Tag Archives: Web

Ed’s Hunches…

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Are usually pretty good ones, but these two hunches are, I think, especially solid. Drawing on a recent column by Michael Stein noting some trends in transactional giving for post-Tsunami relief, Ed theorizes:

  • Supporters don’t want to be members. As Michael noted, people are increasingly giving on an “as-needed basis,” and I think this stems from a desire to be helpful while protecting one’s privacy and identity. People who are happy to support your cause in a variety of temporary ways are reluctant to become permanently affiliated with your organization. As I said recently, “People want to give, but they don’t want to be on your email list, because they’re not going to read your boring newsletter, and they don’t trust you to keep their address out of the wrong hands.”
  • Don’t email them, they’ll Google you (or read your feed, or search for your tags.) Michael also cites “information overload,” and I think this is significantly eroding (or at least transforming) the value of email as a mass communication channel. Everyone’s Inbox is too full these days. Non-essential messages get deleted immediately. Email’s not going away anytime soon, but relying on it as the only online channel is going to yield diminishing returns.

    • Hand that man a cigar. Web publishing is becoming relatively more important as RSS and tagging “unlock” web content from its site of origin, and let it roam through the internets.

    Why blogs are useful, and probably shouldn’t be thought of as “blogs”

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    Ed Batista is on a bit of a tear about the strategic significance of blogging for nonprofits. It’s all about cultivating a human voice and engaging in a conversation. Right on, Ed.

    Blogs are fantastic tools for individual expression, and they’re also fantastic tools for an organization seeking to reach its online audience precisely because blogging tools enable conversations, i.e. authentic, responsive, individual voices.

    The significant common factor isn’t the underlying blogging technology, but how you approach your online audience. Do you hand down stone tablets from the mountaintop? Or do you speak in a genuine, human voice…and ask questions…and respond to questions asked of you? If your answer is “Yes, all of the above” then you’re engaged in an effective conversation with your online audience, and whether you’re using a “blog” or not is irrelevant. If your answer is “No,” then you’re irrelevant (or you soon will be) and a “blog” won’t save you from the scrap heap.

    Nail, Head, Ed: The significance of “citizen media” for nonprofits

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    Dave Averill and I were chatting about the relationship between citizen-driven internet media (“grassroots journalism”) and the mainstrem media over the water cooler this morning. As soon as I turned back to my computer, I noticed that Ed Batista had just posted about the same issue. And as usual Ed cuts straight to the chase:

    Nonprofits are still thinking like the mainstream media were three years ago. The media saw themselves as the professionals, the experts, and everyone else was part of the audience–they were readers or viewers. Nonprofits also see themselves as experts on their particular set of issues, and everyone else is part of their audience–they’re donors or voters or petition-signers, or some variation on that them.

    But the mainstream media (and other major corporations) have finally realized three things:

    1. It’s a big world out there, and the Web brings together a lot of smart, dedicated people–including plenty of amateurs who know as much as the experts on any given subject.
    2. Those smart, dedicated amateurs now have the tools at their disposal to generate copious amounts of polished, compelling and essentially free content.
    3. If you’re a gatekeeper in some way (because of your audience, your brand, or your expertise), and you don’t involve those amateur self-publishers in your operation, they will bypass you and render you increasingly irrelevant. If you do get them involved, they will be an incredibly cost-efficient and powerful resource–but you can’t control them, you can only hope to enlist them in your cause.

    Nonprofits need to wise up to these realities as well, and engage people not merely as donors or voters, but as citizen advocates, as brothers- and sisters-in-arms who in many cases know as much about the issues as nonprofit staff and who have the desire and the means to do more than write a check or pull a lever.

    Still skeptical? Think it’s a flash in the pan? Well, Ed links to Jeff Jarvis, who takes note of Fox News’ new efforts to incorporate citizen media into their content streams. Jeff and Ed think we’re at a tipping point. I think they’re right.

    Update: Steve Andersen passed me this multimedia presentation on the past — and future? — of citizen journalism.

    Contagious Media Showdown

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    The clever nerds at Eyebeam R&D are running a Contagious Media Showdown

    Announcing the world’s first Contagious Media Showdown. Do you have what it takes to corral enough traffic to win the cash prizes? Can you make the next Dancing Baby, All Your Base, or Star Wars Kid and ride into the sunset with the bounty? This is your chance to prove you are the best in the West.

    That is, a viral media contest.

    Lots of good Web 2.0 buzzwords (Technorati, Creative Commons, etc.) in the rules.

    The associated workshop looks pretty interesting too.

    Hat tip to Tim at Echoditto.

    How about an action alert writing contest?

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    We’re in the thick of a state legislative session here, which means that action alerts are flying fast and furious. I think there’s a lot of poorly written and ultimately ineffective alerts out there, but I can’t prove it.

    Which leads me to an idea…

    What if we organized the infrastructure to write and test different versions of a bunch of action alerts, measure the results, rewarded the winners, and wrote up the lessons learned — with statistics? We could structure it as a contest to give aspiring alert writers an incentive to participate.

    We’d need to find a couple of organizations with lists large enough to randomly sample/segment, and organize the system for the alert facts to get out to the writers and turned around quickly. This all seems totally doable.

    BC Priorities for Environmental Leadership Launches

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    The practice of state/provincial environmental communities setting common policy priorities is spreading fast. Today, my talented colleagues at ONE/Northwest helped a coalition of leading BC enviros launch Priorities for Environmental Leadership, focusing attention on four key environmental issues in the runup to BC’s May 17 legislative elections.

    BC’s four environmental priorities are:

    de.lirio.us

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    Phillip said we should do it, but I said “naah, someone else will.” Create an open-source version of Del.icio.us, that is. Appears to be based on the Rubric perl module.

    Interesting. I would love to see a network of federated social bookmarking servers powered by something like this. Start by working in your “neighborhood” but you can always expand your scope of interest searching to include other federated servers.

    The challenges of supporting next-generation infrastructure for nonprofits

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    Kellan (I’m guessing) offers some insightful thoughts about hosting software for nonprofits. He raises two challenages facing folks who build nonprofit solutions using so-called ‘niche’ platforms like Zope or Rails… well, really anything other than PHP, right?

    Challenge #1: “Qualified developers for ‘niche’ technologies.”

    There are definitely a lotta folks out there who know a little PHP, and not as many (yet) who can hack around with Zope or Rails. But I’m not sure there are that many more people who can effectively make substantial changes to a complex PHP application such as Gallery, CivicSpace or Groundspring’s forthcoming Enterprise. And the great thing about frameworks like Rails or Zope is that they’re pretty easy to learn and generally well documented. Also, the points in the landscape to find help are well-lit and active.

    But I definitely agree with the larger point that I think Kellan’s trying to make: the nonprofit tech community needs to do a much better job of teaching itself platforms that aren’t “lowest common denominator” so it can take advantage of the huge leverage that platforms like Zope and Rails offer. I think this is definitely solvable — in fact, ONE/Northwest has already started tackling our local piece of the puzzle by starting the Seattle Plone Users’ Group along with our friend Brian Gershon of RagingWeb. (You can join the email list here.)

    But the “lowest common denominator” challenge is definitely real. In fact, I think it’s been one of the largest challenges that Groundspring’s ebase has faced over its life — there just aren’t tons of great FileMaker consultants out there.

    Challenge #2) Low cost hosting.

    Kellan correctly notes that low-cost PHP hosting is pretty ubiquitous these days while Rails hosting is “at the moment nearly non-existent” and Plone/Zope hosting is a bit more expensive than PHP hosting.

    Couple thoughts here. First, the difference between $7/month ($96/year) for bottom-of-the-barrel PHP hosting and ~$15-25/month ($165-300/year) for solid Zope hosting isn’t gonna break the budgets of most nonprofits.

    Second, I’d observe that Rails and Plone/Zope are in very different places, and it’s probably not fair to generalize about them both simultaneously. Zope and Plone have been around for a few years now, and while not every Tom/Dick/Harry web host supports them, there is a solid marketplace of hosting providers, like Zettai, Quintagroup, and others. I can’t speak to where the Rails hosting market is at, but I’ll take Kellan’s word for it.

    If you’re really concerned about the “cost of experimentation” then I’d note that…

    A) Installing a working Plone/Zope environment on a Windows or Mac box is literally a double-click. Great for experimentation at zero cost. PHP and Apache can’t touch that kind of ease of install for novices. (See comments. Thanks, John & Trey.)

    B) If you’d rather have someone else host your sandbox for you, there are a few providers of free Zope/Plone hosting such as FreeZope and Objectis. Not too bad.

    But again, I think Kellan’s right on the larger lesson: folks like Electric Embers, Community Bandwidth, et al. ought to think seriously about expanding their nonprofit-centric hosting practices to include emerging platforms like Zope and Rails. There is a learning curve to supporting these platforms, but it’s not that bad, and it only takes a few talented sysadmins to climb it to start supporting a pretty huge number of nonprofit clients.

    A Web-Based Resource for the Craft Art Community

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    Sonny Cloward, whom I had the pleasure of meeting in person (along with his adorable son Finn) this winter, is pondering A Web-Based Resource for the Craft Art Community. Lots of good — if raw — ideas in here about how to create a next-generation community oriented web resource for a topical/issue community.

    Facets: Search | News and Publications | Share | Exchange | Locate | Discuss | Connect

    Lots of good thinking here; it’s not hard to see the relevance to the Northwest environmental community I work in. In fact, we’ve been having similar conversations around ONE/Northwest these days.

    Towards the end, Sonny speculates a bit about platforms to build in — my personal choice would be of course be Plone. But that’s another story.

    Conservation Voters of BC

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    My amazing colleagues launched another website today, this one for Conservation Voters of BC.

    It’s got a couple of cool things going on:

    1) A weekly column/blog by CVBC’s founder, Matt Price, who is a sharp thinker, a talented writer, and a gifted leader. Nothing technically amazing here, but it’s nice to see an environmental leader take to new media.

    2) An innovative “Legislator Tracker” feature where Matt has begun to compile the on-the-record statements of BC’s 79 legislators about the environment. Since the parliamentary system doesn’t really allow folks to hold their representatives accountable for individual votes, tracking their statements in floor speeches as published in Hansard transcripts is the best that can be done.

    I’m hopeful that Matt’s innovative effforts will succeed in raising the political profile of environmental issues in BC during the upcoming provincial election cycle.

    UPDATE: here’s the press release from CVBC promoting the Legislative Tracker

    Pages: 1 2

    Digging digg (dang!)

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    Marty thinks that Digg is pretty neat. And it is — a clever combination of del.icio.us-style social bookmarking plus wisdom-of-the-crowds style collaborative editing.

    Marty correctly identifies the activist potential in this tool. But one thing is missing: it’s not open-source, and the Digg (the commercial website) seems to be focused only on technology news. (Shocking!)

    Any takers for whipping up a distributed, federated easy-to-roll out version of this?

    (Heck, maybe we should roll a Plone product like this here at ONE/Northwest!)

    Three new BC websites

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    My amazing colleagues have launched three websites for BC environmental groups over past few days:

    1) Rainforest Solutions Project.

    2) Hollyhock Leadership Institute.

    3) IMPACS, the Institute for Media, Policy and Civil Society.

    All are built on top of Plone, a powerful and user-friendly open-source content management system. Individually the sites are neat, but together I think they start to hint at the power and flexibility of the underlying platform.

    One cool behind-the-scenes trick — nearly all of the scores of pages of content for the IMPACS site was bulk-imported from their previous closed-source CMS. It was really nice for them not to have to retype or even cut-and-paste their old content into their new site.

    Blogging = open source collaborative journalism

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    Kos, who has, what… a couple hundred thousand readers per day, launches a thousand blog posts with this:

    When I’m asked about blogging’s legacy, I talk about open source. Open source politics, open source activism, open source journalism — the aggregation of thousands on behalf of a common cause. Bloggers and their opinions might be mildly interesting, but the ability to pool our efforts on issues that capture the collective imagination is what really gets me excited.