contracts

Highlights Of The 2015 Nonprofit Technology Conference

I’m back and moderately recovered from the 2015 NTC in Austin, Texas, where, along with plenty of good Texas food and beer, I shared some wisdom and learned a lot.  Here’s a summary, with my favorite pics: #NTCBeer is a proven formula. Take a decent bar, Nonprofit techies, and a room without blaring music, and everyone has a great time, whether they’re NTEN mavens like me, or first time attendees. We estimate that about 275 people came by this year. Here’s a great shot of the room by Jason Shim:   On Wednesday morning I led my session on contract negotiation.  I’d been hoping for… Read More »Highlights Of The 2015 Nonprofit Technology Conference

Both Sides Now

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?

The Perfect Fit: A Guide To Evaluating And Purchasing Major Software Systems

This article was originally published at Idealware in September of 2008. A major software package shouldn’t be chosen lightly. In this detailed guide, Peter Campbell walks through how to find software options, evaluate them, make a good decision, and then purchase the system in a way that protects you.  A smart shopper evaluates the item they want to purchase before putting money down. You wouldn’t shop for shoes without checking the size and taking a stroll up and down the aisle in order to make sure they fit, would you? So what’s the equivalent process of trying on a software package will size? How can… Read More »The Perfect Fit: A Guide To Evaluating And Purchasing Major Software Systems

How To Find Data-Exchange-Friendly Software

This article was co-written by Laura Quinn of Idealware and first published on the NTEN Blog in October of 2007.  Peter Campbell, Techcafeteria, and Laura Quinn, Idealware This is an excerpt adapted from Idealware’s article, “XML, API, CSV, SOAP! Understanding the Alphabet Soup of Data Exchange“. Repeat this mantra: I will not pay a vendor to lock me out of my own data. Sadly, this is what a lot of data management systems do, either by maintaining poor reporting and exporting interfaces or by including license clauses that void the contract if you interact with your data in unapproved ways. The software you choose has… Read More »How To Find Data-Exchange-Friendly Software