Just a thought.

http://www.echoditto.com/insights/webthinking

I was honored to contribute some thoughts on the early drafts, and while I don’t think it’s perfect, the final version is a must-read if you’re serious about changing how change happens.   It’s great to see people engaging in serious, big-picture critical thinking like this.  The conversation’s already going on in the comments.  You should join in.  See you there in five.

Popup Forms for Plone makes it point-and-click easy to create timer-driven javascript popup forms anywhere in your Plone site.   You can see a simple example in action at Washington Conservation Voters.   It’s amazingly simple: just build your form in PloneFormGen.  (If you just want to popup a static HTML page or an image, you can use PloneFormGen’s “Form Prologue” and skip adding any form fields!)  Then, you use Plone’s portlets mechanism to assign the form to a page or folder on your site, and to configure an optional time-delay.  That’s it!  No programming, no javascript, no fuss, no bother.

Popup Forms are great for email capture forms, action alerts, user surveys, and many other calls-to-action.  If that’s what you need in your Plone site, I encourage you to check it out!

Sigh.  When will consultants stop promoting this kind of shallow, tool-centric thinking?  Probably never, because it’s easy, cheap marketing.

Apple is hardly a friend to the nonprofit sector.  In addition to being notoriously tight-fisted with hardware and software donations, I just read on ReadWriteWeb that they have no plans to allow charitable donations via the iPhone’s new in-app payments system.  That is incredibly lame.

Though Apple introduced in-application payments last month, the feature is only available to paid apps (Public Radio Player is free) and charitable contributions through the iPhone are strictly prohibited. They can’t even be talked about, Shapiro says, because Apple doesn’t want to deal with the possibility of charity scams, there’s tax complications, the platform’s standard 30% fee for payments isn’t tenable in a non-profit context and Apple has no financial incentive to solve this sticky complex of problems.

The problem

Lots of online activism campaigns (like the League!) use generic content management tools like Plone for their main website and supplement it with more specialized online advocacy tools like Democracy In Action.  It’s a winning combination that takes advantage of inexpensive, easy to use, best-of-breed tools.

The problem is that you can wind up with some messy URLs.  For example, Democracy In Action URLs can look like this:

https://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/315/my/donate.jsp?supporter_my_donate_page_KEY=someVariable

Ugh.  Not very user friendly to stick into an email, a tweet or a blog post.  What Sam really wants is to have a redirect URL like this:

http://go.theleague.com/someAction/someVariable

That will automatically redirect you to the DIA page, with someVariable appended.

“Why not just do this with Apache rewrite rules?” I can hear you asking.  Because Sam’s not an apache administrator, and doesn’t know how to write a regular expression (and neither do I).  We want these to be manageable by people with Plone-user skills, not server-admin skills!

My vision

As Sam was telling me his story, a little vision appeared in my mind’s eye.

I imagine an “external redirects” control panel in Plone, where you would be find a screen that would let you add lightweight “redirects” that would have the following attributes:

• Redirect name (the “someAction” in the example above)
• Redirect destination (the external URL you’re redirecting to.  Variables to be allowed with things like $1, $2)
• Enabled/disabled checkbox

I’d see this as a DataGridWidget or something similarly quick and easy.  A site could have quite a few redirects to manage on a single screen, we’d need to use KSS well to avoid too many page reloads.

Practicalities

Plone’s current “Link” object supports some very basic external redirection, and we could extend that as described at PLIP 126, but I’m not convinced that this is a very ideal approach.  The use case I’m trying to cover is about “placeless” adminstration of lots of links, not administering one-by-one links that are scattered within the content hierarchy.  Also, implementing this functionality with full-fledged content objects creates some problems with viewing vs. editing mode, which I think can be avoided with a centralized, approach based on a utility tha could be overriden or extended.

The other concern that would have to be addressed with this approach is namespace collision.  I think that could be avoided by doing a quick catalog search to make sure your proposed actionName doesn’t conflict with an existing content object (KSS validators to the rescue!).  We might be able to entirely avoid namespace collision by letting you define a subdomain in the control panel (e.g. go.mydomain.org), and if possible push that into VHM.

We’d probably need to sanitize variables so that this doesn’t allow any weird injection attacks.

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 of “web 2.0″ style organizing tend to reverse cause and effect.

The most powerful online campaign efforts — Obama ’08, Dean ’04, some of the early MoveOn antiwar stuff — were successful at tapping into already existing passionate enthusiasm, not in generating energy around issues/campaigns that previously lacked it.

In other words, online organizing can’t create energy, it can only tap the energy that already exists.

That’s bad news for small campaigns that need to “go big” to succeed, and are being told that online organizing offers a free pass to the big leagues, if only they figure out the right tools and tactics.

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 working away on web pages and formatting RSS feeds. It’s reading your electric meter. It’s even there when you drive into a parking lot. It’s monitoring air quality, or temperature, and it’s in that vending machine down the hall tracking the ever-so-important availability of cheese-doodles. The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network of machines, sensors, monitors, and even some humans, that spend their days tasting the world, and talking to other machines about what they’ve tasted. Sometimes it’s frightening. I once characterized the third force as the move “from sampling to monitoring.” I figured soon we wouldn’t need things like statistical sampling to measure our world. I argued that we were increasingly moving to “real-time” measurements to understand the world. The time and distance between action and feedback would disappear. It’s come true.

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.  But I can’t.

How lame.  This would be such a quick and easy win

• Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, meaning that grantees use the web largely as a source of information rather than interactivity. 
  
• A small handful of grantees, for instance Witness, the ACLU, Breakthrough, WYNC Public Radio, are using social media in spectacular ways to engage their constituents in conversations.
• Most grantees are not taking advantage of easy-to-use social media tools effectively. The first is the fact that only half have blogs, and that only half of these groups allow comments on their blogs.
• Survey respondents and group discussion participants often felt a “common struggle” in understanding which tools are critically important to their work and were at a loss as to where and how to get help for selecting and using new social media tools.

Alison asks for comments.  Here’s mine, which is admittedly not based on having read the report yet:

I wonder how much of this anxiety is the product of nonprofit sector consultants and pundits hyping Web 2.0 tool after Web 2.0 tool.  

How short was the hype cycle of MySpace?  Of Flickr?  Of YouTube?  Of Facebook?  Of Second Life?  Are all of these important?  Equally?  Should all nonprofits be doing all of these things, plus blogging, social bookmarking, IM, screencasting, user-generated content, etc. etc. etc.?

I think the message that nonprofits are getting from us “yes, and wait until you see what we’re excited about next!”  I’ve seen a lot more enthusiasm for these tools than reflective analysis of their real-world value in organizations with scarce resources.  And I think that’s what’s creating a lot of anxiety.

Or maybe I’m just having a curmudgeonly day.

I’m looking forward to digging into Alison’s report in depth.

(Hat tip to Beth.)