Next time you put a new power supply into a computer, make sure you connect the little power leads to exactly the right pins on the motherboard. Look at the manual to be sure. If you’re just one pin off, things just won’t work, and you’ll get really confused. You might even decide that it’s your motherboard that’s fried and waste a whole bunch of time on a wild goose chase.
Your friend, You
PS Who wants to guess what I did half of yesterday?
It’s pretty ridiculous to compare Bill Gates to Henry David Thoreau, but that doesn’t make this article documenting Bill Gates’ twice-annual “Think Weeks” any less interesting.
During the week, he bars all outside visitors, including family and Microsoft staff, except for a caretaker who slips him two simple meals a day.
He starts the morning in bed poring through papers mostly by Microsoft engineers, executives and product managers and scribbling notes on the covers.
Noon and dinnertime bring him back downstairs to read papers over meals at the kitchen table, where he has a view of the Olympic Mountains. Thursday’s lunch was grilled-cheese sandwiches and clam chowder. His main staple for the week, he said, is a steady stream of Diet Orange Crush.
Four days into this Think Week, Gates had read 56 papers, working 18 hours straight some days. His record is 112 papers.
How often do the leaders of environmental organizations take a week where they “unplug” from the day-to-day and go out to be close to nature while they stock up on new ideas from not-the-usual sources?
Gates had some administrative support:
Two months before Gates’ February seclusion, his technical assistant, Alex Gounares, collected papers from every corner of Microsoft and culled what he thought should be Gates’ priorities. It’s an open call for papers that lets employees of any level reach the top with their ideas.
Who is playing this role for environmental leaders?
Phillip said we should do it, but I said “naah, someone else will.” Create an open-source version of Del.icio.us, that is. Appears to be based on the Rubric perl module.
Interesting. I would love to see a network of federated social bookmarking servers powered by something like this. Start by working in your “neighborhood” but you can always expand your scope of interest searching to include other federated servers.
Marty offers a good rant on the problems with “strategic planning” in the nonprofit sector:
Most nonprofit directors have a very clear “off the record” opinion of the strategic plan process. They are frustrated with the funds that have been dumped into consultants and non-profit groups for strategic development and planning which typically look at the organization as a stand alone unit in a world of competing interest. They also feel the plans do not account for the real life variability and opportunity that exists in the nonprofit sector.
Most strategic planning seems to throw away instincts of field leaders and create a competitive and hostile environment for building network capacity. The strongest plans typically lead to the destruction of social capital between groups because by design they eliminate the option to work on unrelated work for friends.
Marty’s point is an important one — it’s not whether we should do planning, but what kind of planning that should be. Marty believes — and I’m inclined to agree — that our planning should focus much more on collaboration, innovation, and creating room to embrace unexpected opportunities.
This will require some new thinking and learning on the part of strategic planning consultants, those who fund them — and those who consume their services.
In How to Turn Your Red State Blue, Christopher Hayes delivers a passionate call for progressives to focus on evangelism and persuasion.
Once upon a time, organizing meant more than coordinating e-mail petitions or hosting house parties to raise money and awareness. It meant something much closer to what we now think of as missionary work. A union would send an organizer into, say, a small mining town in Pennsylvania. He would reach out to the miners, get to know them and their families, and tell them what a union was and how it could help them. He would try to convince them to risk their livelihoods by banding together and demanding a safer workplace and better wages. This was difficult, often bloody work. But when it worked– and often it didn’t — it effected a transformation of the miners who joined the union. They now had a new identity. Even if they had joined solely for higher wages or a mine less likely to kill them, after suffering lockouts, harassment and possibly beatings, they would have an entirely new perspective on bosses and power. They would be more progressive.
This is what social movements at their best do. They pull back the curtain on power and expose its workings. They politicize those without political engagements by transforming personal grievances in the workplace, at home and in society into political issues. Before the labor movement, a dangerous workplace, low wages and arduously long workdays were just crappy things about a person’s life. Before feminism, stifling your personal ambitions in favor of doting on your husband was just a drawback to being a woman.
He offers some specific ideas about how to do this, including the idea of using economic issues like consumer debt and credit reform as the lever.
A movement for credit reform also has the potential to drive a wedge between cultural and fiscal conservatives, weakening the coalition of conservative interests while building the progressive �brand� by re-associating progressives with fairness, justice and populism. There�s ample precedent. During his famous Cross of Gold speech in 1896, populist presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who in many ways forged the 20th century Democratic Party, asked: �Upon which side will the Democratic Party fight�upon the side of �the idle holders of idle capital,� [i.e., the banks], or upon the side of �the struggling masses�?�
Good, meaty stuff. He takes a while to get through the setup, but it’s well worth a read.
laughter is often the best defense. The crack team at the Daily Show strikes again.
Molly and I are headed to Lexington, Kentucky for a long weekend to visit her family. I’ve never been to that part of the world before, so I’m looking forward to it.
Have fun in Chicago, all you nonprofit techies!
Looks like Upcoming.org is about to get interesting again, thanks to a well-placed friendly kick in the pants from Jon Udell.
We should integrate this with Plone.
In The Face of Protest is A Changin’, Jeffrey Feldman compares conservative religous protest tactics with progressive anti-war protest tactics, and offers some unconventional wisdom for progressive protesters:
- Protest Economics first, then foreign policy.
- Stage a protest that uses the motion of the viewer, rather than a march.
- Think in images of individuals, rather than photos of faceless crowds.
My colleague Gideon Rosenblatt just published The Three Pillars of Social Source, which tackles some big-picture strategy issues in the nonprofit technology sector.
In the world of scarce resources plaguing the nonprofit technology sector, we currently suffer from a conflation of roles. This paper outlines three functional roles that are essential for a vibrant nonprofit technology sector. These “three pillars” include the �application developer”, the “application integrator” and the “application hoster.” Drawing clearer distinctions between these roles will help nonprofit technology assistance providers clarify their organizational missions, which will reduce competitive overlap and pave the way for improved collaboration between organizations. These steps are absolutely necessary if we are to evolve the nonprofit technology sector into a more integrated “social source” movement dedicated to empowering the agents of social service and social change throughout our societies.
The ideas in this paper echo a similar analysis of functional roles from an earlier paper on the environmental movement called Movement as Network, which argued that:
“The environmental movement is not just some vague concept, but an actual entity. It is a network, made up of very real interconnections between people and organizations; a networked whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.”
In much the same way, the nonprofit technology sector must also come to see itself as something greater than the sum of its individual parts, for it too is a network – a network with the potential to become a movement. What holds it back from its potential as a movement is the lack of a unifying mission. Yes, the nonprofit technology sector does exist to serve the technology needs of the nonprofit community. But that in itself is not unique. Microsoft plays this same role every time a nonprofit organization uses Word to write a letter or Excel to create a spreadsheet. What is it that makes the nonprofit technology sector greater than the sum of its parts? What is its vision – its reason for existence? What, in short, would turn it from a sector into a movement?
Intrigued? Read more at http://www.movementasnetwork.org/
In RE-BIRTH OF AN ENVIRONMENTALIST Alan AtKisson delivers what I think may well be the last word that needs to be said about the so-called “Death of Environmentalism.”
The essay is long, and a bit rambling, but insightful, poetic and smart. Well worth the read. Here are the key ‘grafs, with apologies to Alan for what I’m sure is somewhat ham-handed editing:
In my view, and the view of many others I know working on sustainability, the immediately infamous “Death of Environmentalism” essay was very old news indeed. Truly ho-hum stuff. It was the lament of people who are tired of being what I call (in my own little model of cultural change process) Iconoclasts, meaning folks whose role is to challenge the status quo. We usually think of Iconoclasts as activists, but they can also be critics, protestors, columnists. The role of the Iconoclast is always thankless, difficult, draining.
The Death of Environmentalism authors write as though they were the first to have the insight that environmental campaigns by themselves don’t work. As though generations of environmentalists (and other kinds of activists) before them had not experienced tiring of the nay-saying protestor role and decided to switch to visionary Change Agentry instead. As though no one else had thought about the need to create an Apollo-scale… vision of change in our energy system. The same metaphors and analyses have been around since the 1970s; there were just fewer people ready to listen.
Adam Werbach recently performed a lengthy “autopsy” on environmentalism. Among other things, he showed how his mentor, the great David Brower had gotten off of “environmentalism” and onto The Ecology of Commerce, green job development for union workers, and similar sustainability topics. But this proves nothing essential, and negates the continuing important role played by the conserve-and-protest organizations that Brower founded. And an old activist has every right to get interested in new ideas at the end of his life.
But I dearly hope that no one seriously interprets this tempest in a green teapot to mean that environmentalism should disappear. Calls for the dismantling of environmental funding programs (as Werbach does) and the like are just silly. Environmentalists are, after all, winning many critical battles, in many parts of the world … and the greatest need for them is yet to come.
Environmentalism is also getting subtler about when it must say “No,” and when it can peddle a “Yes.” In fact the difference between “environmentalism” and “sustainable development” — or “worldchanging” or “bright green” or whatever — is, I would submit, starting to narrow now, after a dozen years of gap-widening.
Dave Roberts at Grist delivers a nice smackdown to Nicholas Kristof’s idiotic op-ed on the environmental movement in the NYT this week.
There are thousands and thousands of dedicated people out here — in science labs, in the field, in neighborhood groups, in local government, even in wee small internet magazines — busting our asses to turn this big ol’ ship in the right direction. Instead of using some of the most valuable real estate in the media world to take potshots at us, why don’t you give us a hand? You say it’s “critical” to have a “highly respected environmental movement”? Start by showing us some damn respect.
Dave’s letter is generating some good discussion. Check it out.
Kellan (I’m guessing) offers some insightful thoughts about hosting software for nonprofits. He raises two challenages facing folks who build nonprofit solutions using so-called ‘niche’ platforms like Zope or Rails… well, really anything other than PHP, right?
Challenge #1: “Qualified developers for ‘niche’ technologies.”
There are definitely a lotta folks out there who know a little PHP, and not as many (yet) who can hack around with Zope or Rails. But I’m not sure there are that many more people who can effectively make substantial changes to a complex PHP application such as Gallery, CivicSpace or Groundspring’s forthcoming Enterprise. And the great thing about frameworks like Rails or Zope is that they’re pretty easy to learn and generally well documented. Also, the points in the landscape to find help are well-lit and active.
But I definitely agree with the larger point that I think Kellan’s trying to make: the nonprofit tech community needs to do a much better job of teaching itself platforms that aren’t “lowest common denominator” so it can take advantage of the huge leverage that platforms like Zope and Rails offer. I think this is definitely solvable — in fact, ONE/Northwest has already started tackling our local piece of the puzzle by starting the Seattle Plone Users’ Group along with our friend Brian Gershon of RagingWeb. (You can join the email list here.)
But the “lowest common denominator” challenge is definitely real. In fact, I think it’s been one of the largest challenges that Groundspring’s ebase has faced over its life — there just aren’t tons of great FileMaker consultants out there.
Challenge #2) Low cost hosting.
Kellan correctly notes that low-cost PHP hosting is pretty ubiquitous these days while Rails hosting is “at the moment nearly non-existent” and Plone/Zope hosting is a bit more expensive than PHP hosting.
Couple thoughts here. First, the difference between $7/month ($96/year) for bottom-of-the-barrel PHP hosting and ~$15-25/month ($165-300/year) for solid Zope hosting isn’t gonna break the budgets of most nonprofits.
Second, I’d observe that Rails and Plone/Zope are in very different places, and it’s probably not fair to generalize about them both simultaneously. Zope and Plone have been around for a few years now, and while not every Tom/Dick/Harry web host supports them, there is a solid marketplace of hosting providers, like Zettai, Quintagroup, and others. I can’t speak to where the Rails hosting market is at, but I’ll take Kellan’s word for it.
If you’re really concerned about the “cost of experimentation” then I’d note that…
A) Installing a working Plone/Zope environment on a Windows or Mac box is literally a double-click. Great for experimentation at zero cost. PHP and Apache can’t touch that kind of ease of install for novices. (See comments. Thanks, John & Trey.)
B) If you’d rather have someone else host your sandbox for you, there are a few providers of free Zope/Plone hosting such as FreeZope and Objectis. Not too bad.
But again, I think Kellan’s right on the larger lesson: folks like Electric Embers, Community Bandwidth, et al. ought to think seriously about expanding their nonprofit-centric hosting practices to include emerging platforms like Zope and Rails. There is a learning curve to supporting these platforms, but it’s not that bad, and it only takes a few talented sysadmins to climb it to start supporting a pretty huge number of nonprofit clients.
Aimee Mann has a new album coming out in a few weeks: The Forgotten Arm. Yay!
David Strom reminds us that adopting VoIP — like any complex, mission-critical, leading edge technology — can land you in tech support hell every once in a while. (Turns out that he needed a DOCSIS 2.0-compliant cable modem instead of his older DOCSIS 1.0-compliant model.)
My take-home from this isn’t “avoid VoIP.” Instead, this article is a reminder that we always need to approach the prospect of adopting big exciting new technologies with a “spirit of adventure.”
In Audubon Magazine, longtime environmental activist & writer Ted Williams argues that We’re Winning.
The war is longer than our lives and our children’s lives, but it goes well. We haven’t just established a beachhead; we’ve broken out of the hedgerows. There’s fierce fighting ahead, and there won’t be time to relax. But there will be time to learn from the past and catch our breath. Enjoy the beginning of the post-industrial revolution, the age of restoration. Be part of it.
Hat tip to Eric de Place at Cascadia Scorecard.
The folks at Oxygen Collective are providing some good coverage of the immoral and possibly-illegal logging of old-growth timber in the area affected by the 2002 Biscuit fire.
As dawn broke on the Green Bridge over the Illinois River near Selma this morning, 75 people gathered to block old growth reserve logging at the Fiddler Timber Sale. Forest Service law enforcement officers and Josephine County Sheriffs escorted loggers to the site at 6:30 am where they encountered a large crowd effectively blocking all access to the sale units.
After issuing an order to disperse, 72-year-old Selma resident Joan Norman sat in the middle of the bridge, refusing to move. “We have no laws in our forest so we will be the law,” said Norman, before law enforcement officers carried her off to be arrested, charging her with interfering with an agricultural operation. Two other individuals were arrested at the Green Bridge.
This is what I mean when I say that activists should focus on being their own media.
Jeff Reifman’s new project, CommonBits, which hosts (legal) progressive political media content for distribution via BitTorrent has been Slashdotted. Nice.
Dave Roberts at Grist asks How can we get corporations to operate more sustainably?
I think that’s the wrong question, entirely. A better question would be: how can we reclaim our democracy from corporations, and start having We The People (remember them?) making the fundamental decisions about what goes on in our communities?
It’s not about greenwashing vs. corporate responsibility. It’s about addressing the fact that corporations — legal fictions which don’t eat, breathe, bleed, shit, love or die — have managed to claim the same legal rights as people, and are using those rights to overpower the sovereign rights of people.
Don’t think it’s happening? Check out this segment from NOW, which covers the story of Frank Stern, whose right to serve as an elected official in his hometown was challenged by a quarry corporation.
That’s a more interesting conversation, but perhaps less profitable for “green business” consultants.
Like Dave Pollard, I often feel that I struggle with being unfocused, good a bunch of things bu t not really excellent at anything. Dave seems pretty bummed about it, but I’d offer the observation that the folks who really effect change in the world as leaders (rather than innovators) tend to be great generalists.
That said, Dave offers the following tips for how to do one or two things really well — and they’re good bits of affirmation even if you’re aiming to be a great generalist.
- Believe in yourself. You can do anything if you believe. You can’t do anything if you don’t.
- Find one or two very specific things that are either very useful or very interesting, that you do (or can learn to do) really well, better than anyone else, and which you like doing.
- Hone your skill in and deepen your knowledge about those one or two things.
- Stop doing other things that distract your focus from achieving brilliance in those one or two things.
- Show others, bravely, how well you can do these things — It’s not a distinctive competency unless others recognize it as such.
- Trust your instincts to tell you what to do, what not to do, when to persevere and when to give up and try something else.