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another simple tool for finding meeting times
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Meeting scheduling tool for Outlook
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great compendium of open-source project management wisdom
links for 2007-02-01
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Monthly Archives: January 2007
Jon Udell Says “Integration Is Hard”
… and he’s just talking about connecting Outlook 2007 and Google Calendar!
Bottom-line: support for standards is necessary but not sufficient. Even when products comply with standards like iCal, people struggle mightily to use those products interoperably. It’s the conceptual barriers that get in their way. It’s really hard to figure out how a concept expressed in one system maps to the same (or a similar) concept in another system. To make that easier, technology providers will have to agree on more than just protocols and file formats. We’ll also have to work together to minimize conceptual clutter and normalize core concepts.
Good to keep this in mind as we move forward with integrating wildly different social change tools.
links for 2007-01-30
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another promising linux-based exchange-replacement
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infoworld review of zimbra and scalix
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free website demographics
Walkabout
One of the nicest things about Seattle is that rare, sparkly-sunny winter’s day. Molly and I took a walk down to Carkeek Park, and discovered some great frost hidden in a shady ravine.
links for 2007-01-19
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The idea with Apex is that Salesforce.com customers—and perhaps more importantly, partners—can develop applications and components, using not only the Apex code and dev tools, but Salesforce.com infrastructure services as well—an operating system, d
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sierra club attempts to find the best/worst of “big oil”(tags: environment energy)
Reading the tea leaves
Yesterday’s big nonprofit technology news was Convio’s acquisition of GetActive, which combines two of the largest players in the big-client integrated CMS/CRM market.
The players aren’t really talking about the underlying motivations behind the deal, so it’s pretty easy to read whatever you want into the tea leaves. That said…
As I’ve written before, I believe that the tide is running against big, monolithic applications that do everything for everyone, and that in the future we’ll see a larger ecosystem of lighter-weight applications that do a couple of things well, are easy to extend and, most importantly, assume they need to talk to each other.
For this reason, among others, I’ve signed the Integration Proclamation, which calls on our entire sector to engage in the conversations needed to drive that future ahead.
There’s also some good discussion over on Michael Silberman’s blog. If you’re interested in seeing more tools that play well together, rather than fewer, larger “one size fits most” vendors, then I encourage you to sign it as well.
Does anyone else think it’s funny…
… that a Seattle condo marketing guy is named “Warren Ballard?”
(Sorry all you non-Seattle folks. Move along.)
links for 2007-01-17
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In a first-of-its-kind alliance that could fundamentally reshape the environmental movement, 20 labor unions with nearly 5 million members are joining forces with a Republican-leaning umbrella group of conservationists — the Theodore Roosevelt Conservati(tags: environment)
Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
I love it when the General gets all environmental.
Have you considered the possibility that the people’s wickedness is something they’ve learned from the wolves? Think about it. Alpha male wolves take multiple wives. They’re just as bad as the Mormons. What kind of example is that for our children? The sight of these alpha males engaging in adultery all over the woods has to affect them. If we don’t wipe the wolves from Idaho’s forests, we will be cursed with a generation of fornicators.
links for 2007-01-16
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Wiki-style bill tracker. only for TX and Congress so far. relies on users to input bills.
links for 2007-01-15
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Outlook 2007 will have severely crippled support for CSS-formatted HTML emails. Say goodbye to fancy, standards-compliant email newsletters.(tags: email-newsletters design)
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New word of the day “stigmergic.” Interesting economic theory of why open source works, despite what traditional economic theory suggests.
Rime Ice in Seattle
It’s not every day that my neighborhood is coated in rime ice. Kinda pretty.
links for 2007-01-13
Ideas for Fun, Green Software “Widgets”
David Hsu brainstorms up some great ideas for green software mini-applications (now commonly called “widgets”).
My favorite is actually his first, a paper calculator:
Paper calculator: [I'd like] A nice little toolbar application that tells me how many pages I’ve printed today, this week, this month and this year. If someone could combine this with this useful web-based calculator from EPA and Environmental Defense, then I could get a running tally of the environmental impacts of my printing decisions, and perhaps I would think twice about how much I print.
Simple, self-contained, and provides direct feedback to change your behavior.
I also really like idea #3, “food advisory”:
Food advisory: Again, it would be nice to know what the environmental impacts of my eating decisions are. In the same handy way that the Monterey Bay Aquarium has developed a nice pocket-sized guide to sustainable seafood, it would be nice to have this as a more extensive cell phone service in the same way that Google has made product pricing, weather, and movie information available as a free SMS service. This would, of course, require someone to keep a database of food’s environmental impacts. Or, can someone tell me, does such a thing already exist?
links for 2007-01-08
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nice roundup of new online backup services
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nice general piece debunking pro and anti open source myths. great reading for anyone considering open-source CMS
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new consumer-oriented environmental marketing research c3
links for 2007-01-06
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AsteriskNOW™ is an open source Software Appliance; a customized Linux distribution that includes Asterisk®, the Asterisk GUI, and all other software needed for an Asterisk® system.
Proclaim: Integrate!
My colleagues and I from ONE/Northwest recently signed onto the Integration Proclamation, a first step towards encouraging funders, software developers and those of us who work with them to invest resources in making tools that play together better.
If you agree that social change activists need tools that assume they’re part of a larger picture, not a world unto themselves, then take 30 seconds and sign.
It’s a first step, not a solution. But solutions start with attention.
Group Information Hygiene
Eugene Eric Kim has some interesting musings on the importance of Group Information Hygiene and its importance for high performing groups. Worth a read if you’re a member of a collaborative group that aspires to, well, high performance.
links for 2007-01-03
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“We, the undersigned progressive leaders, have together identified technology integration as a top priority infrastructure need in 2007. We urge progressive funders, vendors and technologists to support a collaborative effort dedicated to ensuring that o(tags: online-advocacy integration)