Monthly Archives: August 2005

NPower Seattle Adopts Plone as Their Preferred Open-Source CMS

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Our friends and former neighbors at NPower Seattle have recently chosen to standardize their nonprofit web development work on Plone.

Seriously, we’re tremendously excited to see other nonprofit tech assistance providers jumping onboard the Plone train. Not only because it’s a validation of the platform, but because it helps to create a tight community of developers and consultants who can draw on each other for both formal and informal support, code and ideas. In fact, the Pacific Northwest is fast becoming something of a hotbed of nonprofit Ploning, what with us, Netcorps, and NPowerSeattle all jumping on board.

In keeping with NPower Seattle’s reputation for meticulous documentation, they’ve already got a community site up to document their spin-up process. We’ve got one, too, but it somewhat more focused on providing documentation for our end-users and quite frankly we haven’t put as much of our developer-knowledge in there as we oughta.

Also worth noting is the new Seattle Plone website by Brian Gerson and ONE/Northwest’s own Andrew Burkhalter. And our friends at DharmaTech in Salt Lake City who are getting ramped up on building Plone-powered sites for enviros in the Intermountain West.

Yow.

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Not looking so good for New Orleans:

URGENT – WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE NEW ORLEANS LA 413 PM CDT SUN AUG 28 2005

EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE KATRINA CONTINUES TO APPROACH THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER DELTA DEVASTATING DAMAGE EXPECTED MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS…PERHAPS LONGER.

AT LEAST ONE HALF OF WELL CONSTRUCTED HOMES WILL HAVE ROOF AND WALL FAILURE. ALL GABLED ROOFS WILL FAIL…LEAVING THOSE HOMES SEVERELY DAMAGED OR DESTROYED.

THE MAJORITY OF INDUSTRIAL BUILDINGS WILL BECOME NON FUNCTIONAL. PARTIAL TO COMPLETE WALL AND ROOF FAILURE IS EXPECTED.

ALL WOOD FRAMED LOW RISING APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL BE DESTROYED. CONCRETE BLOCK LOW RISE APARTMENTS WILL SUSTAIN MAJOR DAMAGE…INCLUDING SOME WALL AND ROOF FAILURE.

HIGH RISE OFFICE AND APARTMENT BUILDINGS WILL SWAY DANGEROUSLY…A FEW TO THE POINT OF TOTAL COLLAPSE.

ALL WINDOWS WILL BLOW OUT. AIRBORNE DEBRIS WILL BE WIDESPREAD…AND MAY INCLUDE HEAVY ITEMS SUCH AS HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCES AND EVEN LIGHT VEHICLES. SPORT UTILITY VEHICLES AND LIGHT TRUCKS WILL BE MOVED. THE BLOWN DEBRIS WILL CREATE ADDITIONAL DESTRUCTION.

PERSONS…PETS…AND LIVESTOCK EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL FACE CERTAIN DEATH IF STRUCK. POWER OUTAGES WILL LAST FOR WEEKS…AS MOST POWER POLES WILL BE DOWN AND TRANSFORMERS DESTROYED.

WATER SHORTAGES WILL MAKE HUMAN SUFFERING INCREDIBLE BY MODERN STANDARDS.

THE VAST MAJORITY OF NATIVE TREES WILL BE SNAPPED OR UPROOTED. ONLY THE HEARTIEST WILL REMAIN STANDING…BUT BE TOTALLY DEFOLIATED. FEW CROPS WILL REMAIN. LIVESTOCK LEFT EXPOSED TO THE WINDS WILL BE KILLED.

Harsh words for Bush — and Democrats

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Frank Rich of the New York Times has some harsh words for both Bush and Democrats on Iraq:

It isn’t just Mr. Bush who is in a tight corner now. Ms. Sheehan’s protest was the catalyst for a new national argument about the war that managed to expose both the intellectual bankruptcy of its remaining supporters on the right and the utter bankruptcy of the Democrats who had rubber-stamped this misadventure in the first place. When the war’s die-hard cheerleaders attacked the Middle East policy of a mother from Vacaville, Calif., instead of defending the president’s policy in Iraq, it was definitive proof that there is little cogent defense left to be made. When the Democrats offered no alternative to either Mr. Bush’s policy or Ms. Sheehan’s plea for an immediate withdrawal, it was proof that they have no standing in the debate.

Replacing textbooks with laptops

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Back in my senior year of college, in 1995, at the dawn of the internet revolution (or whatever), it first occurred to me that laptops could someday replace printed textbooks. Ten years later, it looks like the future has caught up. One Arizona high school has done away with textbooks and issued laptops to all students instead. It will be interesting to see how this experiment works out. It will be even more interesting when pen-based computing technology matures one more generation.

We just launched Snowleopard.org

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Snow LeopardMy brilliant colleagues at ONE/Northwest and our talented collaborators at LightSky Designs and RagingWeb just helped Snow Leopard Trust launch their new website.

It’s a beautiful site, with a ton of great content and some eye-popping photos of these magnificent cats and the communities they live among. Some notable features from a technical point of view:

  • Like all of the websites we do, Snowleopard.org is powered by Plone, the most powerful and easy-to-use open-source content management system around. Plone makes it easy for Snow Leopard Trust staff to maintain a large, complex site.

  • This was our first major site with “full-on” e-commerce functionality. Snow Leopard Trust helps build sustainable economies in the communities that live in snow leopard country, and they sell a bunch of beautiful handicrafts through their new online store. We implemented the store with ZenCart, a popular open-source e-commerce applicaiton, which were able to seamlessly integrate with the main Plone-powered site using Zope’s MySQL database adapter.

  • We built a simple e-card feature that lets site visitors send online cards built around some of Snow Leopard Trust’s incredible photos.

  • We also helped Snow Leopard Trust put their photos to good use by building a simple slideshow module. We adapted Plone’s default ATPhotoAlbum functionality and cross-fertilzed that with slideshow features from Oxfam America’s Plone-powered site.

As with many projects, the requirements changed and expanded over the 12 months that elapsed between our first conversation and this week’s launch. Fortunately, Plone’s Archetypes framework and ATContentTypes made it easy for us to accomodate Snow Leopard Trust’s evolving ambitions and increasing sophistication even as the project was already underway.

Check it out. It’s a beatiful site that really showcases what can happen when you put best-of-breed tools into the hands of people who are doing great work on the ground.

Seattle Times Profiles CommonMedia

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The Seattle Times’ Kristi Helm offers a nice profile of CommonMedia and its founder, my friend, Jeff Reifman.

What it does: CommonMedia’s collection of Web sites acts as a platform to distribute free music and video for download, plus an online newspaper whose front page is determined by story selections of readers.

Of particular note is CommonTimes, which is news aggregator powered by its users. It’s full of all that Web 2.0 goodness that early adopters love, including Tags, RSS Feeds, Greasemonkey scripts, social networking and more.

Future: Reifman sees the Common Times model as a worthy challenger to Google News because it takes Web news a step further through the use of tags and reader selection. His site has had 2 million page views so far this year.

I recently wrote about CommonTimes in ONEList, too.

LinguaPlone: Building Multilingual Websites with Plone

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If you’re thinking about building a multi-language website using an open-source CMS, then you should probably be using Plone.

Why? In a word: LinguaPlone.

LinguaPlone is a drop-in product for Plone that instantly enables you to build multilingual websites that “just work.” Other CMSes have multilingual user interfaces (and so does Plone, translated into 40 languages!), but only Plone gives you a framework for creating and managing translated versions of your content.

Plone’s multi-language capabilities should be of particular interest to anyone building websites for nonprofits, especially for international NGOs or organizations that are serving diverse populations here in the US.

I don’t even build multilingual websites, but LinguaPlone makes me want to. Nice work, PloneSolutions!

Why one project chose Drupal over Plone

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Alexandra Samuel recently evaluated Plone, Drupal and a bunch of other CMS platforms for a project involving the creation of a network of websites that want to exchange a great deal of information via RSS.

In the end, she chose Drupal, mainly because it had built-in RSS aggregation features.

It was interesting to note what she said about Plone in her writeup:

As a CMS based on the Zope platform, Plone offers much greater programming extensibility than other CMS options we considered. The flip side of this virtue is that Plone’s relative advantages are much less compelling for a project that (like telecentre.org) specifically wants to limit its custom programming commitments.

Ultimately our biggest concern was that Plone’s RSS aggregation capacity was not part of its standard install; while adding an aggregation module is a trivial technical challenge, the lack of native aggregation support spoke to the platform’s orientation towards single-site content management rather than distributed community.

Getting Your Email On

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Emily Thorson of EchoDitto offers some great pointers on why and how to write compelling emails, which are they key to driving online action.

Real-life fact: email drives traffic and participations. Implications:
  1. Stop stressing about your website. Yes, it should have regularly updated content and look halfway professional. But it shouldn’t drive your strategy, it should be driven by your strategy.
  2. Figure out what organizations have big lists and befriend them. In DC, this might mean MoveOn or Democracy for America. If you’re running a local organization, it might be your local Planned Parenthood or League of Conservation Voter chapter.
  3. Always be growing. Constantly ask yourself “How can I make this into a list-growth activity?” Tell your list to tell a friend. Do campaigns that encourage signups. Partner with other organizations.
  4. Write decent emails. Just follow a simple principle: write emails as if you’re talking to a friend. There are a couple of points that go along with this.
    • Your emails should be from human beings, not organizations. Put the name of a person in the subject line. The candidate, the campaign manager, whoever.
    • I try to do a “term paper check” a few hours after writing my first draft, where I go through and figure out which sentences sound like they belong in a political science paper, and delete them.
    • No email newsletters! People have very, very short attention spans. Figure out the action you want the email to focus on, and write the email around that link. Paragraph, link, paragraph, link, paragraph, link, signature. PS: link. Even though you also want to include a link to the photo gallery, and the front page, and the campaign you did last week, and the event calendar…don’t do it! Just pick one. Just pick ONE.
    • Write out the link. This sounds petty, but it makes such a huge difference that I would be remiss in not mentioning it. Do not make “click here” into a link. do not make the name of your campaign into a link. Write the whole thing out, with the http://www. for each one. People like to know where they’re going when they click.

Are Enviros Sitting Out “The Big Game”?

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Jon Christensen calls out the environmental movement for failing to engage with issues of international poverty and development.

It’s a shame. Conservationists are sitting on the sidelines while the Big Game unfolds before our eyes. A major campaign is under way to change the terms of development, alleviate crushing debt, and help poor people around the world live better lives. Successes are being racked up. And conservation and environmental groups are nowhere to be seen.

There are 29 groups listed as partners in The Campaign to Make Poverty History at www.one.org. Not one of them is a conservation or environmental organization.

Good governance — which starts with free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, and property rights � needs to be pushed further to embrace conservation of ecosystem services and biodiversity through good laws, adequate administration, and practical incentives that work for people on the land.

It’s a fair point.

Lakoff Deconstructs GSAVE

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Everybody’s favorite frame-meister, George Lakoff, analyzes the framing of the “Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism”.

It is important to note the date on which the phrase “war on terror” died and was replaced by “global struggle against violent extremism.” It was right after the London bombing. Using the War frame to think and talk about terrorism was becoming more difficult. The Iraq War was declared won and over, but it became clear that it was far from over and not at all won and that it created many new terrorists for every one it destroyed. The last justification — fighting the war on terror in Iraq so it wouldn’t have to be fought at home — died in the London bombing.

And so the term “War on Terror” had to go.

The new phrase is less comprehensible, long, complicated. You almost have to memorize it: “global struggle against…” what was that exact wording again…? Oh yeah, “violent extremism.” It doesn’t sound like poetry, but it a perverse way it is. It says the administration’s policy is like the words for it: hard to comprehend, long, complicated. The new phrase is not memorable, and that’s the point.

Gizmo: at last, a solid competitor to Skype

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I’ve been playing around with Gizmo the past couple of days. Gizmo is a free, P2P internet telephony product that is very similiar in many ways to the extremely popular Skype. However, unlike Skype, it is based on SIP, an open-standard for making internet phone calls, which means that Gizmo can make and receive calls from other internet phone networks. Which is a pretty big deal.

Gizmo’s not the first SIP client out there, but it’s extremely well designed, and appears to have little difficulty traversing firewalls and NAT routers, which is often a challenge for SIP-based products.

Like Skype, Gizmo offers end-to-end call encryption, the option to add cheap inbound and outbound calls to landlines, and has great sound quality.

Major plus over Skype: built-in call recording. This will be incredibly useful for podcasters and others who want to record high-quality interviews online.

Major downside compared to Skype: no built-in instant messaging. That’s a bummer, but I suspect it will be addressed soon, as folks are clamoring for it in the forums.

It’s nice to a see a credible competitor to Skype enter the market. Hopefully it will spur another round of rapid innovation.