Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
Posted in General on Oct 13th, 2009
Joel Burton, Chris Calloway, Chris Ewing and Chris Rossi (with some remote assistance from Alex Clark and Matthew Wilkes) just wrapped up an insanely productive sprint focused on improving ZopeSkel, the code generator for Plone integrators and developers. At the end of their in-depth write-up, they share some golden “lessons learned” about effective small-group sprinting. The [...]
Posted in General on Sep 15th, 2009
Supporters of long-term social change should not just be providing resources to organizing campaigns. They should also be focusing on helping decisionmakers become more able to hear the messages that social change campaigns are sending. What good is funding campaigns to send faxes, emails, tweets, phone calls and letters to legislators who are already overwhelmed [...]
Posted in General on Nov 20th, 2008
Google says:Today we’re launching SearchWiki, a way for you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. With just a single click you can move the results you like to the top or add a new site. You can also write notes attached to a particular site and remove results that you don’t feel belong. [...]
Posted in General on Jan 4th, 2008
David Brin, answering Edge’s big question: What have you changed your mind about?, says, somewhat off-topic: Let me close with a final surprise, that’s more of a disappointment. I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 20th, 2007
My colleagues and I at ONE/Northwest have been spending a lot of time engaging with an Open Source software development community (the folks who make Plone) over the past two years. It’s been an amazing learning experience. The following essay summarizes our experiences and attempts to tease out someulearnings both for nonprofits and for Open [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 5th, 2007
Alison Fine just wrote a report on the use of social media tools among Overbrook Foundation human rights grantees, for, um, the Overbrook Foundation. Her top-line finding: “a perpetual state of anxiety” among nonprofits about “Web 2.0″ tools: Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, meaning that grantees use the web largely as [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Sep 2nd, 2007
Remember Chandler? Mitch Kapor’s open-source “Outlook killer” that was supposed to change how we manage information forever? Well, that was a few years back, and while they still haven’t gotten to a 1.0 release, they’ve finally put out an interesting “0.7 Preview” version. And along the way, they’ve really done some amazing thinking about how [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Aug 11th, 2007
Marty shows yet again why he is one of the keenest observers in the nonprofit technology space: Direct online interaction robs the very important inattentive trust building components to relationships. Twitter, facebook, etc. provide a unique window into watching someone without paying direct attention to them. How many of you log on to do work late [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jul 11th, 2007
Managing Proprietary and Shared Platforms: A Life-Cycle View by Thomas R. Eisenmann looks like a really interesting examination of the challenges of both shared and proprietary platforms as they grow and evolve. The research shows that challenges confronting platform managers vary systematically, depending on whether the platform is proprietary or shared and on the stage of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 21st, 2007
We’re finishing up a big intranet project here at ONE/Northwest, and that led to an interesting conversation between me, Dave Averill and Gideon Rosenblatt about tagging and keywording content in a website. Here are a few notes from it. Definitions: 1) “Tags” – keywords that are stored per-item and per-user, ala del.icio.us. Plone doesn’t provide [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2007
Jeff at Lullabot is dreaming big dreams about the potential for Drupal in the social change sector. A great mix of optimism and realism. Worth paying attention to, even if you are, say, a Plone developer.
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 4th, 2007
Alex Steffen muses about innovation and green philanthropy in a network age. Worth a read — his big questions resonate strongly with our experiences here at ONE/Northwest.
Posted in Uncategorized on May 29th, 2007
More wisdom from Dave Pollard: In studying the use (and non-use, and mis-use) of various tools, I’ve come to the realization that some pretty simple rules govern whether, and how, communication tools are used: A tool has to be both simple (intuitive to learn, comfortable and versatile to use) and ubiquitous (everyone needs to have access to it) before it [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 17th, 2007
Seems like I’m not the only person thinking about website comments these days. Our friends at The Tyee have been doing some heavy duty musing on this lately, too: The Tyee just launched its new commenting system yesterday, and it’s been a very interesting ride so far. Overwhelmingly positive feedback, but of course some disgruntled commenters who [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 12th, 2007
Or does WiserEarth, Paul Hawken’s new web 2.0 community mega-wiki-directory project, seem an awful lot like a reimplementation of Idealist.org?
Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2007
My friend Jonah Bossewitch has been involved with a fascinating ‘online direct action’ campaign targeting Eli Lilly, who had been conducting an illegal “off-label” marketing campaign around their drug Zyprexa, despite knowing about the drug’s lethal side-effects.Jonah’s case study of the campaign weaves together simple, freely available technologies such as bittorrent file sharing, anonymous web [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 2nd, 2007
NewsCloud creator Jeff Reifman offers a nice guide for social news aggregation for organizations. It describes five increasingly-sophisticated techniques for groups to integrate NewsCloud-powered social news aggregation into their online activities. Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 26th, 2007
Dear Lazyweb: If you have had good (or bad) experiences with USB speakerphones, I’d love to hear about it. My gut instinct would be to spend the $129 for the Polycom Communicator, since Polycom has a pretty good reputation for quality speakerphones. But I’d love to know if there are decent quality alternatives.
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 23rd, 2007
Steve Andersen continues his series of relationship management process maps with a great “donation procesing” map:
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 21st, 2007
Whit Morriss, who recently led the fantastic Plone commuinty “BBQ Sprint” in North Carolina, published a few great bullet points of sprinting wisdom titled “Get Your Sprint On.” Don’t [work|code|drink] aloneSprints are social event above all and you plural are the main resource.Socks, then shoes:Start at a starting point, move in a direction.Start with a planyour POA. [...]