Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in General on Mar 8th, 2010
The Unpardonable Absence of a Democratic “Attack Machine” “Time to Start Taking The Internet Seriously” by David Gelernter Great read. Openness can make citizens collaborators with officials Day Traders and Campaign Plans Obama Finally Keeps His Word [...]
Posted in General on Mar 7th, 2010
Slurm!! Originally uploaded by jonstahl Molly and I are in love with these nightlights we just bought. Slurm, anyone?
Posted in General on Mar 4th, 2010
Copenhagen was doomed to failure from the day that Obama decided to do health care in 2009 and not climate legislation. Enviros should have recognized this and responded by de-emphasizing the strategic importance of Copenhagen, and focusing their limited resources to prepare for 2010.
Posted in General on Mar 2nd, 2010
Last June, I wrote up some initial thoughts about how Plone could to more to help folks with limited experience preparing images for the web. It got quite a bit of favorable response, but then I went off on sabbatical and haven’t followed up, until now. I’m more convinced than ever that this is a [...]
Posted in General on Feb 28th, 2010
I’ve had a Squeezebox as my digital music system for over three years now; it’s still one of the best few hundred bucks I’ve ever spent on electronics. The Squeezebox’s server software runs on a server. Since 2006, I’ve been using an old Dell Dimension 2350 that we had lying around. But this weekend, I upgraded [...]
Posted in General on Feb 18th, 2010
Shortly before dashing out the door for Pycon 2010, David Glick pushed out a 1.0 release of Popup Forms for Plone, which he and Steve McMahon built on top of Steve’s excellent Pipbox and PloneFormGen products. Popup Forms for Plone makes it point-and-click easy to create timer-driven javascript popup forms anywhere in your Plone site. You [...]
Posted in General on Feb 18th, 2010
Here’s a pattern I’ve observed. Many website design clients, especially those who have never been responsible for a website project before, expect to a process that goes roughly like this: 1) Talk about requirements 2) Do a complete graphic design 3) Fully implement the design in the site 4) Then move on to building out the functional elements [...]
Posted in General on Feb 17th, 2010
We’ve got two open positions at Groundwire right now: one for a CRM database consultant and one for a manager for our “Groundwire Labs” innovation program. Both are incredible opportunities for a creative, entrepreneurial social change technologist who wants to join one of the most accomplished teams in the nonprofit sector. I’ve been here for nearly [...]
Posted in General on Feb 10th, 2010
Faux Friendship – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher EducationWow, fascinating and damning indictment of “online friendship.”How Google Buzz Is Disruptive – Open Data Standards – NYTimes.comI would like this to be true. Oh please.
Posted in General on Feb 9th, 2010
Worldchanging: Bright Green: Where Did We Go Wrong on "Green Jobs"?Some really interesting, thoughtful conversation here.David Glick: Reflections on building a member directory using Plone and Salesforce.comCorrecting the Oil Industry’s ErrorsJon Stewart Disembowels, Eviscerates, Then Destroys The Blogosphere (VIDEO) | TPM LiveWireFunny and on point. Boom!State Senate votes to ban chemical BPA in baby [...]
Posted in General on Feb 4th, 2010
Access Denied: Abuses and Failures Under BC's FOI Act — Dogwood InitiativeGreat report from Dogwood InitiativePutting Kemper Freeman Jr. in his placeWhat Should SR-520 Be?
Posted in General on Feb 1st, 2010
Recession Forces Nonprofits to Consolidate – WSJ.comHmm, more anecdotes, but no hard data on the actual number of nonprofits merging or closing. Does anybody track this?Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider's guide to the fight – Charlie's DiaryTotally fascinating.A "shock jock" in Montana has a great fall — High Country NewsGood news for decency.
Posted in General on Jan 30th, 2010
Do you tend to see innovations as massive paradigm-shifting change, or as the incremental achievements built on longer-term trends? Obviously, there’s some truth in both perspectives, but I think that most people have a tendency to lean one way or the other in how they interpret what’s going on in the world. If you know me, [...]
Posted in General on Jan 28th, 2010
I’ve been thinking a bunch about the challenges of making cultural transformation in the organizations I work with here at Groundwire. It’s a tough challenge. The first step, it seems, is about naming the changes we want to help folks make. Here are some rough notes that popped out as I was gathering my thoughts for [...]
Posted in General on Jan 26th, 2010
The Six Americas of Climate ChangeThe Facts of Cap and Trade
Posted in General on Jan 24th, 2010
Center for a New American Dream has a nicely done “Alternative Gift Registry” tool (currently the #4 Google result for “gift registry”!) that allows you to create gift registries that de-emphasize consumerism (used goods, donations to charity, experiences rather than stuff, etc.). This is a great example of a nonprofit advocacy group coming up with [...]
Posted in General on Jan 24th, 2010
Continuing on the theme of quick-and-dirty benchmarking of the forthcoming Plone 4 release, I decided to revisit an experiment I did about a year ago in which I looked at the memory usage on startup of Plone 3 vs. Plone 4. In December 2008, I found that Plone trunk used 36% less memory on startup [...]
Posted in General on Jan 21st, 2010
Profiting From Haiti’s CrisisThe limits of innovationNew York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site – NYTimes.comNYTimes plans a modern, flexible paywall. I actually hope it succeeds, quality journalism needs a good business model.The Seattle TalksSpeaker Chopp unfurls his tax roadmap“See you lata’” is the new “beta.” Exploring an epidemic of opting out.New [...]
If you didn’t already think that one of the most important long-term issues in our society is the twin hydra of corporate personhood and campaign finance reform, today’s Supreme Court ruling should be a shocking eye-opener for you. Make no mistake, this is serious, worrisome stuff. It’s time for all of the groups in the “progressive” [...]
Posted in General on Jan 19th, 2010
Plone 4 is about to leave its alpha testing phase and enter beta testing prior to a final release. One of the many things the Plone team has worked really hard on in this release cycle is improving Plone’s performance. Plone core developer Hanno Schlichting has blogged about this a number of times, and deserves [...]