Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Fair warning: I’ve tested each of these products in a Plone 4.1.5 development instance, but I’ve not deployed any in production or reviewed the code.  All are written by experienced Plone community members, though, so they should be at least reasonable sane.  I’d love to hear about your experiences with any of them.

collective.folderorder - Jens Klein and BlueDynamics Alliance

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderorder/1.2

Plone’s default folder view shows items in the order they were added, and while you can manually rearrange items, there’s no way to automatically resort items in a folder view.  (Although you can add a collection as the default view of a folder, this is not always obvious to new users, and quite a few clicks.)  With collective.folderorder, you get a new “Order” option the Actions menu for a folder, and you can easily choose from several default folder ordering schemes, including: reverse order, unordered, and partial ordering. Even better, it provides an easy way for developers to add new ordering schemes.

I’d love to see this one PLIPed for future inclusion in Plone, possibly with a few more ordering options (e.g. last modified, creation date). It’s a small but welcome UI affordance.

collective.folderposition – Laurence Rowe

http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.folderposition/1.0

Another small but welcome improvement to folder ordering.  This one adds a nice little set of buttons below a folder listing that allows you to move items instantly to the top, the bottom or up/down a designated number of slots. Again, super convenient when you need to rearrange a lot of folder items.

collective.prettydate – Franco Pellegrini  & Héctor Velarde

http://plone.org/products/collective.prettydate

collective.prettydate reformats the display absolute dates/times (e.g. 3/1/2012) to relative date (e.g. one month ago, four days ago, etc.)  This is really nice for news sites or sites with upcoming events.

collective.embedly – Quintagroup

http://plone.org/products/collective.embedly

collective.embedly makes it stupidly simple to embed almost any externally hosted multimedia (YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare.net, etc.) into Plone.  It uses the fantastic service “Embedly” which is itself built on the open “oembed” standard.    Developers who want a bit more power may also want to look at collective.oembed.

collective.routes – Nathan Van Gheem

http://plone.org/products/collective.routes

This one is a bit conceptual, but pretty awesome.  From the prolific and talented Nathan Van Gheem comes collective.routes, which makes it possible to build URLs in Plone that do catalog queries, e.g. http://mysite.com/blog/date/of/blog/post.  This isn’t really an end-user product, but it makes it easy for integrators to build really nice URLs for their custom Plone apps.

Visible power is the power that plays out in formal decisionmaking processes.  Social change activists participate in this through lobbying, advocacy, organizing, etc.

Hidden power is the power to set the agenda, include or exclude certain participants, etc.  This kind of power is often exercised behind closed doors.

Invisible power “involves the ways in which awareness of one’s rights and interests are hidden through the adoption of dominating ideologies, values and forms of behavior by relatively powerless groups themselves.”  In other words, invisible power is the creation of culture, beliefs and awareness.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

The short version might go something like this: as in the tech startup industry, there are too many nonprofits chasing too little top-flight talent.  They can’t compete on cash.  </analogy ends> So instead they just don’t really compete at all.

Why?  So many organizations competing for limited dollars, limited talent, limited attention, press coverage, etc.  This means you have to be better than ever to punch through the noise and achieve critical mass.  Most of the rewards go to the top 1%.  This is not about scarcity vs. abundance, it’s recognizing that public agendas can only have so many items on them at once.

Still sorting through the implications of this.  I do think Marty is right that we need to come up with new approaches to dealing with this fragmentation.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

• Common agenda.  If you don’t have a shared vision for change, you can’t really expect to collaborate effectively.
• Mutually reinforcing activities.  Successful collaborators need to coordinate their activities, play to their strengths, and know their role in the larger effort.
• Continuous communication.  If you don’t communicate regularly you can’t hope to build enough trust and shared language to collaborate effectively.

At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Jon, why are you wasting my time with such obvious folderol?”  Most coalition efforts I’ve seen fulfill these first three conditions pretty well.  Hang in there, it’s the next two that are the most interesting:

• Shared measurement systems. Hmm, now we’re getting somewhere.  Collective impact suggests that collaborative efforts need agree on a shared set of indicators of success and the systems for monitoring and reporting on those indicators.  Without shared indicators, collaborators have no way to really know if they are succeeding or failing, and no feedback systems that allow them to “course correct” as needed. 
• A backbone support organization.  Proponents of collective impact assert that successful collaboration efforts need to have a strong, staffed organization at their center, in order to run the collaborative process with sufficient intensity and focus to drive it forward in the face of distractions.  It’s not clear to me whether they think a strong “lead coalition partner” fulfills this condition or not.  (I suspect not.)

It’s these last two points where most collaborations falter, and probably not concidental that they require sustained, long-term resource commitments.  How do collaborations you’re involved with stack up?