“Measurement hasn’t tamed politics. Politics has seduced measurement.”
LiquidFeedback: What A Genuine Democratic Process Looks Like | David Bollier
Nice overview of LiquidFeedback from David Bollier
How the German Pirate Party’s “Liquid Democracy” Works | TechPresident
WorldChanging Seattle: Incentive Zoning: A Good Plan For Affordable Housing?
Security In A Box | Tools and tactics for your digital security
Armed With Data, Fighting More Than Crime – NYTimes.com
Nice overview on the spread of “CompStat” processes
Not All Nonprofit Mergers Are Created Equal | Stanford Social Innovation Review
Understanding power for social change | the powercube | IDS, Sussex University
Periodically, I trawl through the Plone Collective repository (both via Github and via PyPi) to see what folks are building but not publicizing widely via Plone.org. As usual, I found some hidden gems that I think deserve a bit wider attention.
Fair warning: I’ve tested each of these products in a Plone 4.1.5 development instance, but I’ve not deployed any in production or reviewed the code. All are written by experienced Plone community members, though, so they should be at least reasonable sane. I’d love to hear about your experiences with any of them.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderorder/1.2
Plone’s default folder view shows items in the order they were added, and while you can manually rearrange items, there’s no way to automatically resort items in a folder view. (Although you can add a collection as the default view of a folder, this is not always obvious to new users, and quite a few clicks.) With collective.folderorder, you get a new “Order” option the Actions menu for a folder, and you can easily choose from several default folder ordering schemes, including: reverse order, unordered, and partial ordering. Even better, it provides an easy way for developers to add new ordering schemes.
I’d love to see this one PLIPed for future inclusion in Plone, possibly with a few more ordering options (e.g. last modified, creation date). It’s a small but welcome UI affordance.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderposition/1.0
Another small but welcome improvement to folder ordering. This one adds a nice little set of buttons below a folder listing that allows you to move items instantly to the top, the bottom or up/down a designated number of slots. Again, super convenient when you need to rearrange a lot of folder items.
http://plone.org/products/collective.prettydate
collective.prettydate reformats the display absolute dates/times (e.g. 3/1/2012) to relative date (e.g. one month ago, four days ago, etc.) This is really nice for news sites or sites with upcoming events.
http://plone.org/products/collective.embedly
collective.embedly makes it stupidly simple to embed almost any externally hosted multimedia (YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare.net, etc.) into Plone. It uses the fantastic service “Embedly” which is itself built on the open “oembed” standard. Developers who want a bit more power may also want to look at collective.oembed.
http://plone.org/products/collective.routes
This one is a bit conceptual, but pretty awesome. From the prolific and talented Nathan Van Gheem comes collective.routes, which makes it possible to build URLs in Plone that do catalog queries, e.g. http://mysite.com/blog/date/of/blog/post. This isn’t really an end-user product, but it makes it easy for integrators to build really nice URLs for their custom Plone apps.
I’m reading an interesting short essay by John Gaventa, in which he talks about three different forms of power: visible, invisible and hidden.
Visible power is the power that plays out in formal decisionmaking processes. Social change activists participate in this through lobbying, advocacy, organizing, etc.
Hidden power is the power to set the agenda, include or exclude certain participants, etc. This kind of power is often exercised behind closed doors.
Invisible power “involves the ways in which awareness of one’s rights and interests are hidden through the adoption of dominating ideologies, values and forms of behavior by relatively powerless groups themselves.” In other words, invisible power is the creation of culture, beliefs and awareness.
The Scarcest Resource at Startups is Management Bandwidth
Also true for nonprofits. Note interesting $2M/20 people threshold.
Finding the Right Measurement Director
“New research reveals that most organizations prioritize the wrong skills in their search for a measurement director.”
Why Are Promotions Less Likely in Nonprofit Firms?
Study suggests that nonprofits have less need to use promotions as a reward and can concentrate on using them to achieve job fit.
Kingston-Seattle foot ferry costs public $35,000 for each rider
Great case study for someone’s Evans class
Beyond awesome.
I can’t quite nail the analogy, but it seems to me that if you took this article, replaced “startup” with “nonprofit” and tweaked the context a bit, it would make for an interesting conversation about the nonprofit sector.
The short version might go something like this: as in the tech startup industry, there are too many nonprofits chasing too little top-flight talent. They can’t compete on cash. </analogy ends> So instead they just don’t really compete at all.
Riffing on Marty’s recent post about the ever-lower cost of advocacy group formation… it is true that it is cheaper than ever to start an advocacy organization. As Clay Shirky observed, that is the real power of the internet, it lowers the cost of finding like-minded people. However, I think the paradox is that as the cost of forming a group declines, more groups are formed, which actually tends to increase the cost of achieving social change campaign goals.
Why? So many organizations competing for limited dollars, limited talent, limited attention, press coverage, etc. This means you have to be better than ever to punch through the noise and achieve critical mass. Most of the rewards go to the top 1%. This is not about scarcity vs. abundance, it’s recognizing that public agendas can only have so many items on them at once.
Still sorting through the implications of this. I do think Marty is right that we need to come up with new approaches to dealing with this fragmentation.
Campaigners, Power and Democracy | Campaign Central
“So campaigners need to get off the hamster wheel of stunt-poll-presser-postcard-petition. Instead spend the majority of your time gathering raw political intelligence and subjecting it to serious analysis; analysis of who has power, how they got it and how they plan to keep it. Think about not just how many people it will take to make a politician listen – but what sort of people make them nervous and why.
Developing the right theory of change and an accurate power map is the best investment you can make. That’s because, in the end, politics is simply the application of power to policy; only those who understand the former really get to change the latter. ”Smartphone-based crowd-source bicycle data collection. Super cool! Hope they open the dataset!
Why Generation Y is Causing the Great Migration of the 21st Century | PlaceShakers and NewsMakers
I’ve been reading and thinking a bit about “collective impact” lately. (Here’s the seminal article introducing the buzzword.) It’s a solid, mostly-common-sense framework for thinking about collaborative/coalition efforts. There are five elements that define a “collective impact” approach:
At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Jon, why are you wasting my time with such obvious folderol?” Most coalition efforts I’ve seen fulfill these first three conditions pretty well. Hang in there, it’s the next two that are the most interesting:
It’s these last two points where most collaborations falter, and probably not concidental that they require sustained, long-term resource commitments. How do collaborations you’re involved with stack up?
Nonprofit Finance Fund | Where Money Meets Mission
“more than 4,500 respondents at nonprofits across the country shared the details of how they are adapting their organizations and finances to economic conditions”
Amazon a virtual no-show in hometown philanthropy
Bezos: “a libertarian.”
Correlation established; causality unclear
Cheating our children: Suspicious school test scores across the nation | ajc.com
” Some of the most persistently suspicious test scores nationwide, however, occurred in districts renowned for cutting-edge reforms. “
Project Management for Non-Governmental Organisations
“The Project Management in Development (PMD Pro) is a contextualised Project Management certification which has been developed with experts from several of the world’s best-known and highly regarded non-governmental organisations. These organisations are committed to improving the use of the resources entrusted to them for development, relief and conservation projects. “
one-line python sentiment analysis.
In fifteen years of consulting work, I learned the hard way how to say “no” to projects. It was always a little bit painful, because, like most consultants, I was very dedicated to “being of service” and turning down a project always felt a little bit like a violation of that core value. But as I came to learn, you only harm yourself and the client by taking on a project that you suspect is teed up for failure, and over time, my colleagues came up with a pretty finely tuned set of requirements for what makes for a successful project.
Here’s short list of the reasons why consultants should sometimes say a polite but firm “no” to projects:
Chicago News Cooperative “Suspending” Operations
Another “new model for civic journalism” site bites the dust. 
Mobilizing websites with responsive design and HTML5 tutorial
NYTimes Matt Bai on “Flash Movements” of the Left and Right | TechPresident
“According to Matt Bai, the chief political correspondent for the New York Times Magazine, the progressive netroots upsurge of the mid-2000s and the rise of the Tea Party from 2009 to present are two variations on a common theme: they are “flash movements” born of online connections, cathartic urges and the devaluation of expertise. And unlike the big social movements of the past, he said both movements were merely oppositional and “ephemeral,” unlikely to bring big changes to government.”
Shareable: Governance of Open Source: George Dafermos Interview
Great article on the limitations of “root cause analysis”
Salon publishes less, gets more traffic
We’ve tried to work longer on stories for greater impact, and publish fewer quick-takes that we know you can consume elsewhere. We’re actually publishing, on average, roughly one-third fewer posts on Salon than we were a year ago (from 848 to 572 in December; 943 to 602 in January). So: 33 percent fewer posts; 40 percent greater traffic.
Paul Beaudet | The Center for Effective Philanthropy
Three nice articles from Paul on effective grantmaking practices
NodeXL Graph Gallery: About NodeXL
“NodeXL is a free, open-source template for Microsoft® Excel® 2007 and 2010 that lets you enter a network edge list into a workbook, click a button, and see the network graph, all in the familiar environment of the Excel® window. “
Gates Foundation’s Tweets reveal passive, insular global health community
Interesting social network analysis
Reactivating inactive supporters
Nice methodology for segmenting, reactivating and gently purging inactive supporters
Mesmerized by Metrics: Is Philanthropy Engaging in Magical Thinking?
Interesting food for thought.