Year-end Reflections
This post was originally published on the NTEN Blog on December 24th, 2015. As years go, 2015 was a significant.
This post was originally published on the NTEN Blog on December 24th, 2015. As years go, 2015 was a significant.
…is the name of the track that I am co-facilitating at NTEN’s Leading Change Summit. I’m a late addition, there.
Okay, I know that it’s a problem worthy of psychoanalysis that I’m so fascinated with the Request for Proposal (RFP).
This article was first published on the NTEN Blog in December of 2012. I think that the best thing that.
I'm still knocking on wood a bit, but I think it's now safe to rep0ort that I'll be joining Legal Services Corporation as their Chief Information Officer in January. Those of you who read my Looking For A New Job post in August know that I had some pretty strict requirements for that gig, and this one meets or exceeds them. LSC is the nonprofit that allocates federal funding to legal aid societies across the country.
This Interview was conducted by Holly Ross and the article was first published on the NTEN Blog in February of 2010..
I'm following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document. There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:
My esteemed colleague Michelle Murrain lobbed the first volley in our debate over whether tis safer to host all of your data at home, or to trust a third party with it. The debate is focused on Software as a Service (SaaS) as a computing option for small to mid-sized nonprofits with little internal IT expertise. This would be a lot more fun if Michelle was dead-on against the SaaS concept, and if I was telling you to damn the torpedos and go full speed ahead with it. But we're all about the rational analysis here at Idealware, so, while I'm a SaaS advocate and Michelle urges caution, there's plenty of give and take on both sides. Michelle makes a lot of sound points, focusing on the very apt one that a lack of organizational technology expertise will be just as risky a thing in an outsourced arrangement as it is in-house. But I only partially agree.
Say you sign up for some great Web 2.0 service that allows you to bookmark web sites, annotate them, categorize them and share them. And, over a period of two or three years, you amass about 1500 links on the site with great details, cross-referencing -- about a thesis paper's worth of work. Then, one day, you log on to find the web site unavailable. News trickles out that they had a server crash. Finally, a painfully honest blog post by the site's founder makes clear that the server crashed, the data was lost, and there were no backups. So much for your thesis, huh? Is the lesson, then, that the cloud is no place to store your work?
I normally try to avoid being preachy, but this is too good a bandwagon to stay off of. If you make decisions about technology, at your organization, as a board member, or in your home, then you should decide to green your IT. This is socially beneficial action that you can take with all sorts of side benefits, such as cost savings and further efficiencies. And it's not so much of a new project to take on as it is a set of guidelines and practices to apply to your current plan. Even if my day job wasn't at an organization dedicated to defending our planet, I'd still be writing this post, I'm certain.
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