Long time readers of my ramblings here are aware that I drink the Google kool-aid. And they also know that I've been caught tweeting, on occasion. And, despite my disappointment in Google's last big thing (Wave), I am so appreciative of other work of theirs -- GMail, Android, Picasa -- that I couldn't pass up a go with their answer to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz.
Google, perhaps because their revenue model is based on giving people ad-displaying products, as opposed to selling applications, takes more design risks than their software-developingcompetitors. Freed of legacy design concepts like "the computer is a file cabinet" or "A phone needs a "start" menu", they often come up with superior information management and communication tools.
What is Buzz?
Buzz, like Twitter and Facebook, and very much like the lesser used Friendfeed, lets you tell people what you're up to; share links, photos and other content; and respond to other people's posts and comments. Like Facebook, Friendfeed and Twitter (if you use a third party service like Twitterfeed), you can import streams from other services, like Google Reader, Flicker, and Twitter itself, into your Buzz timeline.
Unlike Twitter, there is no character limit on your posts. And the comment threading works more like Facebook, so it's easy to keep track of conversations.
How is Buzz Different?
The big distinguishing factor is that Buzz is not an independent service, but an adjunct of GMail. You don't need a GMail account to use it, but, if you have one, Buzz shows up right below your inbox in the folder list, and, when a comment is posted on a Buzz that you either started or contributed to, the entire Buzz shows up in your inbox with the reply text box included, so that continuing the conversation is almost exactly like replying to an email.
The Gmail integration also feeds into your network on Buzz. Instead of actively seeking out people to follow, Buzz loads you up from day one with people who you communicate regularly with via GMail.
Privacy Concerns
Buzz's release on Tuesday spawned a Facebook-like privacy invasion meme the day that it was released -- valid concerns were raised about the list of these contacts showing up on Buzz-enabled Google Profile pages. A good "get rid of Buzz" tutorial is linked here. To Google's credit, they responded quickly, with security updates being rolled out two days later. I'm giving Google more of a pass on this than some of my associates, because, while it was a little sloppy, I don't think it compares to the Facebook "Beacon" scandal. Google didn't think through the consequences, or the likely reaction to what looked like a worse privacy violation than it actually was (contact lists were only public on your profiles if you had marked your profile "public", and there was a link to turn the lists off, it just wasn't prominently placed or obvious that it was necessary). Beacon, in comparison, started telling the world about every purchase you made (whether it was a surprise gift for your significant other or a naughty magazine) and there was no option for the user to turn it off. And it took Facebook two years to start saying "mea culpa", not two days.
Social Media Interactions for Grownups
Twitter's "gimmick" -- the 140 character limit -- defines its personality, and those of us who enjoy Twitter also enjoy the challenge of making that meaningful comment, with links, hashtags, and @ replies, in small, 140 character bursts. It's understood now that continuing a tweet is cheating.
Facebook doesn't have such stringent limits, but you wouldn't necessarily know that to glance at it. It hasn't shaken it's dorm room roots; it's still burdened by all of the childish quizzes and applications; and, maybe more to the point, cursed by a superficiality imposed by everyone having an audience composed of high school buds that they haven't seen for a decade or two, and who might now be on the other side of the political fence.
But Buzz can sustain a real conversation -- I've seen this in my day and a half of use. Partially because it doesn't have Twitters self-imposed limit or Facebooks playful distractions; and largely because you reply in your email, a milieu where actual conversation is the norm. This is significant for NPOs that want to know what's being said about them in public on the web. I noted from a Twitter post this week that the Tactical Philosophy blog had a few entries discussing the pros and cons of Idealists' handling of a funding crisis. But Twitter wasn't a good vehicle for a nuanced conversation on that, and I can't see that type of dialogue setting in on Facebook. Buzz would be ideal for it.
The Best is Yet to Come
This week, Google rolled out Buzz to GMail. Down the road, they'll add it to Google Apps for Domains. The day that happens, we'll see something even more powerful. Enterprise microblogging isn't a new idea -- apps like Yammer and Socialcast have had a lot of success with it. I'm actually a big fan of Socialcast, which has a lot in common with Buzz, but I was stumped as to how I could introduce a new application at my workplace that I believe would be insanely useful, but most of the staff can't envision a need for at all. What would have sold it, I have no doubt, is the level of email integration that Buzz sports. By making social conversations so seamlessly entwined with the direct communication, Google sells the concept. How many of you are trying hard to explain to your co-workers that Twitter isn't a meaningless fad, and that there's business value in casual communication? Buzz will put it in their faces, and, daunting as it might be at first, I think it will win them over.
This is very good news. That overhead metric has hamstrung serious efforts to do bold things and have higher impact. An assessment that is based solely on annualized budgetary efficiency precludes many options to make long-term investments in major strategies. For most nonprofits, taking a year to staff up and prepare for a major initiative would generate a poor Charity Navigator score. A poor score that is prominently displayed to potential donors.
Assuming that these new metrics will be more tolerant of varying operational approaches and philosophies, justified by the outcomes, this will give organizations a chance to be recognized for their work, as opposed to their cost-cutting talents. But it puts a burden on those same organizations to effectively represent that work. I've blogged before (and will blog again) on our need to improve our outcome reporting and benchmark with our peers. Now, there's a very real danger that neglecting to represent your success stories with proper data will threaten your ability to muster financial support. You don't want to be great at what you do, but have no way to show it.
More to the point, the metrics that value social organizational effectiveness need to be developed by a broad community, not a small group or segment of that community. The move by Charity Navigator and their peers is bold, but it's also complicated. Nonprofit effectiveness is a subjective thing. When I worked for a workforce development agency, we had big questions about whether our mission was served by placing a client in a job, or if that wasn't an outcome as much as an output, and the real metric was tied to the individual's long-term sustainability and recovery from the conditions that had put them in poverty.
Certainly, a donor, a watchdog, a funder a, nonprofit executive and a nonprofit client are all going to value the work of a nonprofit differently. Whose interests will be represented in these valuations?
So here's what's clear to me:
- Developing standardized metrics, with broad input from the entire community, will benefit everyone.
- Determining what those metrics are and should be will require improvements in data management and reporting systems. It's a bit of a chicken and egg problem, as collecting the data wis a precedent to determining how to assess it, but standardizing the data will assist in developing the data systems.
- We have to share our outcomes and compare them in order to develop actual standards. And there are real opportunities available to us if we do compare our methodologies and results.
This isn't easy. This will require that NPO's who have have never had the wherewith-all to invest in technology systems to assess performance do so. But, I maintain, if the world is going to start rating your effectiveness on more than the 990, that's a threat that you need to turn into an opportunity. You can't afford not to.
And I look to my nptech community, including Idealware, NTEN, Techsoup, Aspiration and many others -- the associations, formal, informal, incorporated or not, who advocate for and support technology in the nonprofit sector -- to lead this effort. We have the data systems expertise and the aligned missions to lead the project of defining shared outcome metrics. We're looking into having initial sessions on this topic at the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference.
As the world starts holding nonprofits up to higher standards, we need a common language that describes those standards. It hasn't been written yet. Without it, we'll escape the limited, Form 990 assessments to something that might equally fail to reflect our best efforts and outcomes.
Here at Idealware, an organization that's all about nonprofit-focused software, we understand that the success or failure of a software project often has far more to do with the implementation than the application. So, in addition to discussing software, we talk a lot about project management. To many of us, it seems like the only thing worse than devoting our scant resources to the task of building and maintaining a complex project plan is living with the result of a project that wasn't planned. While I'm a big a fan as the next guy of PMP-certified, MS Project Ninja masters, and will argue that you need one if your project is to build a new campus or a bridge, I think there are alternate methodologies that can cover us as we roll out our CRMs and web sites, even though I know that these projects that will fail expensively without proper oversight.
The traditional project planning method starts with a Project Manager, who plays a role that fluctuates between implementation guru, data entry clerk and your nagging Mom when you're late for school. The PM, as we'll call her or him, gathers all of the projected dates, people, budget, and materials, then builds the house of cards that we call the plan. The plan will detail how the HR Director will spend 15% of her time on a series of scheduled tasks that, if they slip, will impact the Marketing Coordinator and the Database Manager's tasks and timelines. So the PM has to be able to quickly, intelligently, rewrite the plan when the HR Director is pulled away for a personnel matter, skewering those assumptions.
My take is that this methodology doesn't work in environments like ours, where reduced overhead, high turnover and unanticipated priorities are the norm. We need a less granular methodology; one that will bend easily with our flexible work conditions. Mind you, when you give up the detailed plan, you give up the certainty that every "i" will be dotted, every "t" crossed, and every outcome accomplished on schedule. But it's possible to still keep sight of the important things while sacrificing some of the structural integrity.
First, keep what is critical: clear goals, communication, engagement and feedback. The biggest risk in any project no matter how well planned, is that you'll end up with something that has little relation to what you were trying to get. You need clearly understood goals, shared by all internal and external parties. Each step taken must factor in those goals and be made in light of them. All parties who have a stake in the project should have a role and a voice in the plan, from the CEO to the data entry clerk. And everyone's opinion matters.
Read up on agile project management, a collaborative approach that is more focused on the outcomes than the steps and timeline to get there. Offload the project management by focusing on expectation management. The clearer the participants are about their roles and accountability for their contributions, the less they need to be managed. Take a look at the Cult of Done (their manifesto is at the top of this article). Sound insane? Maybe. More insane than spending thousands of dollars and hours on an over-planned project that never yields results? For some perspective, read The Mythical Man Month (or, at least, this Wikipedia article on it), a book that clearly illustrates how the best laid plans can go horribly wrong.
Finally, my advocacy for less stringent forms of project management should not be read as permission to do it haphazardly. Engagement in and attention to the project can't be minimized. I'm suggesting that we can take a more creative, less traditional approach in environments where the traditional approach might be a bad fit, and for projects that don't require it. There are a lot of judgment calls involved, and the real challenge, as always, is keeping your eye on the goals and the team accountable for delivering them.
A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Google Wave, and how it might live up to the hype of being the successor to email. Now that I've had a month or so to play with it, I wanted to share my initial reactions. Short story: Google Wave is an odd duck, that takes getting used to. As it is today, it is not that revolutionary -- in fact, it's kind of redundant. The jury is still out.
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to try it, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial, competitive "gimme" stage. They should be easier to find if you speak up. And, once you get there (or if you are there and don't know what to do), there are some excellent ways to start learning and playing, which I'll discuss below.
Awkwardness
To put Wave in perspective, I clearly remember my first exposure to email. I bought my first computer in 1987: a Compaq "portable". The thing weighed about 60 pounds, sported a tiny green on black screen, and had two 5 and 1/4 inch floppy drives for applications and storage). Along with the PC, I got a 1200 BPS modem, which allowed me o dial up local bulletin boards. And, as I poked around, I discovered the 1987 version of email: the line editor.
On those early BBSes, emails were sent by typing one line (80 characters, max) of text and hitting "enter". Once "enter" was pressed, that line was sent to the BBS. No correcting typos, no rewriting the sentence. It was a lot like early typewriters, before they added the ability to strike out previously submitted text.
But, regardless of the primitive editing capabilities, email was a revelation. It was a new medium; a form of communication that, while far more awkward than telephone communications, was much more immediate than postal mail. And it wasn't long before more sophisticated interfaces and editors made their way to the bulletin boards.
Google Wave is also, at this point, awkward. To use it, you have to be somewhat self-confident right from the start, as others are potentially watching every letter that you type. And while it's clear that the ability to co-edit and converse about a document in the same place is powerful, it's messy. Even if you get over the sprawling nature of the conversations, which are only minimally better than what you would get with ten to twenty-five people all conversing in one Word document, the lack of navigational tools within each wave is a real weakness.
Redundant?
I'm particularly aware of these faults because I just installed and began using Confluence, a sophisticated, enterprise Wiki (free for nonprofits) at my organization. While we've been told that Wave is the successor to email, Google Docs and, possibly, Sharepoint, I have to say that Confluence does pretty much all of those things and is far more capable. All wikis, at their heart, offer collaborative editing, but the good ones also allow for conversations, plug-ins and automation, just as Google Wave promises. But with a wiki, the canvas is large enough and the tools are there to organize and manage the work and conversation. With Wave, it's awfully cramped, and somewhat primitive in comparison.
Too early to tell?
Of course, we're looking at a preview. The two things that possibly differentiate Wave from a solid wiki are the "inbox" metaphor and the automation capabilities. Waves can come to you, like email, and anyone who has tried to move a group from an email list to a web forum knows how powerful that can be. And Wave's real potential is in how the "bots", server-side components that can interact with the people communicating and collaborating, will integrate the development and conversation with existing data sources. It's still hard to see all of that in this nascent stage. Until then, it's a bit chicken and egg.
Wave starting points
There are lots of good Wave resources popping up, but the best, hands down, is Gina Trapini's Complete Guide, available online for free and in book form soon. Gina's blog is a must read for people who find the types of things I write about interesting.
Once you're on wave, you'll want to find Waves to join, and exactly how you do that is anything but obvious. the trick is to search for a term "such as "nonprofit" or "fundraising" and add the phrase "with:public". A good nonprofit wave to start with is titled, appropriately, "The Nonprofit Technology Wave".
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial "gimme" stage. In fact, I have ten or more to share (I'm peterscampbell on most social networks and at Google's email service).
Social networks provide nonprofits with great opportunities to raise awareness, just as they offer individuals more opportunities to be diagnosed with information overload syndrome. To my mind, the value of tools like Twitter and Facebook are not only that they increase my ability to communicate with people, but also that they replace communication models that are less efficient. Prior to social networks, we had Email, phones, Fax and Instant Messaging (IM). Each of these were ideal for one to one communication, and suitable for group messaging, but poor at broadcasting. With Twitter and Facebook, we have broader recipient bases for our messaging. Accordingly, there's also an assumption that we are casual listeners. With so much information hitting those streams, it would be unrealistic to expect anyone to listen 24/7.
Twitter offers, in addition to the casual stream, a person-to-person option called direct messaging. This is handy when you want to share information with a twitter friend that you might not want to broadcast, such as your email address, or a link to a map to your house. You can only direct message someone who is following you -- otherwise, it would be far too easy to abuse. Direct messages have more more in common with old-fashioned IM and EMail than Twitter posts. You can't direct message multiple recipients, and most of us receive direct messages in our email inboxes and/or via SMS, to insure that we don't miss them.
So I took note when a friend on a popular forum posted that his organization was launching a big campaign, and he was looking for a tool that would let him send a direct messages to every one of his followers. This, to me, seems like a bad idea. While I follow a lot of people and organizations on Twitter, I subscribe by email to far fewer mailing lists, limiting that personal contact to the ones that I am most interested in and/or able to support. I follow about 250 organizations on Twitter; I have no care to receive all of their campaign emails. But i trust that, if they are doing something exciting or significant, I'll hear about it. My friends will post a link on Facebook. They'll also retweet it. The power of social media is -- or, at least, should be -- that the interesting and important information gets voted up, and highlighted, based on how it's valued by the recipients, not the sender.
Social networks differ primarily from email and fax in that they are socially-driven messaging. The priority of any particular message can be set by each persons community that they tune into. My friend thinks his campaign is the most important thing coming down the pike, and that he should be able to transcend the casual nature of Twitter conversation in order to let me know about it. And, of course, I think that every campaign that my org trumpets is more important than his. But I think that proper campaign etiquette and strategy is to blast information on the mediums that support that, where your constituents sign up to be individually alerted. If you want to spread the word on Twitter or Facebook, focus on the message, not the media, and let the community carry it for you, if they agree that it's worthy.
To break down that tweet a bit, @kanter is the well-known Beth Kanter of Beth's blog. @pearlbear is former Idealware blogger and current contributor Michelle Murrain, and Beth asked us, in the referenced blog post, to dive a bit into internet security and how it contrasts with internet privacy concerns. Michelle's response, offers excellent and concise definitions of security and privacy as they apply to the web, and then sums up with a key distinction: security is a set of tools for protecting systems and information. The sensitivity of that data (and need for privacy) is a matter of policy. So the next question is, once you have your security systems and policies in place, what happens when the the policies are breached?
Craft a Policy that Minimizes Violations
Social media is casual media. The Web 2.0 approach is to present a true face to the world, one that interacts with the public and allows for individuals, with individual tastes and opinions, to share organizational information online. So a strict rule book and mandated wording for your talking points are not going to work.
Your online constituents expect your staff to have a shared understanding of your organization's mission and objectives. But they also expect the CEO, the Marketing Assistant and the volunteer Receptionists to have real names (and real pictures on their profiles); their own online voices; and interests they share that go beyond the corporate script. It's not a matter of venturing too far out of the water -- in fact, that could be as much of a problem as staying too close to the prepared scripts. But the tone that works is the one of a human being sharing their commitment and excitement about the work that they (and you) do.
Expect that the message will reflect individual interpretations and biases. Manage the messaging to the key points, and make clear the areas that shouldn't be discussed in public. Monitor the discussion, and proactively mentor (as opposed to chastising) staff who stray in ways that violate the policy, or seem capable of doing so.
The Case for Transparency
Transparency assumes that multiple voices are being heard; that honest opinions are being shared, and that organizations aren't sweeping the negative issues under the virtual rug. Admittedly, it's a scary idea that your staff, your constituents, and your clients should all be free to represent you. The best practice of corporate communications, for many years, was to run all messaging through Marketing/Communications experts and tightly control what was said. I see two big reasons for doing otherwise:
We no longer have a controlled media.
Controlled messaging worked when opening your own TV or Radio Station was prohibitively expensive. Today, YouTube, Yelp and Video Blogs are TV Stations. Twitter and Facebook Status are radio stations. The investment cost to speak your mind to a public audience has just about vanished.
We make more mistakes by under-communicating than we do by over-communicating.
Is the importance of hiding something worth the cost of looking like you have something to hide? At the peak of the dot com boom, I hired someone onto my staff at about $10k more (annually) than current staff in similar roles were making. An HR clerk accidentally sent the offer letter to my entire staff. The fallout was that I had meaningful talks about compensation with each of my staff; made them aware that they were getting market (or better) in a rapidly changing market, and that we were keeping pace on anniversary dates. Prior to the breach, a few of my staff had been wrongly convinced that they were underpaid in their positions. The incident only strengthened the trust between us.
The Good, the Bad, and the Messenger
Your blog should allow comments, and -- short of spam, personal attacks and incivility -- shouldn't be censored. A few years ago, a former employee of my (former) org managed to register the .com extension of our domain name and put up a web site criticizing us. While the site didn't get a lot of hits, he did manage to find other departed staff with axes to grind, and his online forum was about a 50-50 mix of people trashing us and others defending. After about a month, he went in and deleted the 50% of forum messages that spoke up for our organization, leaving the now one-sided, negative conversation intact. And that was the end of his forum; nobody ever posted there again.
There were some interesting lessons here for us. He had a lot of inside knowledge that he shared, with no concern or allegiance to our policy. And he was motivated and well-resourced to use the web to attack us, But, in the end, we didn't see any negative impact on our organization. The truth was, it was easy to separate his bias from his "inside scoops", and hard to paint us in a very negative light, because the skeletons that he let out of our closet were a lot like anybody else's.
What this proves is that message delivery accounts for the messenger. Good and bad tweets and blog posts about your organization will be weighed by the position and credibility of the tweeter or blogger.
Transparency and Constituent Data Breaches
Two years ago, a number of nonprofits were faced with a difficult decision when a popular hosted eCRM service was compromised, and account information for donors was stolen by one or more hackers. Thankfully, this wasn't credit card information, but it included login details, and I'm sure that we all know people who use the same password for their online giving as they do for other web sites, such as, perhaps, their online banking. This was a serious breach, and there was a certain amount of disclosure from the nonprofits to their constituents that was mandated.
Strident voices in the community called for full disclosure, urging affected nonprofits to put a warning on the home page of their web sites. Many of the organizations settled for alerting every donor that was potentially compromised via phone and/or email, determining that their unaffected constituents might not be clear on how the breach happened or what the risks were, and would simply take the home page warning as a suggestion to not donate online.
To frame this as a black and white issue, demanding that it be treated with no discretion, is extreme. The seriousness and threat that resulted from this particular breach was not a simple thing to quantify or explain. So it boils down to a number of factors:
Scope: If all or most of your supporters are at risk, or the number at risk is in the six figure range, it's probably more responsible, in the name of protecting them, to broadcast the alert widely. If, as in the case above, those impacted are the ones donate online, then that's probably not close to the amount that would fully warrant broad disclosure, as even the strident voice pointed out.
Risk: Will your constituents understand that the notice is informational, and not an admission of guilt or irresponsibility in handling their sensitive data? Alternatively, if this becomes public knowledge, would your lack of transparency look like an admission of guilt? You should be comfortable with your decision, and able to explain it.
Consistency: Some nonprofits have more responsibility to model transparency than others. If the Sunlight Foundation was one of the organizations impacted, it's a no-brainer. Salvation Army? Transparency isn't referenced on their "Positions" page.
Courtesy: Some constituencies are more savvy about this type of thing than others. If the affected constituents have all been notified, and they represent a small portion of the donor base, it's questionable whether scaring your supporters in the name of openness is really warranted.
Since alternate exposure, in the press or community, is likely to occur, the priority is to have a consistent policy about how and when you broadcast information about security breaches. Denying that something has had happened in any public forum would be irresponsible and unethical, and most likely come right back at you. Not being able to explain why you chose not to publicize it on your website could also have damaging consequences. Erring on the side of alerting and protecting those impacted by security breaches is the better way to go, but the final choice has to weigh in all of the risks and factors.
Conclusion
All of my examples assume you're doing the right things. You have justifiable reasons for doing things that might be considered provocative. Your overall efforts are mission-focused. And the reasons for privacy regarding certain information are that it needs to be private (client medical records, for example); it supports your mission-based objectives by being private, and/or it respects the privacy of people close to the information.
No matter how well we protect our data, the walls are much thinner than they used to be. Any unfortunate tweet can "go viral". We can't put a lock on our information that will truly secure it. So it's important to manage communications with an understanding that information will be shared. Protect your overall reputation, and don't sweat the minor slips that reveal, mostly, that you're not a paragon of perfection, maybe, but a group of human beings, struggling to make a difference under the usual conditions.
I have been thinking about email lately. Email predates the World Wide Web as we know it. In some settings, tackling email issues evokes about as much enthusiasm as planning for shoveling snow in the Northeast winter. Social media and what’s new on the web generally seem the forward place to be for communication. Yet email lives.
I recently helped facilitate Idealware’s debut of a new day-long email fund-raising boot camp training. Third Sector New England hosted this first one, and Idealware hopes to replicate it elsewhere. Toward the end, I suddenly had this flash. A couple dozen communications and development managers in the room, and not one “is email dead?” question all day. We had a great, collaborative spirit throughout the day based on what I see in hindsight as some shared understandings:
Email tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response make broadcast emails and e-newsletters easier and more professional than ever.
Email broadcast or newsletter tools are content management for email. They facilitate the same collaborative editing and planning that content management systems bring to the Web. They empower you to track statistics against goals. They bring consistent design templates to email. They enable reliable web links. They bring reliable viewing to different email readers.
Writing and editing email messages resembles other writing in some ways, but has its own professional features—such as brevity.
On the downside, the sea of spam email swims in and other challenges make successfully delivering and getting attention email harder than ever. Email tool bring an easy discipline to the legal requirements for safe email and to maximizing “deliverability” to your lists.
And having a full data strategy—integrating with forms on the web, contact databases and such, segmenting lists—won’t come without serious effort.
Even so, whether my organization’s constituents mainly, primarily or only secondarily look for email news, email remains a critical part of the communications circuit, requires planning and campaign models.
These expectations and understandings vary by generation and community context. (And globally, they also vary by technology infrastructure. Where the Internet infrastructure is weak, mobile text based messaging is stronger.)
Effective Email is one part strategy, one part design and one part data management. You can only learn so much by checking email stats. You need to correlate email campaigns with the full range staff and community advocacy and services that reach your constituency -- and the sub-groups and segments within it.
This was my third email training in the last few months. With each, it has become less of a guilty pleasure again.
Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.
If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.
How long do email posts persist?
Here in Boston, missing emails from the computer of the Mayor’s chief adviser have become one of a handful of widely-discussed fall campaign issues. We have a mayor with a strong reputation for attention to all the details in all the neighborhoods, including perhaps emailing about them. And we have challengers focusing on the need for greater transparency and decentralization of decision-making. These have been somewhat abstract differentiators. Nothing like a chief aide’s apparent penchant for erasing all his email every day to focus the public attention.
What’s fascinating to me is how much public information about technology this incident has brought about.
Infrastructure: The public is learning stuff about the technical infrastructure of backing up emails on a server, also important in the second incident, below. Everyone should know now that it’s the norm for their email to exist in more one place. It’s not just on your desktop. Once it’s out there, a message’s traces may persist for a long time.
In this case, while things were not automatically and consistently kept in multiple places, emails that we’re cc’d or forwarded to others leave their own traces. Multiple computers leave traces. Sender’s outbound email leave traces.
While there has been a lot of discussion recently about what happens to personal details on Facebook and other social media, we all got a big fat reminder about the persistence of email.
Forensics: Second, on the technical side, those that could stand it learned more about computer forensics than you would in a season of 24. Maybe 2 seasons. Are things you erase from a hard drive really erased? Not if someone is willing to spending time and money recovering those electronic wisps and traces of the past. Typically, even if you reformat a hard drive, a lot of stuff is still there. When you are done with a computer, in addition to the environmental concerns about all the hardware, better be pretty sure what is going to happen with that hard drive.
Open Government: Third, given that some of the missing emails may factor in a corruption case involving another politician, if they are truly gone, this may violate the state’s public record laws. This may point to the most important public information side of the incident.
Transparency in government operations means more than just having cameras in hearing rooms. It means that the sum total of data collected and used—including emails—may be of interest to policy advocates and others. Tabular data on services provided and business status may have more direct value. And there may not be much to learn from plowing through tedious emails by the thousands from the desks of policy makers. Yet I can imagine that many people now imagining seeing a “power map” of the social web of who corresponds with who and in what frequency at City Hall and other government offices.
Email shows politics in charter school decision
The second email-ish political incident is playing out at the state level. We have had a look at highly embarassing “private” email correspondence between Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville. We see that a critical decision regarding a new charter school had as much to do with politics as pedagogy. What, politics in charter school decisions? This is like Captain Renault confronting Humphrey Bogart with gambling in “Rick’s Cafe” in Casablanca. Education activists have been trying to make this point for years, and one tiny email exchange blows it wide open for everyone.
Both incidents are lessons in the advocacy potential of Open Government.
The irony about all this is that it also reveals the twin headaches of email in IT or personal computer infrastructure. Email can be one of the hardest things to ensure safe back-up. Whether to tape, disk or off-site cloud storage, you generally need software specifically rated to back up an Outlook mailbox or Exchange server files. And if you have off-site hosted Exchange or use Google Apps webmail, you have even more complicated issues in insuring your organization controls and retains the archives it wants. Blackberries and such add even more complexity to infrastructure and back-up issues.
If the city issue shows that email archives can be harder to maintain than, say, a project document folder, the state issue shows that sometimes a email exchange you thought casual, ad hoc, and private may turn out to have a life of its own. Email copies may exist in many places aside from your own desktop, and they maybe there for a really long time, and they may get forwarded when and where you least expect it.
And both political problems also show that even if you take care in what you write, you can’t control what comes streaming into your Inbox unscreened every day. Things others send you can make trouble even if they’re not malware.
In the continuum of attention to what we write these days, Instant Messages or cell phone SMS texts sit at one end of casualness. A polished, multiply edited and vetted report or proposal lies at the other end. Tweets, blogs, social media participation, along with emails all occupy some middle ground. While quite old in Internet terms, email--whether person-to-person or broadcast out—needs new strategy, care and attention that reflects its continuing persistence.
The popular theory is that, with social networks like Twitter and Facebook serving as link referral tools, there's no need to setup and look at feeds in a reader anymore. And I agree that many people will forgo RSS in favor of the links that their friends and mentors tweet and share. But this is kind of like saying that, if more people shop at farmer's markets than supermarkets, we will no longer need trucks. Dave Winer, quite arguably the founder of RSS, and our friends at ReadWriteWeb have leapt to RSS's defense with similar points - Winer puts it best, saying:
"These protocols...are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece."
My arguments for the defense:
1. RSS is, and always has been about, taking control of the information you peruse. Instead of searching, browsing, and otherwise separating a little wheat from a load of chaff, you use RSS to subscribe to the content that you have vetted as pertinent to your interests and needs. While that might cross-over a bit with what your friends want to share on Facebook, it's you determining the importance, not your friends. For a number of us, who use the internet for research; brand monitoring; or other explicit purposes, a good RSS Reader will still offer the best productivity boost out there.
2. Where do you think your friends get those links? It's highly likely that most of them -- before the retweets and the sharing -- grabbed them from an RSS feed. I post links on Twitter and Facebook, and I get most of them from my Google Reader flow.
3. It's not the water, it's the pipe. The majority of those links referred by Twitter are fed into Twitter via RSS. Twitterfeed, the most popular tool for feeding RSS data to Twitter, boasts about half a million feeds. Facebook, Friendfeed and their ilk all allow importing from RSS sources to profiles.
So, here are some of the ways I use RSS every day:
Basic Aggregation with Drupal
My first big RSS experiment built on the nptech tagging phenomenon. Some background: About five years ago, with the advent of RSS-enabled websites that allowed for storing and tagging information (such as Delicious, Flickr and most blogging platforms), Techsoup CEO Marnie Webb had a bright idea. She started tagging articles, blog posts, and other content pertinent to those working in or with nonprofits and technology with the tag "nptech". She invited her friends to do the same. And she shared with everyone her tips for setting up an RSS newsreader and subscribing to things marked with our tag. Marnie and I had lunch in late 2005 and agreed that the next step was to set up a web site that aggregated all of this information. So I put up the nptech.info site, which continues to pull nptech-tagged blog entries from around the web.
Other Tricks
Recently, I used Twitterfeed to push the nptech aggregated information to the nptechinfo Twitter account. So, if you don't like RSS, you can still get the links via Twitter. But stay aware that they get there via RSS!
But I'm pretty dull -- what's more exciting is the way that Google Reader let me create a "bundle" of all of the nptech blogs that I follow. You can sample a bunch of great Idealware-sympatico bloggers just by adding it to your reader.
Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google's aspirations, will supersede email. There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve. We've gone from:
The Yahoo! Directory model - a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to
The Google needle/haystack approach - the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to
Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.
For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we're looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it's being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks. Much of what we refer to eachother is content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.
Google Wave might well be "Web 3.0", the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure. Data isn't stored as much as it is shared. You don't browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves. Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.
Looking at Wave in light of Google's mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world's information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called "robots". Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response. The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they're going to give patient "John Doe" a peanut butter sandwich. The robot has access to Doe's medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe's medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.
This doesn't invalidate the use of Wave, by any means -- a wave that is housed on the Doctor's office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone "replying to all" when they didn't mean to. If it's that easy to forget who you're talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we're revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?
The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave's combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend. If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to use the net, then it has culture-changing potential. It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable's Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here's a tutorial on how to build a robot.
Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we're willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level. My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer's preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.
Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".
The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and "wave" list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail's two.
A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time. This means that, if we're both working in the same wave, you can see what I'm typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It's a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it's also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.
Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google's personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them -- or things like them -- in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.
You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with. User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.
Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google's being kind of coy when they call it an email killer - it's a Sharepoint killer. It's possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer. It's certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying "I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share" says "I want to share, and, once we're sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever". Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features. Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It's Google Docs inverted.
So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:
Adopt it;
Feel comfortable with it; and
Trust Google.
Next week, I'll spend a little time on the gotcha's - please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.
I'm following up on my post suggesting that Wikis should be grabbing a portion of the market from word processors. Wikis are convenient collaborative editing platforms that remove a lot of the legacy awkwardness that traditional editing software brings to writing for the web. Gone are useless print formatting functions like pagination and margins; huge file sizes; and the need to email around multiple versions of the same document.
There are a lot of use cases for Wikis:
We can all thank Wikipedia for bringing the excellent crowd-sourced knowledgebase functionality to broad attention. Closer to home we can see great use of this at the We Are Media Wiki, where NTEN and friends share best practices around social media and nonprofits.
Collaborative authoring is another natural use, illustrated beautifully by the Floss Manuals project.
Project Management and Development are regularly handled by Wikis, such as the Fedora Project
Wikis make great directories for other media, such as Project Gutenburg's catalogue of free E-Books.
Almost any popular Wiki software will support the basic functionality of providing user-editable web pages with some formatting capability and a method (such as "CamelCase") to signify text that should be a link. But Wikis have been exploding with additional functionality that ramps up their suitability for all sorts of tasks:
The Floss Manuals team wrote extensions for the Open Source TWiki platform that track who is working on which section of a book and send out updates.
TWiki, along with Confluence, SocialText and other platforms, include (either natively or via an optional plugin) tabular data -- spreadsheet like pages for tracking lists and numeric information. This can really beef up the value of a Wiki as an Intranet or Project Management application.
TWiki and others include built-in form generators, allowing you to better track information and interact with Wiki users.
And, of course, the more advanced Wikis are building in social networking features. Most Wikis support RSS, allowing you to subscribe to page revisions. But newer platforms are adding status updates and Twitter-like functionality.
Before choosing a Wiki platform, ask yourself some key questions:
Do you need granular security? Advanced Wikis have full-blown user and group-based security and authentication features, much like a standard CMS.
Should the data be stored in a database? It might be useful or even critical for integration with other systems.
Does it belong on a local server, or in the cloud? There are plenty of great hosted Wikis, like PBWorks (formerly PBWiki) and WikiSpaces, in addition to all of the Wikis that you can download and install on your own Server. There are even personal Wikis like TiddlyWiki and ZuluPad. I use a Wiki on my Android phone called WikiNotes for my note-keeping.
Are you already using a Wiki? You might be. Google Docs, with it's revision history feature, may look more like a Word processor, but it's a Wiki at heart.
Questions you might be asking yourself about social networking -
Have you been asking yourself why you would put time, energy and potentially even funding towards social networking when you are have your hands full just keeping your core technology operational? Or, have you jumped on the band wagon, have your Facebook page up and have begun to tweet but are not seeing the results that you were expecting?
To address the first question – Why even start? – social networking is the “new” communication medium and is used extensively by people crossing many of the boundaries that exist for other media – age, gender, culture, education, etc. Social networking is simply a new tool and methodology for communication. Like any other business critical system, if there is an upgrade available that provides greater functionality, it is in the best interest of your organization to determine if the benefits of that upgrade are worth the related cost.
To engage your community in your mission, efforts have traditionally been focused on producing print, TV and radio advertising materials, providing content on your web site, and more recently many organizations have moved into email marketing/communication. Each of these methods of communication brings with it different costs and benefits, and reaches a potentially different audience. They all have two things in common – you are “pushing” information in one direction – out, and there is limited if any “ripple effect” from your messaging. The concept of social networking is simply that information is pushed out and/or conversations are started, and they are spread via your constituents’ personal and professional networks. The unique characteristic of social networking is that your potential benefit increases exponentially with a single piece of communication, and without increasing the cost of production.
Addressing the second question raised above – Why am I not getting the results I had hoped for?
There are a couple of questions below, and your answers will guide you to the correct action…
1 - Has an assessment been completed including the following items?
Assess your audience
Determine the appropriate framework for your message - Twitter allows 140 characters, Facebook has virtually unlimited capacity, and in both, you need to continue to actively message to stay “above the fold”.
Identify the appropriate tools to deliver the message – blog, Twitter, Facebook, Ning, Flickr, and so many more exist. Each has different qualities and drawbacks.
2 – Have you defined a strategy including the following items?
Training on selected tools and best practices in their use
Implementation plans
Schedule for content updates
Staffing for writing content and ongoing maintenance
Definition of evaluation methods – what are your metrics for determining if your efforts are successful?
A few closing thoughts to help you design a successful social networking strategy – Your planning for entering this new medium of communication should be as thoughtful as the planning for a new education or marketing campaign in any other medium to realize the maximum benefit. You must remember that this is a new medium, and like all new communication efforts, it takes some trial and error to find the best fit for your organization in terms of tools, frequency and substance of content. Know what you are evaluating for and do the analysis necessary to determine if your efforts are paying off. Finally, if you are not sure where to start – there are resources available, both freely accessible information on the web and consulting expertise.
As the internet has progressed from a shared source of information to a primary communications tool, a natural offshoot of the migration has been where the two things meet: people referring internet information. If you're active at all on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendfeed, or any of the numerous online communities, big or small, then you are regularly seeing links to useful articles and blog posts; cute YouTube videos, and entertaining photos. Much of this information is passed along from online friend to online friend, but where does the first referral originate from? Usually, it's somebody's RSS reader.
The main reason that I'm such an RSS advocate is that I believe that it's the tool that lets me find the strategic and useful needles lost in the haystack of celebrity gossip, prurient content, and corporate promotional materials that they're buried under. But it isn't "RSS", per se, that does the filtering -- it's other people, whom I call "information agents", who do the sifting. If I want to keep up with fundraising trends, a topic that interests me, but, as an IT Director, isn't my primary area of expertise, I'm not going to spend thirty minutes a day doing research. I subscribe to some very pertinentblogs, and I follow a few people on Twitter and in Reader who find the important and insightful articles and share them with me.
Now it appears that Google wants to cut out the social media middlepeople. As I alluded to in my article on RSS, and fleshed out in this post about sharing with reader, the ability to refer information that you find in Reader is one of the things that makes it so powerful. Last week, Google seriously upped the ante by adding Twitter/Facebook/Delicious-like following, "liking" and sharing to the mix.
Here's what the new features do:
Sharing now lets you share with the world, or just those members of the world that you want to share with. Google has always allowed you to share items, but connecting to other people was a bit arcane and limited, as, by default, Google only allowed you to connect to those that you chat with in GMail. If you read up on it, you learned that you could change that to any defined group of associates in your Google Contacts (all of this assuming that you use Google Contacts - many Google Reader users don't). As someone who does use all of the Google stuff, I still found that opening this up to 80 or so people in my contacts didn't make it clear to many of them as to how they could connect with me.
The new Following feature lets you follow anyone who is willing to share, not just people that you personally communicate with. Now my shared items are marked as public, so anyone can follow my shared items feed by clicking on "Sharing Settings" (in the "People You Follow" section) and searching for me by name or email address. Once you locate me (or someone else), you can (and should) browse through their items to make sure that they share things that you'll find useful. For example, I share a lot of things that are on the topics that I blog about here. But I also share items related to civil rights issues and the occasional link that I find funny. Since humor and politics are very subjective topics, you might want to be sure that you're not going to be annoyed or offended you before you subscribe to a feed.
But the internet is not just about who you know. The Like feature allows you to find new people to follow based on common interests. You'll note that certain articles have a new note at the top saying "XX people liked this", where "XX" is the number of people who have indicated that they like the article by checking the option at the bottom of the post. This message is a link, and clicking it expands it into links to each of the people who "liked" it, allowing you to browse their shared items and optionally follow them. This, to me, enables the real power of the social web -- finding people who share your interests, but have better sources. It's what initially was so exciting about social bookmarking service Delicious, and it's about time that Google Reader enabled it.
I'm hoping the Google's next round of Reader updates will improve our ability to not just tag and classify the information that we find, but also share based on those classifications. That will enable me to selectively publish items that I think are of interest to others, perhaps sending nptech links to Friendfeed and the humorous stuff to Facebook. But I welcome these improvements, and I appreciate the way that reader becomes more and more of a single stop for information discovery and distribution. The Internet would be a messier place without it.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
When comparison shopping, we have come to expect that companies will make outlandish claims about their stuff. Sometimes it's frustrating, but most of the time, I continue on numb to the distorted claims clinging to the brands all around me. For nonprofits in the business of providing a social benefit, its especially disheartening when I read similarly exaggerated claims about their accomplishments.
I see credible communication as a social benefit. Sandra Stewart, a colleague over at Thinkshift Communications, shared a beta "Credibility Quotient" to help quantify the credibility of initiatives. I found it useful as I thought about building nonprofit websites, and the kinds of messaging and communications strategies that become implicit in the architecture of the sites I build.
Thinkshift identifies several factors in determining credibility, including provable claims, accurate data, attention to challenges, relevance to the audience, consistency with actions and more. These factors and definitions show the different perspectives we can take when considering whether web content is credible, and helps to determine where to focus to fix any problems. For me, the details of the scoring and weighting are less important than the exercise in understanding what credibility factors are most important, and how to read content for these factors.
Do you run an online community? The definition is pretty sketchy, ranging from a blog with active commenters to, say, America Online. If we define an online community as a place where people share knowledge, support, and/or friendship via communication forums on web sites or via email, there are plenty of web sites, NING groups, mailing lists and AOL chat rooms that meet that criteria.
The current interest is spurred by the notion that this is the required web 2.0/3.0 direction for our organizational web sites. We've made the move to social media (as this recent report suggests); now we need to be the destination for this online interaction. I don't think that's really a given, any more than it's clear that diving into Facebook and Twitter is a good use of every nonprofit's resources. It all depends on who your constituents are and how they prefer to interact with you. But, certainly, engagement of all types (charitable, political, commercial) is expanding on the web, and most of us have an audience of supporters that we can communicate with here.
Buried deep in my techie past is a three year gig as an online community manager. It was a volunteer thing. More honestly, a hobby. In 1988, I set up a FidonetBulletin Board System (BBS); linked it to a number of international discussion groups (forums); and built up a healthy base of active participants.
This was before the world wide web was a household term. I ran specific software that allowed people to dial in, via modem, to my computer, and either read and type messages on line or download them into something called a "QWK reader"; read and reply off line, and then synchronize with my system later. There were about 1000 bulletin board systems within the local calling distance in San Francisco at the time. Many of them had specific topics, such as genealogy or cooking; mine was a bit more generally focused, but I appealed to birdwatchers, because I published rare bird alerts, and to people who liked to talk politics. This was during the first gulf war, and many of my friends system's were sporting American Flags (in ASCII Art), while my much more liberal board was the place to be if you were more critical of the war effort.
At the peak of activity, I averaged 200 messages a day in our main forum, and I'm pretty sure that the things that made this work apply just as much to the more sophisticated communities in play today. Those were:
Meeting a Need: There were plenty of people who desired a place to talk politics and share with a community, and there wasn't a lot of competition. The bulk of my success was offering the right thing at the right time. It's much tougher now to hang a shingle and convince people that your community will meet their needs when they have millions to choose from. How successful -- and how useful -- your community might be depends on how much of a unique need it serves.
Maintaining Focus: many of the popular bulletin boards had forums, online gaming, and downloads. My board had forums. The handful of downloads were the QWK readers and supporting software that helped people use the forums. The first time you logged on, you were subjected to a rambling bit of required reading that said, basically, "if birdwatching and chatting about the issues of the day interests you, keep on reading", and I saw numerous people hang up before getting through that, which i considered a very good thing. The ones that made it through tended to be civil and engaged by what they signed on for. By focusing more on what made for a quality discussion, as opposed to trying to attract a large, diverse crowd, my base grew much bigger than I ever imagined it would.
Tolerance and Civility: We had a few conservatives among our active callers, and that kept the conversation lively. But we had excellent manners, never resorting to personal attacks and sending lots of private messages to the contrarians supporting their involvement. We really appreciated them, and they appreciated semi-celebrity status. It was all about the arguments, not about the attitude. Mind you, this was 1989/90 -- I'm not sure if it's possible to have civil public political debates today...
Active moderation: My hobby was a full time job that I did on top of my full time job. I engaged with my callers as if they were sitting in my living room, being gracious and helpful while I participated fully in the main events. There was a little moderation required to keep the tone civil, and making the board safe for all -- particularly the ones with the minority opinions -- required having their trust that I wouldn't let any attacks get through without my response.
I think that the biggest question today is whether you should be building a community on your own, or engaging your community in the ample public places (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) that they might already hang out in. In fact, I think that where you engage is a fairly moot point, what's important is that you do engage and provide a forum that helps people cope and learn about the issues that your organization is addressing. Pretty much all of the bulleted advice above will apply to your community, or out in the community.
The technology trend that defines this decade is the movement towards open, pervasive computing. The Internet is at our jobs, in our homes, on our phones, TVs, gaming devices. We email and message everyone from our partners to our clients to our vendors to our kids. For technology managers, the real challenges are less in deploying the systems and software than they are in managing the overlap, be it the security issues all of this openness engenders, or the limitations of our legacy systems that don't interact well enough. But the toughest integration is not one between software or hardware systems, but, instead, the intersection of strategic computing and organizational culture.
There are two types of silos that I want to discuss: organizational silos, and siloed organizations.
An organizational silo, to be clear, is a group within an organization that acts independently of the rest of the organization, making their own decisions with little or no input from those outside of the group. This is not necessarily a bad thing; there are (although I can't think of any) cases where giving a group that level of autonomy might serve a useful purpose. But, when the silo acts in an environment where their decisions impact others, they can create long-lived problems and rifts in critical relationships.
We all know that external decisions can disrupt our planning, be it a funders decision to revoke a grant that we anticipated or a legislature dropping funding for a critical program. So it's all the more frustrating to have the rug pulled out from under us by people who are supposed to be on the same team. If you have an initiative underway to deploy a new email system, and HR lays off the organizational trainer, you've been victimized by a silo-ed decision. On the flip side, a fundraiser might undertake a big campaign, unaware that it will collide with a web site redesign that disables the functionality that they need to broadcast their appeal.
Silos thrive in organizations where the leadership is not good at management. Without a strong CEO and leadership team, departmental managers don't naturally concern themselves with the needs of their peers. The expediency and simplicity of just calling the shots themselves is too appealing, particularly in environments where resources are thin and making overtures to others can result in those resources being gladly taken and never returned. In nonprofits, leaders are often more valued for their relationships and fundraising skills than their business management skills, making our sector more susceptible to this type of problem.
The most damaging result of operating in this environment is that, if you can't successfully manage the silos in your organization, then you won't be anything but a silo in the world at large.
We've witnessed a number of industries, from entertainment and newspapers to telephones and automobiles, as they allowed their culture to dictate their obsolescence. Instead of adapting their models to the changing needs of their constituents, they've clung to older models that aren't relevant in the digital age, or appropriate for a global economy on a planet threatened by climate change. Since my focus is technology, I pay particular attention to the impacts that technological advancement, and the accompanying change in extra-organizational culture (e.g., the country, our constituents, the world) have on the work my organization does. Just in the past few years, we've seen some significant cultural changes that should be impacting nonprofit assumptions about how we use technology:
Increased regulation on the handling of data. We're wrestling with the HIPAA laws governing handling of medical data and PCI standards for financial data. If we have not prioritized firewalls, encryption, and the proper data handling procedures, we're more and more likely to be out of step with new laws. Even the 990 form we fill out now asks if we have a document retention plan.
Our donors are now quite used to telephone auto attendants, email, and the web. How many are now questioning why we use the dollars they donate to us to staff reception, hand write thank you notes, and send out paper newsletters and annual reports?
Our funders are seeing more available data on the things that interest them everywhere, so they expect more data from us. The days of putting out the success stories without any numbers to quantify them are over.
Are we making changes in response to these continually evolving expectations? Or are we still struggling with our internal expectations, while the world keeps on turning outside of our walls? We, as a sector, need to learn what these industrial giants refused to, before we, too, are having massive layoffs and closing our doors due to an inability to adapt our strategies to a rapidly evolving cultural climate. And getting there means paying more attention to how we manage our people and operations; showing the leadership to head into this millennia by mastering our internal culture and rolling with the external changes. Look inward, look outward, lead and adapt.
I had big plans for another insightful, deep, break-down-the-walls-of-the-corporate-culture-that-diminishes-use-of-technology post today, but I think I'm gonna save it for a rainy day and write something a bit more useful, instead. I have a big nonprofit technology conference coming up this weekend, as you might, as well, and I think we should all be resting up for it.
The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate. All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can't tell people what you're doing, what you're doing won't be well-received. And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you're doing, whether it's taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007.
Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read:
Let no acronym go unexplained.
The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that
"The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server" or
"The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane".
Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible. But if it's relevant, speak english: "In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections."
Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects
Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance. If your message is titled "Technical Information", it might as well be titled "You are getting sleepy..." But, if it's titled "Network Availability" or "Database Maintenance Scheduled", your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don't worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability. The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff's attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points to the email (see rule 4).
Keep it short and simple
It's about what the staff needs to know, not what you'd like to tell them. So, the network maintenance email should not read:
"The systems will be down from 4:30 to 9:00 tonight while we replace drives in the domain controllers and run a full defrag on the main document server"
It should read:
"The network will be unavailable from 4:30 pm until 9:00 pm while we perform critical maintenance".
If it's only a portion of the network, but something useful will be up - as when the file servers are being repaired, but email is still available, make a note of that: "While the main servers will not be available, you will still be able to send and receive email".
No ALL CAPS, no exclamation points!!! and go sparingly on the bold
System downtime might be urgent to you, but it's never urgent to the staff. It's a fact of life. A reply from the Director of Online Giving that the downtime will jettison a planned online campaign is urgent; not your routine announcement.
Tell the whole story
...even if this sounds like it conflicts with rule 3. Because there are two types of people on your staff:
The majority, who want simple, non-techie messages as described above
The rest, who want the gory details, either so they can rest easy that you aren't making anything up, or because they're actually interested in what you're up to.
My approach is to do the simple message and, below it type, "Technical Details (optional reading)". In this section I might explain that we're replacing the server that processes their network logins (I won't use "DHCP" or "Domain Controller" if I can help it) or that we're upgrading to the new version of Outlook.
The key concepts here are consistency, simplicity, and a focus on what impacts them regarding what you're doing. Stick to it and, miraculously, people might start reading your all staff emails.
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