Monthly Archives: October 2005

Heirs to Alinksy Organize Katrina Survivors

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Nice story today in the New York Times about how nuts-and-bolts community organizers are helping Katrina survivors pull together to cope with disater and reconstruction:

In the two months since Hurricane Katrina hit, the Metropolitan Organization, a group of professional organizers affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation, a grass-roots network founded by the Chicago radical Saul D. Alinsky, has been busy sowing nonpartisan political activism and mobilizing survivors to champion their own interests in resettlement and rebuilding decisions.

The Metropolitan Organization, active for 25 years in Houston, has toned down the confrontational playbook applied by Mr. Alinsky and his followers in the Depression-ravaged 1930′s and the revolutionary 1960′s. Today, organizers seek alliances with partners like religious groups, schools and unions, while identifying and grooming local leadership.

Good stuff. There’s no effective substitute for putting real people out into community to help people solve their own problems.

“The iron rule in organizing is, ‘Don’t do for people what they can do for themselves,’ ” Broderick Bagert, one of the group’s organizers, said at a meeting at a church last month that brought survivors of Hurricane Katrina face to face with public officials.

Plone Calendaring Sprint

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I’m very excited to hear that Nate Aune is organizing a Plone Calendaring Sprint for San Francisco in early December. Exact location and date are still TBD.

Their list of proposed topics, which includes a strong focus on interactivity and syndication, is excellent. And it represents a strong move in the direction of “Plone as social software” — a evolution that I believe Plone needs and for which it is extremely well-positioned.

KNotes Skinning

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Mike Malloch talks about his recent experiments at developing ‘cleaner’ skins for KNotes, his forthcoming Plone power-blogging tool, which you can see in action on his ELearning 2.0 blog.

I like the direction the look is heading. My major usability concerns at this point (for readers, anyway) are in the discussion interface. Right now, the discussion on a post is in a separate pop-up window (apparently based on the KFastFolders product) from the main post itself. And the UI for that screen is complex, unfamiliar and rather off-putting for a casual reader. (Or even a not-so-casual reader such as myself.)

I would suggest that the KNotes team implement a more standard threaded discussion view beneath the full blog post, and make the “Fast Folders” style view an option that can be turned off.

How Plone Can Become Kick-Ass Community Collaboration Software

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The quality and power of Plone as a content management system is incredible. It’s got incredible usability, workflow, permissioning, document handling, search, extensibility, internationalization, accessibility — and more. We’ve launched over 40 Plone-powered sites for non-technical clients in the past year with a very small team of people.

However, for websites that revolve around “community” and “collaboration” (whatever those things mean, and believe me I’m often very cynical) I think that Plone’s community collaboration features could use some improvement.

The good news is that most of these features have pretty solid products that already get us 80% of the way there — they just need some focused “polishing.” Here are some thoughts drawn from our experiences at ONE/Northwest, and some of my hopes for the future.

But before I dive in, I apologize in advance. These are all pretty raw thoughts, and there’s likely a lot of half-baked ideas and not-so-great conclusions in here. I thought it better to spit this out into the world to see what response it would attract than to spend too much time polishing it to a sheen.

Continue reading →

Tags more useful for individuals than groups?

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Darren Barefoot rants against tags, perhaps a bit hyperbolic (but a welcome tonic these days). There’s a gem in the first comment though:

…tags only work well for individuals who know what they will tag something with. That is, if I need to find a URL or know I linked to something that’s related to something else, then I search for a tag that, based on what I know about myself, I would use to categorize it. Aggregating individuals’ tags to determine what the category something belongs to so far hasn’t delivered on its promise, which is a “wisdom of crowds” of categorization.

Tagging may seem more social than it really is. Food for thought.

Google Earmarks $265m for Social Change: Focus on Global Poverty and the Environment

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Wow. The NYTimes is reporting that Google Earmarks $265 Million for Charity and Social Causes. Priorities will be global poverty and the environment. Strategies will include not only traditional grantmaking, but investments in socially useful businesses, and into policy work.

Wow. And $265 million is just the start.

This should be interesting.

One reason we like Plone: real, serious companies are investing in

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One of the many reasons that we at ONE/Northwest like to do web development using Plone is because there are serious companies investing serious money in it.

A great example of this is the Goldegg initiative, which is being organized by Cignex, a leading Plone/Zope development shop and funded by one of their large public-sector clients. They’ve even just put out a press release.

Goldegg is going to do a bunch of “plumbing” work on the Plone/CMF/Zope stack, the end result of which will be a “future-proof” Plone that is suitable for serious enterprise content management projects.

What I love about this is that it lets smallfries like us leverage much larger investments by big customers. And unlike corporate investments in PHP or MySQL, which are also good, these investments are much, much closer to the website end-user.

Good pushback

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Nicholas Carr offers some intelligent push-back against the overzealous quasi-religious internet cheerleaders.

I’m all for blogs and blogging. (I’m writing this, ain’t I?) But I’m not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere – its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological extremism and segregation. Now, all the same criticisms can (and should) be hurled at segments of the mainstream media. And yet, at its best, the mainstream media is able to do things that are different from – and, yes, more important than – what bloggers can do. Those despised “people in a back room” can fund in-depth reporting and research. They can underwrite projects that can take months or years to reach fruition – or that may fail altogether. They can hire and pay talented people who would not be able to survive as sole proprietors on the Internet. They can employ editors and proofreaders and other unsung protectors of quality work. They can place, with equal weight, opposing ideologies on the same page. Forced to choose between reading blogs and subscribing to, say, the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Atlantic, and the Economist, I will choose the latter. I will take the professionals over the amateurs.

But I don’t want to be forced to make that choice.

Using Del.icio.us to tag Plone-powered sites

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Del.icio.us is a great way for the Plone community to quickly build a readily-accessible list of Plone-powered websites. But it would sure be a lot easier if we could use a common tag. Right now I can find at least four tags that folks are using for this purpose:

http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-site http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-sites http://del.icio.us/tag/plonesite http://del.icio.us/tag/plonesites

The most popular tag of these four appears to be “plone-site.” So I humbly suggest that Plone users, developers and just-plain-Plone-fans concentrate their Plone-site-tagging efforts on “plone-site.”

Which lawsuits NOT to publicize

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Most environmental groups I know blast out press releases trumpeting every lawsuit they file. (Here’s the kind of story that such press releases generate.) Recently, my colleagues Liz Banse and Harlin Savage at Resource Media have started advising environmental organizations that maybe, just maybe, they’d better off NOT trumpeting some of their lawsuits to the media. I recently had the pleasure of attending a conference session they presented on lawsuit legal strategy, and here are a few notes from their excellent presentation.

Liz and Harlin made a distinction between “damages” lawsuits, where we’re suing a bad actor for damage they’ve caused, and “process” lawsuits, where we’re trying to get the government to follow its own damn laws and/or rules. They suggest that while it’s great to publicize “damages” lawsuits, where there’s a clear harm, a clear bad guy and we’re playing the obvious role of the hero, but that perhaps we should avoid trumpeting our “process” lawsuits.

Liz and Harlin offered a few reasons why bragging about process lawsuits might do more harm than good:

  • Media coverage doesn’t actually affect the outcome of process lawsuits. And it may hurt our long-term public image, because…

  • The storyline of process lawsuits, which (unlike “damages” lawsuits) lack clear heroes, villains and harms, makes it easy for eco-destroyers to paint environmentalists as legal obstructionists, yadda yadda yadda.

Note that Liz and Harlin didn’t say that environmentalists should stop filing process lawsuits — merely that they should stop relfexively sending out press releases to announce them, unless they’re really sure that the resulting press coverage is actually good for the organization’s long-term communications goals.

I think it’s solid advice. Too bad more folks aren’t following it. What say you?

Dynamic Drop-Downs in Plone

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ZopeMag Weekly News offers the following ideas about building dynamic drop-drown menus for Plone:

Anton Stonor answered: “The easiest approach is to buy or grap a well working javascript dropdown menu such as Ultimate Drop Down Menu.” “To feed the menu with data you could:” 1. Hardcode it. The fastest solution if your site doesn’t change structure, but not very elegant. 2. Build it dynamically–look at the scripts that build the standard navigation tree. 3. The best solution: write a Plone “generator” for the Menugenerator (from Collective CVS). I will give you different kinds of dynamic menus to choose from (“emitters”) and you would make the Plone community happy. 4. Combine 2 and Menugenerator

Has anybody actually successfully implemented any of these?