Top 10 Idealware articles in 2006
Tis the Season… for Cheap and Easy - and Distributed – Online Fundraising Tools
ChipIn started the buzz with their tool for online community fundraising. The premise was simple: ChipIn allows anyone to add to their website or blog a simple interface that requests money for a goal and shows the money raised to date. While straightforward, this is a very powerful idea: if it’s easy for anyone to do, anyone can be a fundraiser for your organization. Organizations who have a strong base of supporters who are blogging or using social networking can engage these supporters in creating their own individual campaign in the organization’s name. For instance, let’s say I’m interested in the wildlife in Maine, and I have a blog devoted to information about local plans and animals that has attracted a following among bird watchers and hikers in the area. It’s very natural – and likely very effective – for me to ask my readers to contribute to a holiday campaign to support an environmental cause. ChipIn lets me do just this. ChipIn started us off, but Network for Good followed close on their heels, with a virtually identical widget. They sweeten the pot by allowing anyone to create a widget for any nonprofit in Guidestar, and thus fundraise for them on their website. Not to mention a $50,000 bounty (or at least a matching grant) from Yahoo for the organization that has the most donors by the end of the year. And now, announcements from GetActive, Kintera, and Convio: they now all offer the same thing to organizations who are already using their service. (thanks to Confessions of a Nonprofit IT Director for the tip) Either this was an idea whose time had come with a vengeance, or one or two people had an idea so good and so easy to implement that everyone’s copying it. Either way, it’s great for the sector. These tools are touted as a way to tap into the participatory media culture, like blogs or social networking tools – and they are, no question about it. The ability to let supporters essentially run their own campaign for you on their own website is a powerful thing. I don’t say it often, but here it is: this hype is warranted. And this trend to make fundraising tools that are easy to install on any website has a great side benefit as well: it makes it easy for small nonprofits to add them to their own site to get started with online fundraising. Tools like ChipIn and Network for Good’s widget look like a great and easy way for nonprofits to get started with online credit card capabilities and a campaign progress meter on their own website. Network for Good has always been a great online donation option for nonprofits, but ChipIn is also well worth considering for those looking for inexpensive and easy options.
Resource Roundup 12/21
Top 10 mistakes when selecting a CMS (Step Two Designs) A terrific look at best practices and.. er.. worst practices when selecting a CMSManaging Digital Assets in US Museums ( RLG Digital News) A very meaty look at the use of digital asset management systems in museums, with case studies from the Met, the National Archive, and more. Announcing Metrix Version 2.0 - A Free Constituent Database Tool ( Metrix) After four years of development and beta installations, The Fund for the City of New York announces that their open source constituent management database is available to any nonprofit as a free download. They also offer a package that includes needs assessment, installation, training, and six months of support. Second Life: Hype vs Anti-Hype vs Anti-Hype-Hype ( GigaGamez) A great look at the truth of the numbers and the actual potential of Second Life as a viable marketing platform, along with it's implications and potential for online interactions in the future. Four Tools for Private Communication ( TechSoup) TechSoup rounds up free and low-cost ways to transfer data securely over the internet. A Compilation of Case Studies on the Use of Free and Open Source Software for Development (Asia Pacific Development Information Programme) A collection of scholarly case studies on, as the title would suggest, FOSS software in developing countries.
Who Pays for Eben Moglen’s First Loaf of Bread?
Eben Moglen, lawyer with the Free Software Foundation, gave an amazing and inspiring keynote address at the October 2006 Plone conference in Seattle. For those of us not fortunate enough to witness it, it’s been posted on YouTube and was transcribed by Geof Glass.It’s a tremendous speech, well worth your time, with many themes, but I’ve been obsessing over one in particular. Here’s an excerpt from the middle: If you could make as many loaves of bread as it took to feed the world, by baking one loaf and pressing a button, how could you justify charging more for bread than the poorest people could afford to pay? If the marginal cost of bread is zero, then the competitive market price should be zero too. But leaving aside any question of microeconomic theory, the moral question, “What should be the price of what keeps someone else alive if it costs you nothing to provide it to them”, has only one unique answer. There is no moral justification for charging more for bread that costs nothing than the starving can pay. Every death from too little bread under those circumstances is murder. This is incredibly compelling – compelling enough to bring tears to my eyes. And all too relevant – it not only speaks to the world of software (and the dire issues faced by small nonprofits who can’t afford the software that they need to do their critical work), but the world of content. If the marginal cost of distributing, say, reviews of nonprofit software are zero, how can you justify charging for them? But there’s a key logistical question implicit here: Who pays for the first loaf of bread- i.e. the software application, or the software reviews? If it costs $20,000 in time or money for the first loaf (or way more, in the case of a software application) but nothing for every copy thereafter, how do we answer our moral imperative to give it away to those who need it and can’t pay, while still allowing those baking the bread to earn a living and continue to make better and different kinds of bread? I know that smarter people than I have thought this through (like Eben Moglen, for instance), but I can’t find anything that feels satisfactory to me for the reality in which I live. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is often referred to here, which offers: For any given culture, there will be some acts that a person would prefer to perform not for money, but for social standing, recognition, and probably, ultimately, instrumental value obtainable only if that person has performed the action through a social, rather than a market, transaction. Okay. Hmmm. So there is no question that there are some acts that people are willing to perform without money, but are there enough acts to fuel all the software and content (and everything else) that might be needed? In the realm of nonprofit software, I would argue that there clearly is not. People have as good intentions (or better) as anyone, but the needs are too specific to too small a group, and the people involved are too strapped for resources (both time and money) to make this model successful – to allow enough bread bakers to get the job done. Some alternate revenue models are possible – say, consulting or support for free software – but the nonprofit audience is so limited and so revenue strapped themselves that I have a hard time seeing this work. In addition, there is also a key divide between the bakers and those eating the bread in the nonprofit sector. The free software movement’s greatest successes (Firefox, Linux, Apache…) have been in the realms in which the developers are creating software which they themselves need. This is underscored by Benkler’s inclusion of instrumental value. But in the nonprofit sector, we have too few bakers and need too many different kinds of bread to make this work. We could likely do better than we are, through more collaboration and rationalizing of true needs, but I don’t believe that we can effectively address nonprofit sector needs by relying on developers to build what they themselves need. And truthfully, I’m just not comfortable with a model that puts the sole burden on the developers – the bakers. It forces us to find intrinsic satisfaction or crazy alternate revenue schemes for the bakers, and bypasses an audience that has, to my mind, a greater moral imperative: those who receive value from the bread. Those who receive value have a responsibility to contribute to its creation, each according to their means and the amount of value they gain. But there’s a catch-22 here. Unfortunately, people aren’t very good at assessing the value received and their own means, and will all too frequently opt to pay nothing if that’s an option. So trying to get people to pay according to their means in the real word often requires enforcement. And as enforcement isn’t free, the marginal cost of the bread is no longer zero. Instead we’ve added costs in icky ways: trying to collect fair contributions from those who receive value. This, um, sounds like copyrights and proprietary software, huh? So we’ve come full circle. There are a lot of people out there who would like to bake the bread and give it away for what those who need it can pay, but can’t figure out how to make a living while doing so. How can we sort this out? Who pays for those first loaves of bread?
On Devoting Web 2.0 Style Energy to 0.5 Technologies
I have to admit it: I'm confused as to why we as a nonprofit tech professionals are devoting so much time to promoting and following Web 2.0 stuff. Idealware is a bit guilty of this a bit ourselves of late. I struggle with it - these Web 2.0 articles get a ton of traffic and click-throughs, but are they really useful to the sector? Over the last year, there's been a huge number of articles Web 2.0 techniques and tools for nonprofits. Tremendous hype about how this is the next generation (or a total revolution, depending on who's talking) of websites or software or nonprofits in general. It certainly implies that a lot of people think that Web 2.0 is a key solution to nonprofit tech woes. Is that actually true? Certainly the nonprofit software field needs as much content as it can get, but wouldn't it be great to have this much coverage of, say, constituent databases? Detailed lists and tips on content management systems? Are we actually thinking that's it more important for a nonprofit to be using de.licio.us or YouTube than to have a useful eNewsletter? That the bulk of nonprofits should vault over a professional website to go straight to participatory media? Take a look at a summary of the things that at least one technologist at an actual nonprofit finds more useful than Web 2.0 stuff (copiers! windows as a service! voice response systems!). Not sexy, but useful. Not to be cynical, but how much of our excitement about Web 2.0 tools is due to the fact that it's simply more interesting (and perhaps easier) for us as nonprofit tech professionals to talk about? Yes, we absolutely need trailblazers. We need people to help define the shape of things to come - which might be Web 2.0 tools, among other things. But if nonprofit tech support providers all blaze the trail, who is bringing up the rear? Who is helping those in the middle and those lagging behind the pack, to make sure they don't fall further and further behind in the journey?
New articles: Participatory Media and Online RSVP software
Resource Roundup 12/11
Experiences with Online Conferencing ( I collaborate, e-collaborate, we collaborate) Interesting and detailed notes on a group's (only somewhat successful) experience with an online meeting using Skpe conference calling and a chat space. Nonprofit Blogs on the Rise (The Chronicle of Philanthropy) A detailed article about the the ways that nonprofits and nonprofit staff are using blogs. Web 2.0 in Nonprofits (The Bamboo Project) Another roundup of web 2.0 tools and how to use them - this one specific to nonprofits, and a cut above some of the others. Web 2.0 Still In Early Stages (ClickZ) A less hype-filled-than-usual look at how the corporate world is using web 2.0 tools, and what mainstream marketers think of their potential. Boys & Girls Club CIO Talks About Vendor Lock-in (CIO Magazine) A great piece from the CIO of the Boys & Girls Club explaining why organizations using small to midsized vendors must always be ready to break away. Nonprofits and Online Video Services (NP Times) A detailed look at how some nonprofits are using online video services, with some of the upsides and challenges. How To Ask Questions The Smart Way (Thyrsus Enterprises) A terrific guide as to how best to understand the culture of and pose questions to developer and programmer forums. Microsoft's Ambitious Online Suite (SmallBusinessComputing.com) Walk through of the features available in Microsoft's new online suite, which provides not word processing and such, as the name would imply, but rather an email/ contact management/ website creation suite. ICT Hub Knowledge Base - CMSs, Online Collaboration Tools, more (ICT Hub) LASA's ICT Hub Knowledge Base is publishing great nonprofit tech articles faster than we can keep up. Check out recent terrific articles on questions to ask in choosing a CMS, tools and techniques for online collaboration, marketing your website, and more.
Resource Roundup 12/4
The Growing Digital Divide Among Nonprofit Organizations (Coyote Communications) An interesting post from Jayne Cravens, about a growing digital - and organizational - divide between "traditional, hierarchical and tech-wary" organizations and "progressive, inclusive and tech-savvy" organizations. How organizational structure affects web strategy and implementation (Social Signal) An in-depth podcast on structuring organizations to support website work, with speakers from the ACLU and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Well worth a listen. Participatory Media Links and Resources (Berkeley) Apparently put together for a Berkeley class, this wiki provides a useful and lengthy list of resources about "participatory media" - i.e. blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging, video sharing, mashups, etc. Best of the Best Web 2.0 Web Sites (Real World Software Development) Need another huge list of Web 2.0 tools? You're in luck. Saving the Amazon with GPS and Google Earth ( Mongabay) A case study about the Amazon Conservation Team's work to help Amazon natives use Google Earth and GPS to protect their home. Our Office 2.0 Experiment (Vitamin) A small, distributed firm experiments with transitioning to Web 2.0 tools for all their office productivity software (i.e. word processing, backup, etc), and reports back Rules for Using MySpace in Politics (Personal Democracy) A practical list of things to consider when using MySpace for advocacy, based on advice from two nonprofit advocacy experts. Bottom-up social networking (Quixotic1) Some great additional thoughts about the benefits and dangers of bottom up organizing through social networking sites from Ian Boothe, the author of our Using Social Networking to Prevent Genocide article.
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