the type of social networking functions that online social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace provide. This comes at a time when Twitter, the group chat/micro-blogging tool has been rising up the social staircase and getting a lot of new users and attention. Twitter, unlike the more established social networks, is more commonly accessed through third-party, desktop applications than the twitter.com web site.

I like this trend. My primary social networking site isn’t Facebook or LinkedIn— it’s GMail. Twitter is the first thing to challenge that. Because, for me, it’s not about the brand – it’s about communication. So Facebook has it’s ouvre, it’s demographic market, and, like everyone else, it’s mission to learn everything there is to learn about my network’s shopping preferences, and the slow website and constant “spam your friends” requirements of their tools really puts me off. LinkedIn has a cleaner, more professional aesthetic that I find a lot less annoying, but my favorite new feature of theirs is the ability to subscribe to the feed of my network updates in my RSS reader (something Facebook doesn’t provide). So I’m rooting for the destruction of the social networking brands, and the ultimate incorporation of powerful social tools into my my desktop, RSS Reader and email.

At that point, I’ll be able to take advantage of the powerful interpersonal tools that the web enables. I’ll still travel to my friends and associates web sites; and I’ll still visit the Ning and Drupal communities that matter to me. I won’t need a middle man like Facebook or MySpace. That will be a happy day!

An IT Director in New York City, working for a large nonprofit (650 people, multiple locations, full IT platform), got approval from his boss to hire in a Systems Administrator (punchline here) at $40,000 annually. Understand, System Administrators rarely make less than $75k a year at similarly sized for profits. The boss pulled that number out of a salary survey, but, given the quality of it, I say he might as well have pulled it out of a hat.

Determining what’s fair—or, as we call it “market”—pay is an art in itself, and good salary surveys, like the one NTEN produces, offer far more than suggested wages – they provide context, like location, industry standards; they discuss trends, and the best ones frame the survey results in what the numbers should mean to us.

So, when I read the NTEN survey, and saw what were still ridiculously low salaries in comparison to the for-profit pay scales, I didn’t read it as “these are good numbers”. I read it as “our industry doesn’t value technology.” Literally. If our salaries are at 50-75% of the rest of the world’s, how are we going to attract long-term, talented people? And if we have a revolving door of mediocre (or, more accurately, some stellar, some miserable) sysadmins running our critical systems, how much money, productivity, and plain competence at our important work are we going to sacrifice? What’s the cost of maintaining instability in order to save bucks on payroll?

So my pitch is that we have to stop thinking that there’s a metric called nonprofit wages. There are market rates for positions, and there is a value in serving a mission. So a nonprofit salary is a market salary (what a for profit would pay), less the monetary value of being able to serve the mission.

Nonprofits can’t keep thinking that they exist in some world within a world. They complete with all businesses for talent, and, in the IT realm, for profits not only offer better compensation, they offer more toys, bigger staffs (which translates to more techies to pal around with, something a lot of my staff have missed in nonprofit), and, often, newer technology to learn and deploy. In our field, it’s all about current skills.

So I feel for my compatriot in NYC, and hope that he can muster a case for his boss, for both his and his bosses sake. If NTEN is reading, a great accompanying metric for the salary survey would be IT turnover tracking, as well as interims when key poisitions (CIO, Sysadmin) are unfilled. Info on how that impacted business objectives. We need to do more than just report on the pay – we have to document the impacts.

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.

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]

So, I took my family to see the movie yesterday. The movie takes the ten minute tale and strrrreeetttccchhess it into a 90 minute film with mostly topical humor. As father to a homeschooled son, I was pretty offended by one joke. Early on, the haughty, over-critical kangaroo, voiced by Carol Burnett, protests that Horton can’t be allowed to spread these horrible lies about tiny people, that he’ll corrupt the youth with his overactive imagination. But her little kangaroo will be all right – “he’s pouch-schooled”.

This promotes the sad, but popular stereotype of homeschool parents as over-protective and narrow-minded. It’s this type of stereotype that, last month, led a three judge panel to rule, in a case of possible domestic abuse, that children can’t be homeschooled in California unless the primary parent doing the homeschooling is an accredited teacher.

Three judges ruled on one case of possible neglect and abuse, and then took a giant club and swung it as wide and far as they could, hitting every one of the estimated 200,000 homeschooling families in California. We aren’t abusing our child; we aren’t hiding him from the world—quite the opposite! What we’re doing is working as hard as we can to provide the educational environment that he will soar in.The state government should respect that.

I’m blogging this because it’s the tip of a very large iceberg. While homeschooling wasn’t our first choice, public school isn’t an alternative that we would consider, even if our kid was one of the minority of children whose learning style meshes with that educational model. The No Child Left Behind Act is ravaging our school systems, and creating an environment where fear and threats determine the curriculum, much as fear and threats have dominated our political arena in the George W. Bush years. Children are taught to pass tests, and the ability to test well is a skill unrelated to the ability to think.

The kangaroos are in the classroom. What kind of world will my child grow up into, if all of his peers are taught only how to memorize, not to imagine and discern?

In 2004, I was reading Jon Udell’s Infoworld columns about a new technology called “Really Simple Syndication”, RSS. The technology interested and thrilled me a bit, because it looked like it might provide a much needed management tool for web-based information (which it did). In early 2005, I was browsing through popular bookmarked web sites at Del.icio.us, a web site that made innovative use of RSS, and saw a link entitled “The Top 10 Reasons that Nonprofits Should Use RSS“. I noted that the author, one Marnie Webb, of course, worked near me in SF at Compumentor/Techsoup. The next week, I ran across a post by the same Ms. Webb to the del.icio.us mailing list. Armed with the knowledge that there was someone else obsessed with the same technology trends and potential that I was, I emailed her and said “You don’t know me, but we have to have lunch”.

The rest is this story—this blog, Techcafeteria, my happiness in finding/joining NTEN, which Marnie introduced me to. We started up the nptech aggregator web site, as the next logical progression in Marnie’s campaign to get people around the world referring useful information to each other via that ubiquitious tag. But I am positive that my story is far from unique—Marnie is one of those people who, in her unassuming way, promotes ideas and community. So, good work NTEN, and great work Marnie! A well-deserved award.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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

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

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

Smartphones come in a variety of flavors:

• Blackberries


• Treos (PalmOS or Windows – new variant: the Centro)


• Windows Mobile phones


• Apple iPhone


• Others (Nokia, Symbian).

My requirements were as follows:

1. A decent voice phone


2. A real QWERTY keyboard


3. Push (or automated pull) email from my org’s Exchange server


4. Access to GMail


5. A good screen


6. A Password-keeping application


7. Third party apps


8. Some ability to get internet connectivity for my laptop


9. Not a requirement: small form factor. I actually prefer a decent sized screen and keyboard.

Note that this ruled out the iPhone on two or three counts. The iPhone can only do POP and IMAP email, making it far less capable for Exchange than a Blackberry or phone that supports Activesync (which includes any Windows Mobile device and all current Treos, Palm or Windows). iPhones also have only a soft keyboard, and I spent about an hour trying it out at the Apple store with way too many errors. Since I’m geeky enough to actually write things on my phone, the lack of cut and paste was pretty serious, as well. Finally, no java support and, at the time, no support for third party apps. Jobs announced a turnaround on the last one the day after I bought my new phone, but I’m still happy I steered clear. Maybe in two years the iPhone will be a better choice; for now, only buy it if you are looking more for a music and movie machine than a business phone. It rules for multimedia, yes.

There’s a reason why I’ve stuck with Treos for so long, and the new Centro – which is, essentially, the Treo 755p in a smaller body, is a great deal, particularly if you switch to Sprint to get it at the $99 price. The keyboard is small, but I had no errors testing it. I stayed away for a few reasons: Sprint, who I was trying to ditch; no wifi; and a small, lo-rez screen.

I’m not a Blackberry fan – having supported them at the last two companies I was at, I’m convinced that they’re buggy as all get out. And the push email, which was revolutionary a few years back, feels more and more like a hack, now that Microsoft has Activesync down. While it’s true that Activesync is more of a drain on the phone (it’s not true push; it’s just scheduled pull), it’s pretty seamless. My Earthjustice mail comes right to me, wherever I am. That said, I was pretty intrigued by the Blackberry Curve, and almost sold on the T-Mobile version, which comes with their Hotspot@Home service, allowing you to switch to VOIP (which isn’t charged against your minutes) whenever you’re in wireless range. But I couldn’t get all of the required T-Mobile and Blackberry required plans without upping my monthly bill by about $35 over Sprint, so I passed on it.

I wound up with what I think is the best Windows Mobile smartphone, the T-Mobile Wing (made by HTC, AT&T has something just like it). The Wing has a slide out keyboard, much bigger than the Blackberry or Treo; Windows Mobile 6; Wifi (but not Hotspot@Home); a 2 megapixel camera (very nice) and – this is important – a MicroSD slot that can take the new high density cards. The Curve maxes out at 2GB, but I’m carrying a 6GB card in my Wing. This allows me to copy my 500-600 song playlist to the card and have plenty of spare room for photos and other things.

Two warnings: It is Windows, so I have to reboot daily (I went months without rebooting my PalmOS Treo). it is sincerely Mac-hostile. My main computer is a Macbook Pro. I had to buy Markspace’s Missing Sync in order to sync iTunes playlists with it, and I still have to sync with a Windows machine to install additional applications and sync data in apps that don’t speak Mac. So if you don’t have access to a Windows box, or you don’t want this hassle, stay away from Windows Mobile.

The icing on the cake was that T-Mobile’s unlimited Internet plan (at $20/mo) includes unlimited access at any T-Mobile hotspot, for your phone and/or your computer. This means that, as long as I don’t mind buying Starbuck’s coffee, I have wifi access virtually anywhere I go. That was a killer feature for me.

To sum up, the best deal out there is probably the Sprint Centro. But T-Mobile is the only provider (as far as I can tell) that adds Hotspot access to their data plan. I’m paying about $5/mo more than I was at Sprint for all of the wifi access, and everything else that my Treo did.

I expect that buyer’s remorse will set in the day the Google phone arrives. Rumor or not, it is almost certain that they’ll be announcing a mobile OS, based on Linux, with a suite of java apps as cool as their Maps and GMail for Mobile tools, which are really nice cell phone apps (another gripe: Windows Mobile can do Google Maps, but not GMail. I’m hoping someone will fix that soon. But gmail.com/m works fine). But in markets like these, I figure you have to just buy your phone when you need it, and avoid being too much of a beta tester.

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.

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.

It’s funny how many connections I had to this organization prior. First, the Communications Director there is a dear friend of mine who used to work for me at Goodwill. When they asked for my references, I had to explain that she had been on the list for years. Second, the consultant they were working with is a friend of mine through NTEN, and he had actually introduced me to my predecessor there last year, who gave me a heads up about the job.

But the connections are even deeper. My first “real” job (discarding the ten years I spent working in restaurants and playing in bands in Boston in the late seventies/early eighties) was with a small law firm in SF that had spun off from a larger firm called Lillick & Charles. My second job, where I was first promoted to the IT Director role, was with Lillick & Charles (since merged with giant firm Nixon Peabody). I took a very intentional detour after that out of the for-profit world and to Goodwill. Earthjustice, oddly enough, was founded by a couple of Partners from Lillick & Charles. So it’s a small world I work in.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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.

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

On a related note, my blog entry on Joomla Day West was almost quoted verbatim in the latest Joomla Weekly News (this is a PDF download). And I have an article coming out soon in Non-Profit Times on Data Management, a summary of the Managing Technology 2.0 presentation that I led at the NTEN conference in April. (Powerpoint link here).

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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


2. He created the database (another line)


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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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


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


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

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

1. The OpenID-enabled Blog;


2. The OpenID server, which I’m committed to maintaining. Techcafeteria won’t be going away anytime soon!;


3. A new OpenID F.A.Q., which links to other OpenID resources;


4. and a new OpenID illustrated How-to, which uses the Techcafeteria server as an example but overviews how they all work.

Why am I harping on about this? I really do think that OpenID offers a solution to a very pesky problem. I have an encrypted file with all of the logins and passwords that I keep on a regular basis for web sites and services that I use. There are over 200 of them. I might be an extreme case, but I’m far from alone. And, from my years as a technology manager, I know that most people solve this problem by using the same password at multiple sites. So if those sites include your online banking, that’s a serious risk.

But, beyond the convenience and security, I look at it this way. My goal for Techcafeteria is to grow it into a real diverse offering of web-based services, in fitting with the name. Some of these, like the blog, will be based on third-party platforms, others will be things that I develop (I’m experienced with PHP/MySQL and I’m learning Ruby on Rails – I’m even attending O’Reilly’s big conference on it in Portland this week). My goal is single sign-on, via OpenId, for everything that Techcafeteria ever offers.

It’s not a big deal doing this on my web site. It would have been a huge deal if I could have accomplished it at the large non-profit or decent sized law fIrm that I served as an IT Director for. At both of those jobs, we had a variety of systems, all tied into Novell and/or MS networks, but we still had nothing but password soup to offer our users, because the apps weren’t standardized enough to allow for true single sign-on.

At Joomla Day on Saturday, I sat in on a session where one of the core developers (Sam) demonstrated a way to share authentication between Joomla and MediaWiki. Very cool, but somewhat easy because MediaWiki stores the password unencrypted. Assuming that most sites use standardized encryption protocols (MD5 being the big dog, that’s not an insurmountable challenge. But I couldn’t help thinking how much easier this will be via OpenID. It’s not just about this stuff being possible – it’s also about allowing Sysadmins who are not also programmers to implement it.

So, end of OpenID rants, for now. I’ll be doing some live blogging from the Rails conference, and I’ll try and include some context as to why I think Ruby on Rails is an important programming environment.

This is an interesting event – an “un-conference” as Ryan calls it, which falls somewhere in the territory of a traditional conference, a town hall meeting, and, maybe, the Phil Donahue show, as emceed by the always entertaining Gunner (of Aspiration fame).

It’s about halfway through the day, and continuing through tomorrow, but I won’t be able to come back, because that would incur the justified scorn of my son’s mother, who expects me to not be a computer geek on her day. There are 100 or so people here from many corners of the earth (well, the Americas and Europe are healthfully represented) and associations to Joomla that range from a tiny non-profit thinking about using it to the core development team. Joomla, for those who don’t know, is a popular open Source Content Management System (CMS) with a huge developer community, making it very powerful and popular. It has it’s roots in a CMS called Mambo.

The big topics are:

• The upcoming Joomla 1.5 release, which is a dramatic rewrite of the application that will make developers (like me) very happy. They have exposed a programming framework that could develop into an environment all it’s own, and they’ve made changes to the templating that allow for powerful customizations.


• The move to more strictly enforce GPL compliance. The GNU General Public License is designed to offer users of GPL applications much freedom,with restrictions on how the code can be redistributed that insure that the community will share in all enhancements. The Mambo/Joomla developer community apparently includes many add-ons that aren’t compliant with this, and the Joomla team hopes to (appropriately) bring them back to compliance.

This is a seriously fun event with group activities intersperced with break out sessions, and a kind of “this is being made up as it goes along” agenda. Next up: speed geeking! which Gunner describes as “like speed dating, but completely different”.

First, my apologies if you’re trying to play. For some reason, the DNS change that will allow you to access openid.techcafeteria.com is taking a looonng time to propagate. I’ve asked my ISP about this. And it makes no sense to give you the ip or an alternate name – you need the actual name to get this working.

Don’t trust me to maintain techcafeteria.com 24/7 for as long as you may live? Good thinking! I’m hosting this on my home box, because I can’t hack PHP sufficiently in order to get it going on my ISPs system. So this is what’s cool about OpenID. It’s relatively easy to become an OpenID provider, if you have your own server. I think it took me two hours or so to get it all set up. So there will be plenty of providers out there. And OpenID gives you an option for setting up a permanent address on any server where you can create a simple page (regardless of whether it’s your system or if it has anything related to OpenID installed) and then referring it to your OpenID provider. So, if I take my system down (I do that about twice a year), you can register somewhere else and simply point your URL to their system. It’s very flexible, and you’ll have the instructions in front of you after you create your ID on my server.

In addition to OpenID.net here are two important resources:

OpenID Enabled is a wiki devoted to OpenID. Very thorough!

The OpenID Directory is an early stab at collecting all of the sites that allow you to log in via OpenID. It’s also an OpenID provider, if you’re looking for that backup.

In order to deepen my understanding of OpenID and what it’s ramifications might be for me and the non-profit community, I’m diving in and inviting you to join me. I’ve set up an OpenID server at http://openid.techcafeteria.com that you are welcome to use to establish your own ID. From there, you can also manage your identity, optionally revealing some demographic info to sites that you authenticate to (completely optional!) and managing the sites that you have authenticated to.

I’ve also set up my blog to allow for OpenID as a registration option, via a handy Wordpress plugin.

Some notes if you want to join in:

• If you sign up, you might want to then register on my blog and leave a comment on this entry. That way we’ll know who we’re playing with.


• If you have trouble accessing http://openid.techcafeteria.com, wait a few hours – it should be fully reachable by Friday at the very latest. I just set up the DNS a few hours ago

If you don’t know where to use OpenID other than my blog, note that plugins are available for Wordpress, livejournal, Drupal, MediaWiki, and other community-based applications, as well as a module for apache. Technet has articles on how to integrate it with ASP sites. So, it’s out there – look for the logo:

• There were numerous referrals to horror stories where a new exec or a board member had imposed a more business-like structure on a non-profit to disastrous results.


• Others suggested that non-profits, being mission-based, as opposed to profit-based, are fundamentally different from for-profits. And some went further by limiting the concept of efficiency to simply streamlining expenses and increasing revenues, as opposed, to, say, more efficiently communicating with constituents or managing client data..


• Some seemed to equate for-profit business practices with unethical or customer-abusive practices.

On this last point, let’s quickly acknowledge that many business have unethical practices, and those are not the ones that we should emulate or adopt, of course.

On the first two, let’s establish a few givens here: