Monthly Archives: November 2009

Coolness is not innovation

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Michael Gilbert writes:

Coolness is not innovation. That which is innovative is not always cool. More importantly, that which is cool is not always innovative. Indeed, cool can be seen as inherently conservative. If an invention is not already well on its way to adoption in certain (possibly small, probably themselves cool) circles, then it is too obscure to be cool. Even if we’d never use the actual word “cool” to define our choices, the desire for coolness is powerful. It provides us with the appearance of innovation without the inherent risks of the real thing. Mistaking coolness for innovation is far from trivial. It leads to large scale investments in promises of change that do not materialize. It causes genuine innovations, which don’t tap into established tropes or status in the same way, to languish in obscurity.

Groundwire is hiring a strategist!

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Come join our team at Groundwire (formerly ONE/Northwest) and help us build a better world!

Groundwire is growing, and we’re looking for an experienced strategy consultant to join our team.   Our ideal candidate will have real world, senior level organizing and/or fundraising experience (online and offline), believe in the importance of relationship building for achieving social change, and understand the power of technology to support relationship building at scale.

Groundwire is a pretty amazing place to work — I should know, I’ve been there for thirteen years!  We have a world-class team of kick-ass people, amazing clients and are constantly pushing the intersecting wavefronts of technology and social change.

Job description and application instructions.

Sympa tip: changing domains

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As many of my readers likely know by now, my organization ONE/Northwest has just rebranded itself as Groundwire.  Obviously, our domain name changed, and with it our email addresses.  One of the many “switchover” tasks we faced was the challenge of updating our email addresses on the many Sympa-powered email lists we host.

The obvious solution is to have each user log in one-by-one and change their email address in the Sympa web UI.  This has two major disadvantages, though:

1) It’s a real pain for 2o+ users to log in and update their addresses

2) That would only affect list subscriptions, not list configurations such as owners and moderators, because Sympa doesn’t yet stores this configuration info in its database; it’s still stored in a text-based config file on the filesystem.  Ugh.

So, in the end, a twofold approach was necessary.  Here’s what I did.

Updating list subscribers in Sympa’s MySQL database

I used SQLyog, a popular Windows-based GUI front-end to MySQL.  (You could also use PHPmyadmin on your server to provide a web interface.)  I did the following queries to update onenw.org to groundwire.org in all user emails.

update user_table set user_email = replace(user_email, 'onenw.org', 'groundwire.org');
update subscriber_table set user_subscriber = replace(user_subscriber, 'onenw.org', 'groundwire.org');
update admin_table set user_admin = replace(user_admin, 'onenw.org', 'groundwire.org');

Updating list owners/moderators in Sympa’s filesystem-based config files

Sympa stores list owners and moderators in a plain-text file on the filesystem.  Here’s how I mass-updated it.

On the server command line, I navigated to sympa’s expl folder at /home/sympa/expl.  This directory contains one subdirectory for each list, and each list contains a “config” file.

I executed the command:

find . -name config | xargs perl -p -ie 's/onenw\.org/groundwire\.org/g'

This took a couple of minutes to iterate over a little more than 1000 lists.  Not blazing fast, but not too horrible.

I think a great feature addition to Sympa would be a script that would take either one email or one domain as an input, and execute these commands in parallel.