Politics, the environment, technology, activism. And stuff.
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 Oct 17th, 2009
I think we would all be better off without analyses like this which inventory how many social media tools large advocacy groups are using as if using more tools is somehow indicative of sophistication, effectiveness or having a solid strategy for achieving your organizing goals. Sigh. When will consultants stop promoting this kind of shallow, tool-centric [...]
Posted in General on Jul 21st, 2009
Lots of nonprofit technologists are unapologetic Apple fanboys (and girls). I’ve owned and used Apple products over the years, and while some have been fine, they rarely make me swoon. I think of Apple as just another mega-corporation that sometimes makes nice computer hardware, not some extension of my personal brand identity. Apple is hardly a [...]
Posted in General on Oct 2nd, 2008
Sam Dorman of the League of Young Voters just tickled my funnybone with a really nice idea for how to elegantly handle external redirects in Plone. I think this would be really easy to roll up into a nice user-friendly product that would have tremendous, wide-ranging re-usability. I’d love your thoughts on it. The problem Lots of [...]
Posted in General on Sep 1st, 2008
Here’s an idea that’s been tumbling around in my brain for a while, and popped out yesterday during a walk: A lot of people think online organizing helps build enthusiasm about an issue or campaign, and thus holds tremendous promise for small, obscure campaigns. I think the promise is oversold, and that the most enthusiastic proponents [...]
Posted in General on Jun 2nd, 2008
Gavin Clabaugh’s got a fun (and wise) new riff on the larger forces shaping our world: I see this third force everywhere. I see it hiding inside the inaccurately named thing called “social networking. I see it embedded in “American Idol.†It follows me to the grocery store. It wakes me up at night. It’s busy [...]
Posted in General on Nov 2nd, 2007
… it were possible to include the contents of an RSS feed in the group. This would make it possible to stream content from a group’s website to their Facebook group space, no extra software needed. For example, I would really like to be able to embed the RSS feed from http://www.onenw.org/news-events in ONE/Northwest’s Facebook group page. [...]
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 Aug 29th, 2007
Very interesting. Facebook has announced that it will no longer rank popular applications by raw number of users, instead choosing to measure “engagement” those users have with the apps they’ve installed. This is a great, smart shift, and I think it presages lots of changes to how online activism is measured. We define engagement as the [...]
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 Jun 21st, 2007
Zack rants, Marty riffs. Most the people talking to you (especially nonprofits) think of the web/internet as a tactical support for the rest of the operations. They want the “web†guy to support our restoration initiative, the web team to support fundraising, the web team to support field, the web to support membership. Web is a tactic [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on May 25th, 2007
Jeff Brooks channels Roy Williams. Good to stay grounded: Just remember, a new medium is not a magic bullet. As brilliantly riffed by Roy Williams in his MondayMorningMemo: The Media Is Not the Message, the real issue is what you say, not where you say it: Relevance is what determines whether an ad works or [...]
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 Mar 23rd, 2007
It’s been a while since I’ve fallen in love with a new blog (over-exposure breeds cynicism I suppose), but I’ve just been turned on to The Agitator and I’m head over heels for it. The Agitator is the blog of Roger Craver and Tom Belford, both of the well-known DC-based fundraising/marketing consulting firm Craver Matthews Smith. [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 16th, 2007
As Washington Toxics Coalition’s multi-year campaign to pass a first-in-the-nation ban on toxic flame retardant chemicals (known as PDBEs) comes to a rousing finish, check out what they’re doing with user-generated content. They’ve invited members and supporters to send in photographs of them with their own “I Want To Be PDBE-Free” message. They’ve taken a smart, [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 14th, 2007
This sounds like a very creative and effective use of Google Earth as an environmental advocacy tool. Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. I hope [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Mar 8th, 2007
Duane Raymond of Fairsay has got the first three parts of a six-part series on the state of online advocacy/e-campaigning. Worth a read. It’s really great to see some big-picture reflection coming from a hands-on campaigner. I’m particularly enjoying the latest installment, Part III, in which Duane considers some of the “key campaigning gaps” that [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 4th, 2007
Ryan Ozimek’s piece “Islands and Bridges, the building has begun” is a great hallelujah to the power and importance of integration via open APIs. It’s clear that PICnet and ONE/Northwest are drinking form the same cup, when Ryan writes: The power of open source, combined with best of breed proprietary systems with open APIs give organizations the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jan 18th, 2007
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 [...]