Jon Stahl's Journal

Jeff Reifman has released the NewsCloud platform under an open-source license. Great stuff. As he points out: While there are a number of social network journalism platforms that allow a wide variety of original content, none of the latest… generation so far are licensed to the open source community to inspect, re-purpose and improve. The [...]

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Britt Bravo interviewed me for NetSquared today.  I discourse on Plone, the Plone Conference, the social web, nonprofit technology planning, and more.  Technorati Tags: nptech, plone, onenorthwest

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Loyal readers (assuming I have any) will doubtless recall that one of our projects this summer at ONE/Northwest has been building a product to connect websites powered by the Plone content management with user databases stored in Salesforce.com. I’m pleased to announce that Andrew, Steve and I have just finished our initial testing and review [...]

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Writely, the web-based word processor that Google recent purchased, has re-opened to the public, for free. It’s not quite a replacement for Word, but it’s a damn handy tool for writing documents collaboratively.

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Look, it’s a Web 2.0 logo generator. Niice. (Hat tip to Nate.)

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My colleague Steve Andersen recently penned a short article entitled “Some Observations on Nonprofit Software” that lays out a few of the core assumptions we hold about how software tools for the nonprofit sector can and should play nice together. The core of the argument goes like this: Missions are serviced only by engaging constituents [...]

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Jonah Bossewitch’s summary of this month’s Big Apple Sprint is a great peek under the hood of what effective community-driven open-source development process looks like. I also think that the substance is pretty compelling to nonprofit website builders, because it’s all about “that Web 2.0 stuff” like multimedia, tags, blogging and creative commons licensing. Here’s [...]

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Seth Gottlieb pulls together a short rant and then a large dose of common sense about why email is an ineffective collaboration tool, and what can be done instead. UPDATE: changed “effective” to “ineffective” thanks to eagle-eyed reader T.B.

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There were those who said it couldn’t be done. There were more who said it shouldn’t. But we took their advice and ignored it with all the gusto we could muster. We finally flipped the switch today on the new, Plone-powered ONE/Northwest website. It’s a got a lovely new design, a bunch of new content [...]

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Reading Zack Rosen’s assertion that building applications inside Drupal-the-framework makes more sense than loose integration of complementary applications triggered some thinking that’s been rattling around in my head for a while. I think that the next few years are going to bring tremendous challenges for applications that do not easily communicate with other applications that [...]

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Continuing its march to world domination ™, Google has launched Google Analytics, a free webstats service. Interesting.

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Nicholas Carr offers some intelligent push-back against the overzealous quasi-religious internet cheerleaders. I’m all for blogs and blogging. (I’m writing this, ain’t I?) But I’m not blind to the limitations and the flaws of the blogosphere – its superficiality, its emphasis on opinion over reporting, its echolalia, its tendency to reinforce rather than challenge ideological [...]

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Plone Conference 2005 kicked off today in Vienna, Austria. I wish that wasn’t so far away. But I’m looking forward to a full report from Brian when he gets back. In the meantime, I’ll content myself with ONE/Northwest’s latest string of Plone website launches: Oregon League of Conservation Voters and the OLCV Education Fund — [...]

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Mambo, the popular open-source CMS, has been thrown into turmoil by an abrupt split between Miro, the copyright holder, and the core of the open-source development community. The developers are rallying at http://www.opensourcematters.org. Whether the product will emerge stronger or crippled is as yet uncertain.

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My brilliant colleagues at ONE/Northwest and our talented collaborators at LightSky Designs and RagingWeb just helped Snow Leopard Trust launch their new website. It’s a beautiful site, with a ton of great content and some eye-popping photos of these magnificent cats and the communities they live among. Some notable features from a technical point of [...]

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The Seattle Times’ Kristi Helm offers a nice profile of CommonMedia and its founder, my friend, Jeff Reifman. What it does: CommonMedia’s collection of Web sites acts as a platform to distribute free music and video for download, plus an online newspaper whose front page is determined by story selections of readers. Of particular note [...]

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Man, getting fired can be great for your creativity and productivity. At least that’s what I’m learning from my friend Jeff Reifman these days. Jeff’s been on creative streak lately, playing with a bunch of permutations at the fertile intersection of social networks, alternative media, progressive activism and emerging tech. His latest creation, CommonTimes is [...]

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Jeff Reifman, former Groundspring employee, reports that Groundspring has released EmailNow, DonateNow, Enterprise and ActionStudio as open source. The fine print: no support, no active development, no resources for community building. AdvocacyNow is being made available as a hosted service under the name eAdvocacy. It will be interesting to see whether anyone is able and [...]

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Beth Kanter interviews Michael Gilbert about nonprofit blogging. Worth a read. Ed Batista picks up on the most provocative bit: I still find that nearly every nonprofit organization is rather afraid of the idea of blogging. It’s threatening to them to have their staff blogging, it’s too much work to have their leaders blogging, and [...]

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I’m pleased to report that Jeff Reifman has rescued ActionStudio from the train wreck created by Groundspring’s recent organizational turmoil. He’s relaunched his low-cost, high-featured online activism tool as eAdvocacy from ActionStudio. eAdvocacy is a great tool for doing online petitions and contact-your-decisionmaker elements. It offers a great blend of powerful features at a bargain-basement [...]

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