Monthly Archives: June 2005

Groundspring Releases Its Tools As Open Source — but unsupported

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Jeff Reifman, former Groundspring employee, reports that Groundspring has released EmailNow, DonateNow, Enterprise and ActionStudio as open source. The fine print: no support, no active development, no resources for community building. AdvocacyNow is being made available as a hosted service under the name eAdvocacy.

It will be interesting to see whether anyone is able and willing to pick up the ball and run with developing these codebases.

As Gunner and Katrin observed, someday this is all gonna make a great case study.

The Fourth (?) Northwest Environmental Group Executive Director To Start A Blog Is…

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…Kathy Fletcher, of People for Puget Sound!

Big congratulations to Kathy and the rest of her folks at People for Puget Sound, for recognizing the importance of the personal, frequent online communication that blogs allow. Executive Directors are busy folks, and it’s great to see Kathy taking the time to write from the heart about her work and why it’s important to her (and the planet).

Of course, being an environmental technologist/communications strategist, I have a couple of suggestions:

1) Turn on comments. A blog is a conversation, not a monologue. And it’s the conversations that blogs allow that build the relationships that justify starting a blog in the first place.

2) Turn on trackbacks. Same reasons.

3) Encourage your staff to start blogging, too. I know that lots of them are doing lots of interesting stuff, and blogging is a great way to power the voices of the folks who are “in the trenches” doing the heavy lifting of environmental protection. (Paging Jim Dawson!)

4) Post shorter, more frequent entries. It was nearly two weeks between your first and second posts. I found your blog about a week after your first post, and, when I didn’t see anything new, I almost didn’t come back. Effective blogging is all about getting folks coming back frequently (or reading your RSS feed regularly). And putting new stuff up at least once a week is pretty important. It can be short, though — in fact, short is good.

5) Spread the word among your fellow environmental E.D.s! You’re an online communications role model — talk it up!

PS… yes, the first Northwest environmental group Executive Director to start a blog is none other than ONE/Northwest’s own E.D., Gideon Rosenblatt. (Who could probably stand to post a little more often himself.)

What comes after oil? Biomass and algae, perhaps

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Jamais Cascio over at WorldChanging notes some interesting developments in biomass chemistry that may have the potential to help us transition to an oil-free economy.

Biomass is the top candidate for oil equivalents, and indeed biodiesel has been getting more attention of late as a renewable and low-net-carbon method of fueling vehicles, both by renewable energy advocates trying to move away from fossil fuels and by researchers trying to improve the efficiency of biodiesel production. Biomass is also being used as an experimental feedstock for chemicals now requiring petroleum. And by stretching the definition of biomass a bit, even fertilizer — a favorite of the apocyphiles — can be made without fossil fuels.

Interesting stuff.

The tacit dimension of tech support

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The often-insightful Jon Udell puts his finger on an oft-unstated phenomenon: the “tacit dimension of tech support.”

Jon points out that most techies “know more than they can say” because we are good at figuring out how to solve problems even if we don’t know the exact answers.

The clash of these cognitive styles — knowing how to do things versus knowing how to find out how to do things — is a source of friction between IT folk and our clientele. From our perspective, it’s annoying to be asked constantly to write down detailed step-by-step procedures. If we don’t rely on them, why should anyone else need to?

Exactly!

Jon then turns his attention to thinking about what kinds of systems we need to do a better job of using tacit knowledge. Thus enters the network.

For tasks we’ve done before, our systems should help us access the mental and muscle memories we’ve forgotten. For novel tasks, though, the unconscious knowledge we seek resides in other persons’ heads and hands. Exporting that knowledge in a shareable format is one key challenge; helping people to connect with it is another.

Google narrows the gap between knowing how to do and knowing how to find out. To close that gap completely, we’ll have to begin designing systems that facilitate easy collaboration as well as enabling discoverability.

This is the kernel of the most important idea that will govern our next generation of collaboration tools. Discoverability.

Lakoff’s new memes

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I attended George Lakoff’s public presentation on Friday night in Seattle. While it was mostly “framing for beginners,” Lakoff offered a few new memes that he’s been shopping:

  • “Progressives believe in using the commonwealth for the common good so that we can be free to pursue our personal goals.”
  • Supporting “ethical, honest business.”
  • The “conservation of governance” principle: Conservatives think that if you get rid of government, then you won’t be governed. This is false. If you get rid of government, you’ll be governed by corporations — and they’re not accountable to you *at all*.
  • 42 MPG = No mid-east oil. (Raising the average mileage standard to 42MPG would save so much oil that we wouldn’t need to import any from the middle east.)
  • George Bush is “breaking the faith” with the American people.

Lakoff also offered his opinion that left-wing talk radio such as Air America is misguided because talk radio shouting is an inherently competitive, “strict-father” type of discourse that can’t be used to advance a progressive “nurturant parent” morality.

Michael Gilbert on non-profit blogging

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Beth Kanter interviews Michael Gilbert about nonprofit blogging. Worth a read.

Ed Batista picks up on the most provocative bit:

I still find that nearly every nonprofit organization is rather afraid of the idea of blogging. It’s threatening to them to have their staff blogging, it’s too much work to have their leaders blogging, and it seems irrelevant to have their stakeholders blogging. Obviously, I support all three of these blogging strategies and I think that together they represent a resurgence of a community based form of organizing, whether in support of social service or social change. But I think the vast majority of the sector isn’t there yet.

For most of the folks I’ve worked with, “overwork” is more what’s driving blog-resistance than fear. And they are still skeptical about the network-centric communication and organization theories that underlie our empahsis on blogging.

Ode to Garlic

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Molly and I took a walk down to the Ballard Farmers Market today. I’m not exactly a new convert to the idea of eating fresh, local, organic food. But one item we got today really knocked my socks off, and reminded me just how much better real, slow food can be.

Really, really fresh garlicWe picked up the bunch of garlic you see at right from Full Circle Farm. As soon as we got it home, Molly picked it up, sniffed it, handed it to me and said, “You have got to smell this.” I inhaled deeply, and… wow. It smelled like… garlic. But fresh and deep, like it had been buried in the ground ten minutes ago.

When it came time to cook dinner, I peeled a bunch of cloves and found that they were so fresh that the skin was still moist, not dried out and papery like most garlic. I pressed the cloves and they literally almost exploded in the press — never before have I seen garlic that I would have described as juicy.

Neither did this garlic disappoint in the pan. Both the garlic chicken and garlic bread we made were fantastic. Intensely garlicky, without a hint of sharpness. Supermarket garlic (even organic supermarket garlic) just isn’t even in the same zip code. I was blown away. By garlic, humble garlic.

Thanks, Full Circle.

Rumors Put Oil Traders on Edge – New York Times

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According to the New York Times

One of OPEC’s concerns is that oil prices will quickly climb to a level where many car owners decide to switch from sport utility vehicles to compact cars, or possibly, to public transportation or carpooling. Such a change in driving habits, while still considered unlikely, might produce a scary outcome for oil-producing countries: a crash in oil prices.

You mean, like, the best way to stick it to the oil barons is to drive less? Riding the bus helps boost our national security? I’m shocked, shocked.

Seattle’s green Web sites

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ONE/Northwest, along with our friends at Grist, Eco Encore, ActionStudio, Sustainable Style and Sustainable Industries Journal were featured in a Seattle P-I front-page-of-the-local-section article today entitled Seattle’s green Web sites: Laugh or the planet gets it!

Not the greatest article in the world — they did a nice job of covering Grist, and gave Eco Encore a good little plug, but they spelled our name wrong, and misidentified our ED Gideon Rosenblatt as our founder.

But hey, any press is good press, right?

ActionStudio reborn

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I’m pleased to report that Jeff Reifman has rescued ActionStudio from the train wreck created by Groundspring’s recent organizational turmoil.

He’s relaunched his low-cost, high-featured online activism tool as eAdvocacy from ActionStudio.

eAdvocacy is a great tool for doing online petitions and contact-your-decisionmaker elements. It offers a great blend of powerful features at a bargain-basement price — $50/month plus a penny per email.

ONE/Northwest will be enthusiastically recommending both eAdvocacy and Democracy in Action to folks who are looking for solid low-end online advocacy tools.

Bad Project Warning Signs

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Andy Budd, a freelance web designer in Brighton, England, offers 10 Bad Project Warning Signs, many of which ring very very true over on this side of the pond as well. In particular:

  • The project needs to be done in an incredibly short space of time, due to a fixed deadline. In these situations the potential client has often known about the deadline for a while. However it�s taken them longer to plan the project than initially anticipated so they expect the developer to make up the time.
  • The client says they want the site to be as cheap as possible, or they have an extremely low budget. This usually means the client doesn�t value their web presence much, preferring cheaper over better. In this situation potential clients are often spending their own money, can be extremely demanding and expect more for less.
  • The client expects much more from the project than their budget will allow. In these situations it can be difficult to manage the clients expectations.

A couple of my warning signs:

  • The client is unable to articulate the outcomes/results they want from the project, or to connect those outcomes to accomplishing their organizational mission.
  • The client resists the idea of trading off features, cost and time — the classic project management “iron triangle.”
  • The client appears too busy and overwhelmed to do their part of the work on the project.

What are your warning signs?