“Change” may not be coming to Washington as fast as we expected a year ago. Yet at the grass roots level, in the technology realm, something is definitely happening, and its going to help the policy reform process. The same kind of democratizing, collaborative, open source/open content trend that has swept through nonprofit technology now is gathering momentum in local, state and even national government. That was my overall takeaway from taking part in the March 6 New England Gov 2.0 “Unconference” at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Even if you didn't attend, you can find a lot of notes and material here: http://gov20ne.pbworks.com/ or look for Twitter archives at #gov20ne.
About 250 of us gathered in Cambridge as part of a series of Gov 2.0 summits and informal conferences around the country initiated last year by O’Reilly (the publisher) and other partners. While I have followed these to some degree, this was my first outing. Read more about the national efforts here: http://www.gov2summit.com/. On the related blog, you can sign-up to be part of the nonprofit/public sector connection.
Feeling that my own work straddles the fence between nonprofit and public sectors, I wasn’t sure how I would feel or where I would fit in that day. Right at home: we had an energized mix of public officials, government technology policy staff, nonprofit policy advocates, community activists, software developers, and academic researchers and students. Judging by the conversations at this conference, those working in human services, policy advocacy and political activism need to pay close attention to what is happening here. The public and nonprofit sectors have a lot to learn from each other, they serve common goals, and progress around effective use of data and the web will be mutually reinforcing. “Data” was likely the biggest buzz word at the conference—open data, sharing data, collaborative data, mapping and visualizing data and so on. This being an unconference, it aimed to self-organized by interest and we started by everyone giving a three words introduction of their background and interest. (Mine way, “share data now.”) Looking at the wordle (word cloud) of those introductions, you can see that data and open information drew many to the conference. (Creative Commons credit to http://www.wordle.net/ for the "Gov 2.0 Camp New England ")
Federal, State and Local Government agencies sit on enormous repositories of data that traditionally gets collected as a matter of course for regulatory reasons. We have business, economic, environmental and other data that advocacy groups need to be more effective. It’s often there but hard to get one’s hands on.
We also have mounds of data extracted from nonprofit social services and educational organizations at tremendous cost of time and infrastructure. Busy staff collect data to satisfy public grants as much or more than private foundation grants. From my point of view, this data may start as your data, yet once it passes to the government, it becomes public data. It makes sense that this data—in aggregated, depersonalized, privacy-protected form—be available back as well for communities to learn from, make their own assessments and evaluations of success and effectiveness.
In the public sector, making public data public serves the general good. Elected officials can commission and use (or ignore, as they see fit) qualitative assessments for policy making. The Gov 2.0 trend represents a desire for transparency around that government policy research.
Meanwhile, social sector advocates and activists have learned a lot about mining data to assess trends, correlate results with demographic and other community factors, and press for results and changes. We are all collectors of data and measurers of outcomes. This experience outside the government is an accelerant that will drive change inside the government. Organizational staff and consultants may gripe about grant requirements, yet we are also increasingly using the experiences to improve our own strategies and organizational management.
Toward a policy of "Data Impact Statements"
What should we look for, expect and advocate for in these realms?
First, the public wants more, easier, fuller access to government data. Yet government agencies have old systems, have legitimate boundaries around confidentiality and privacy, and have tight budgets and overwhelmed staff these days with little room to build elaborate data reporting systems. How do we strike a balance?
Where government agencies collect data, and most do, we should expect increasing transparency about what will be collected, at what cost in agency staffing and in compliance time and cost for those required to submit the data, with what quality, with what expected use internal to the government agency, and with what return back to the public. A few years ago, when incoming Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick asked for testimony to his Transition Teams, I proposed the concept of a standard “Data Impact Statement.” Like an environmental impact statement, government agencies would need to file a statement in a standard, readable format on any new initiative that collected data—individual filings or anything else. The statement would list what was being collected; what privacy, confidentiality, or security concerns there were about it; a pre-emptive judgment of the likely quality of the data; and what provisions the agency planned to make to put the data in the public domain.
In the not so distant future, we should aim that reactive freedom of information lawsuits will fade in favor of proactive Data Impact Statements throughout government. By having Data Impact Statements, at least advocacy organizations and human services agencies would be able to review, comment on, and press for change on what was going to happen with data their communities would provide and what of use they would get back. Over time, we can move toward uniform expectations—and funding to back it up.
Second, we should press that the release of data follow emerging technical standards. Web sites with pages of information, even if searchable, are not the same as reusable, transferable data format. The data evolutionary trajectory goes from text on the web, to tabular data on web pages, to downloadable text or Excel, to XML and now to the emerging concept of RDFa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/. This year’s new Drupal release, for example, will embrace RDFa as a standard for web services and data exchange. I suspect that other modern data and community oriented software will as well.
Helping people ask, "How would this look on a map?"
Third, where the average person might reasonably ask, “how would this data look on a map,” public data should be presented with geographic information right there for use. The Gov 2.0 conference gave interesting attention to opening up data for spatial analysis, using geographical based information in crises such as Haiti and Chile, and innovative light-weight open source software like Ushahidi for social mobilization and response.
Fourth, even in the midst of glaring global policy issues from health care to the economy to the wars, we should give some attention to reinforcing national leadership coming in the tech sphere. The Obama administration has taken a strong stand on the democratizing of public data. The http://www.data.gov/ web site is both a growing repository of data anyone can use in the policy making process as well as a sounding board for developing technical and policy standards. It is a welcome initiative and I part of the framework that makes the Gov 2.0 conferences so timely.
Let data inform the educational policy debates
Fifth, if data is flooding in to government and beginning to steam out, we need keep a steady eye on privacy and confidentiality issues. Protect privacy yet don't let it derail opening things up.
A good example is in the realms of education policy. Policy advocates want to be able to do their own refactoring of data on mandatory testing, the record of charter schools, programs to reduce educational inequality, and other elements of No Child Left Behind and its local equivalents. Often this data usage gets lost or delayed because of how long it takes to resolve legal issues around protecting individual student and teacher performance data. In this day and age, we should be able to keep individual data confidential and make aggregated data public. We should also be able to let public school systems and community-based youth jobs and enrichment programs securely exchange individual level student data where both sides agree, have signed appropriate agreements, and have family sign-offs as well. This is probably the single most recurring technology related demand from staff I work with on youth and alternative education programs.
Mobile and Social Media And the Gov 2.0 Trend
Sixth, there is better access to existing data and there is creating new data. In particular, an additional important trend is the use Web 2.0 and social media technologies to inform, energize and empower the public. At the conference, probably the most frequently mentioned example of local tech initiative was the local transit authority’s initiative to put realtime tracking of buses and other transit in the hands of the public. Yes, others may have started on this long before Massachusetts. Yet it has been remarkable how quickly local developers rushed to create mobile apps and all kinds of technology ideas have surfaced around the transit data. At one level, having this information helps busy people know whether they can grab that extra cup of coffee and therefore promote local business at a time when the state really needs it. At another level, it will also help transit and environmental activists really focus in on questions about which areas of the city get what kind of service.
As we learned at the conference, many local communities are experimenting with mobile phone-based systems that enable people and organizations to report problems, oversee responses, and work collaborative to improve services.
All these trends and more will also aid business planning and development. For the moment, the main learning and drive in the Gov 2.0 trend is collaboration and sharing among nonprofit and public sector technologists and policy makers. If you aren’t yet following this trend, you need to.
I’m at an interesting intersection in my career path. I just concluded eight years at a small, statewide health care reform nonprofit in Massachusetts called Community Partners. I was Technology & Strategy Director there. Like so many orgs around us, we went under a month ago due to the bad economy. Though I am sad to lose my wonderful co-workers, it was coming for a long time, so I was somewhat prepared. A long time ago, other organizations and foundations started asking me lots of technology questions. This has naturally parlayed into consulting.
At this juncture where I have a sense of what it's like to work in a small org and am also looking at and helping larger orgs and foundations to make decisions about tech and use it in smart ways, I’m thinking a lot about something I call "supported open source."
"How do I choose a CMS?" is one of the most frequent questions I get. "Should I go with a closed but well-supported system or should I venture out into the Badlands of Open Source?" There is another way! That is supported open source.
The perception is often that if you choose open source—even if you hire additional expertise to initially build your site—you have to have skills in-house to keep it going after launch. I think the perception that you're on your own with open source is one of the barriers to its adoption for many businesses and nonprofits. But there are companies and consultants that will stick around, long after your site is launched, to give you the help and support you need. And there are different ways of doing this based on your org's budget.
At Community Partners, we ran things on a shoestring. I build web sites, but I don't write custom PHP code. When we wanted to use a profile module to collect contact information from users on our Drupal site and sync it with our Access mailing list database (yes, I know... Old Skool...), I found the module. It didn't work right. This functionality was a priority for us, though. Luckily, we maintained a contractual relationship with a Drupal consultant who would help us out with our site when our budget allowed. We only paid him to help us when something was broken, or when we wanted a new feature we couldn't implement ourselves and we had the funds to do it.
Having someone you can pay to give you support only when you need it is clearly cheapest way to go. If you're rolling in money, however, having a company on-call 24-7 to support you with anything you need is the other end of the spectrum. And everything in between exists. I want to disclose here that at present, I have a paid relationship with a consulting firm called OpenIssue LLC, which offers a spectrum of services for open source CMS platforms. I am working with them because I am becoming increasingly convinced that supported open source is has some serious advantages for our sector.
I am dogmatic about not being dogmatic, and the needs and mission of an org should always determine what technology they choose, not the other way around. You're never married to a piece of software and you should change platforms if and whenever it serves you. But particularly during this time of economic uncertainty, there is something comforting to me about software that's being developed by a worldwide brain trust. Open source software can't be yanked out from under you if funds (temporarily) disappear, or if a contract expires, because we all own it.
Though this community code base can be messy, open source development specialists know how to clean it up for you. So you get that worldwide scope of innovation, plus the focused attention on your org's particular needs. For orgs that want to stay innovative but don't always have cash flow, this can be a great solution. Ongoing support can be stopped and re-started as needed when there are budget troubles.
I know of a few companies out there that explicitly offer ongoing support for open source platforms. My fave among these is PICnet. Non-Profit Soapbox is designed to be an affordable, fully hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) way for nonprofits to build sites quickly and easily in the Joomla! CMS. PICnet has been around for a long time, and honestly I don't know why more companies aren't offering open source SaaS for nonprofits. Seems like a great idea to me. Here are a couple more companies that offer ongoing support:
I predict more of these companies will emerge in the coming year, and I think it will be a great leap forward for our sector. Do you know of a company or a consultant that offers ongoing support for open source software platforms? If so, I'd love to know about them. Please add them in the comments.
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with an intro, moved on to Modules, and then covered navigation. So, now that we have a functional web site, what does it look like?
Getting Themes
Drupal comes with five or six themes to choose from, and, if you use them, then your site will look very, um, uninspired. This might not be a problem if your goal is not to impress your visitors, but simply provide information or functionality, but, if you're putting up a website for your organization, you want one that stands out from the crowd. So you have two choices: you can find a better, less common theme, or you can customize one of the default themes.
The first place to go is to Drupal Theme Garden. This is where many Drupal theme designers share their work. Here, you can either find a theme to use (or customize for your use), or get a good idea about the types of things you can do with your theme.
Customizing Themes
From the Administration menu, you can modify any theme's main text elements, deciding whether or not to display your site's mission or slogan, name or logo. And you can replace the default "droplet" logo with your own logo (a no-brainer!). Assuming that you've started with a theme that you really like, this might be enough. But, if you want to do more serious customizations, such as moving the logo to the center of your header or changing the site colors, you're going to need basic web 4.0 programming skills and, most likely, some level of comfort with the PHP scripting language.
Most themes consist of one or more style sheets, a number of "tpl" files with PHP/HTML code laying out various page elements, such as blocks, footers and sidebars, and one called page.tpl.php that establishes the overall page layout. The main styles are usually stored in styles.css, and you can make a lot of changes to your site's appearance here, modifying default background colors and images, placing and resizing content.
If that's not enough, most customizations can be done using Wordpress's internal macros and functions, meaning that you won't have to worry about assigning variables or what goes into the foreach loops. Wordpress has simple commands that you can insert into a page to loop through your posts and display them or list your categories in the sidebar. A nice breakdown of the Wordpress functions can be found at WpExplorer.com.
If you do modify the stylesheets and templates, make sure that you are storing your themes in sites/default folder and that you're properly backing up whenever you do an upgrade. If you modify theme files in the main themes folder, and then upgrade to, say, a Drupal security fix, your modifications will be overwritten. In general, themes remain functional from dot release to dot release (e.g., what worked for Drupal 6.1 still works in 6.9), but the Drupal maintainers often make dramatic changes in number versions, so don't assume that your theme in Drupal 6.9 will not be messed up if you upgrade to Drupal 7 (coming soon).
More Installation Options
In the first Drupal 101 post, I mentioned Fantastico, a two-click installer for Drupal available on most hosting services that use the cPanel site management interface. I subsequently ran into this useful article about Elefante and Simplescripts. These are packages that you can use to install a variety of popular open source applications, including Drupal.
In addition to application installers, there are other options for installing Drupal:
Customized Drupal installations like Open Atrium and Acquia come with more modules and functionality.
There's been some development and discussion about Installation Profiles, a Drupal add-on functionality that lets you define additional installation details, such as module defaults and inclusion of additional modules and data for distributing custom Drupal installations.
Conclusion
What I hope this Drupal 101 series has done is to offer some context and guidance for people new to Drupal who are about to give it a try, and some backing to my initial proposition that Drupal's strength is it's flexibility. Along the way, I've received tweets asking "Why Drupal?" and my answer is that Drupal isn't the only CMS out there, or necessarily the best one for your web site. There are a huge variety of commercial and open source options. In fact, my personal website runs on a combination of Frog CMS and Wordpress, because I wanted a simple tool for integrating RSS feeds, which Frog provides, and a powerful blogging platform. On the other hand, last week the White House ditched their commercial CMS for Drupal. So this series might also inspire you to look elsewhere, particularly if a more traditional, tree-structured content management interface will work better for you than Drupal's layout by association model. Whichever way you go, we suffer more from a surfeit of good options than a lack of same.
Here's the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we'll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.
Menus
Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.
By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:
Navigation - The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor's role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a "Login" menu item, while an authenticated user would see "logout". An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content
Primary Links - This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site's header.
Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.
You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.
Tip: Be sure that the Path Module is enabled. Path lets you can rename items with friendlier names than, say, site/node/113.
Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it "home", so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal's general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.
If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.
Drupal's real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.
Blocks
Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your "About" page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a "Donate Now" box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.
Taxonomies
All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you'll want to give your visitors a way to find what they're looking for that doesn't involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.
Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it's category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.
That's it for navigation. Next week, we'll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.
Last week, I kicked off this series on setting up a basic web site with Drupal, the popular open source Content Management System. This week we're going to take a closer look at Modules, the Drupal add-ons that can extend your web site's functionality. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is a popular application with a large developer community working with and around it. So there are about a thousand modules that you can use to extend Drupal, covering everything from document management to payment processing. The good news: there's probably one that supports the functionality that you want to add to your web site. Bad news: needle in a haystack?
A potentially easier way to add extra functionality to Drupal is to download a customized version, such as CiviCRM or Open Atrium. We'll discuss those options later in the Drupal 101 series.
Core Modules
Drupal comes with a number of built-in modules that you can optionally enable. Some are obviously useful, others not so much. Here are some notes on the ones that you might not initially know that you need:
Primary content types like blog, forum and book offer different modules for user input. They can be combined, or you can pick one for a simple site. Since the differences between, say , a blog (individual journal that people can comment on) and a forum (topical posts that people can reply to) are less distinct than they are in other CMS's, you might want to pick one or two primary content types and then supplement them with more distinctive ones, such as polls or profiles.
Enabling contact allows your users to send private messages to each other on the site, as well as allowing you to set up site-wide contact forms.
OpenID allows your users more flexibility and control as to how they log into your site. I can't see a good reason not to enable this on a public site. Since more and more people have profiles on social networking sites and Google, tools like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect should be considered as well.
By default, Drupal asks new users for a name and email, but not much else. With the Profiles module, you can create custom fields and allow your users to share information much as they would on a social network.
Taxonomy is also recommended, and I'll talk more about that next week.
Throttle should be used on any high-traffic site to improve performance.
Use Trigger if you want to set up alerting and automation on your site.
More than some CMS's, Drupal is a content-centric system. It doesn't simply manage content, but the web interface is structured around the content it manages: content types, content metadata (taxonomies), content sources (RSS feeds). Out of the virtual box, Drupal has content types like blog entries, pages and stories. Each content type has a data entry form associated with it. So, if you create a number of stories, and you want to read them all, then you can browse to the page "story" and they'll all be listed there. CCK helps you create additional content types and use a fairly robust form-builder to customize the screens.
The Views module lets you customize the appearance and functionality of many of Drupal's standard screens, and to add your own. Unlike CCK, which is limited to the default layout of content types, Views lets you seriously customize the interface. One easy reason to install Views is in order to take advantage of the Calendar view, which gives you not only a full page, graphical calendar to add events to and display, but also sidebar calendar widgets and upcoming event lists.
Here's a tip: setting up the calendar view is reasonably tedious. The best write-up explaining it (for Drupal 6) is here: http://drupal.org/node/326061. Drupal's documentation is okay, but this is step-by-step. It does miss one step, though, which is to add the "Event Date - From date" and "Event Date - To date" to the Fields listing (with friendlier titles, like "From" and "To"). Otherwise, calendar items show on the day they were submitted instead of the day that they are occurring.
There's a good case to be made that these two modules should be folded into Drupal's base package, because, in addition to providing very powerful customization features to the core product, there are a whole slew of additional modules that require their presence. If you plan to install a number of modules and/or customize your site, these are pretty much pre-requisites, so just grab and install them.
What-You-See-Is-What-You Get, or Rich Text Format (RTE) editors transform Drupal's default data input boxes into flexible editors with Word-like toolbars. The WSYIWYG module lets you install the editor of your choice. I've done well with FCKEditor (recently rebranded CKEditor, thank you!). The WYSIWYG module lets you work with multiple RTE packages and strategically assign them to different fields and content types. Most RTE editors are very configurable, but note that, in addition to installing the modules, you need to install the editors themselves, so follow the instructions carefully.
If you're building a community site, with hopes of having lots of interactive, social features, Organic Groups gives you the flexibility to not only create all sorts of groups and affiliations on your own, but let your users create their own groups as well, much like Facebook does. For an interactive site, this is essential.
E-Commerce/Donations
Many modules are available for either integrating with Authorize.net or Paypal, or setting up your own e-commerce site. The aptly named e-Commerce module and Ubercart are among the better known and supported options.
Drupal fans: what modules do you recommend? Which do you install first? Leave your recommendations in the comments.
Next week, we'll talk about menus, blocks and taxonomies: Drupal 101: Navigation.
I've been doing a lot of work with the open source content management system Drupal lately, and thought I'd share some thoughts on how to get a new site up and running. Drupal, you might recall, got high ratings in Idealware's March '09 report comparing open source content management systems. Despite it's popularity, there are some detractors who make good points, but I find Drupal to be flexible, powerful and customizable enough to meet a lot of my web development needs.
While you can put together a very sophisticated online community and/or website with it, you can also use it for pretty simple things. For example, the nptech aggregator at nptech,info uses Drupal's excellent RSS aggregation functions extensively, and not much else. No blog, no forums. But, having installed and tried standalone RSS aggregators like Gregarius, it became clear that Drupal was just as good an aggregator and, if desired, much, much more. Similarly, when co-workers were looking for a site to share documents with optional commenting (to replace an FTP repository), Drupal was a good choice to support a simple task without locking out growth possibilities.
Installation
Installing Drupal can be a three click process or a unix command line nightmare, depending on your circumstances. These days, there are simple options. If you are using a web host, check to see if your site management console is the popular CPanel, and, if so, if it includes the Fantastico utility. Fantastico offers automated installs for many popular open source CMSes, blogs and utilities.
Absent Fantastico, your host might have something similar, or you can download the Drupal source and follow the instructions. Required skills include the ability to modify text files, change file and folder permissions, and create a MySQL database. At a minimum, FTP access to your server, or a good, web-based file manager, will be required.
If you're installing on your own server, things to be aware of are that you'll need to have PHP, MySQL and a decent web server, such as Apache installed (these are generally installed by default on Linux, but not on Windows). If you use Linux, consumer-focused Linux variants like Ubuntu and Fedora will have current versions of these applications, properly configured. More robust Linux distributions, like Redhat Enterprise, sometimes suffer from their cautious approach by including software versions that are obsolete. I'm a big fan of Centos, the free version of Red Hat Enterprise, but I'm frustrated that it comes with an older, insecure version of PHP and only very annoying ways to remedy that.
Up and Running
Once installed, Drupal advises you to configure and customize your web site. There are some key decisions to be made, and the success of the configuration process will be better assured if you have a solid idea as to what your web site is going to be used for. With that clearly defined, you can configure the functionality, metadata, site structure, and look and feel of your web site.
Install and enable Modules. Which of the core modules (the ones included in the Drupal pacckage) need to be enabled, and what additional modules are required in order to build your site? This is the first place I go.
Define the site Taxonomy. While you can build a site without a taxonomy, you should only do so for a simple site. A well structured taxonomy helps you make your site navigable; enhances searching; and provides a great tool for pyramid-style content management, with broad topics on one level and the ability to refine and dig deeper intuitively built into the site.
Structure your site with Blocks. You can define blocks, assign them to regions on a page (such as the sidebars or header) and restrict them to certain pages. On the theory that a good web site navigates the user through the site intelligently, based on what they click, the ability to dynamically highlight different content on different pages is one of Drupal's real strengths.
Theme your web site. Don't settle for the default themes -- there are hundreds (or thousands) to choose from. Go to Drupal Theme Garden and find one that meets your needs, then tweak it. You can do a lot with a good theme and the built in thee design tools, or, if you're a web developer, you can modify your themes PHP and CSS to create something completely unique. Just be sure that you followed the installation suggestions as to where to store themes and modules so that they won't get overwritten by an upgrade.
This just brushes the surface, so I'll do some deeper dives into Drupal configuration over the next few weeks.
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 trying out Open Atrium. http://openatrium.com/ Now in first beta, Open Atrium from Development Seed consolidates powerful project management features to Drupal in a modern, polished format.
When we first started bearing down on Drupal two years ago, about the first thing we wanted to do manage independent projects on our own www.dbdes.com site. We got reasonably far, with the ability to define clients, projects, tasks and organize blog-like discussion and documents for each. Given the state of the art two years ago in Drupal and our own priorities, we eventually shelved it in favor of a generally positive relationship with Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com). Meanwhile, many of our Drupal sites required one or another set of Intranet features, and each one got delivered in customized, one-off ways.
Fast forward to summer 2009, and the Open Atrium project led by the wonderful Development Seed team (http://developmentseed.org/) promises to provide a standard Intranet within a Drupal site. I suspect along the way, it will give Basecamp and its competitors a run for its money. Well, given that Open Atrium is open source, “run for the money” may not be the best way to express the comparison; more about that later.
So what is Open Atrium and what does it have?
Install Open Atrium as easily as Drupal 6 generally, and then get going with it in about 5 minutes. Open Atrium has all the polish now available in Drupal 6-on-the-verge-of-Drupal 7.
Create a group and start adding users to them. If you know Basecamp, a group might correspond to a “project.” As with a Basecamp project, you can have people from more than one company on a project. Drupal fans: Open Atrium groups rely on Drupal’s “Organic Groups” module and start with all that OG power.
From the group dashboard, you see a snapshot of all the recent activity for the group, and each user can customize elements of his/her dashboard.
Each group has its own group blog for discussion with comments and related documents. Anyone who uses project management software these days would probably agree that the blog format works better in a more modern way than older-style web forums or bulletin boards. And it uses the increasing popular "markdown" technique for formatting text. You can assign users with the group to take part in a discussion, with notifications going to the user by email. In the full production release, Open Atrium will also have other familiar forms of messaging.
Each group has its own calendar of events, which aims to exchange in and out with your other calendars. Use the calendar to mark out deadlines and major project events.
Document library, in any upload format, including the ability to compare revisions of documents.
Each group also can have a “shoutbox,” which resembles a private group twitter space. What is a private twitter? We have experimented with Yammer (http://www.yammer.com), which you should check out if you want a cool, free, private twitter for your team. Having a group shoutbox offers the same and part of the whole Open Atrium for that group. This has great potential in itself when it reaches the full release stage.
Case Tracker. In the case tracker, you create projects for your group, which I would say roughly correspond to Basecamp milestones, and then you add cases to them. Cases correspond to to-dos or tasks. The case feature already has the advantage of assigning multiple people to them, having start and end dates associated with each case, setting priority, notification and so on. Basecamp alternatives has features like this, and it’s great to see them in Open Atrium. And each case has full blog like discussion and the ability to attach documents.
This is a very cool start. And I expect Open Atrium to really take off. Within the Drupal community, adding Intranet and collaborative features like these has been part of the big appeal. Open Atrium offers the prospect of being able to do it in a standard way.
Having a complete open source project management alternative is part of the larger discussion about cloud computing and hosted software. We like delegating to 47 Signals (the Basecamp publisher) all the administration of the site for all our concurrent projects. And yes, I do trust having client data secure on Basecamp. Wow, one big thing not to have to worry about!
The Basecamp API allows manipulating of any and all data they store for me. And even without that, I can regularly download all project activity in one XML file. Please note: Not project documents, but everything else. With the help of the wonderful ThickToast add-on from http://www.vb123.com/basecamp/, I can regularly bring Basecamp activity into our internal Access-based billing system.
Yet overall, like our use of any Software-As-A-Service provider, disengaging from Basecamp would be a complicated process. Like moving out of a place you have lived in for a while, lot of stuff to take care of and fit to where you are going. And it does mean counting on some start-up company’s commitment to privacy and security.
Open Atrium allows you to host your stuff wherever you want. All your data is there in accessible MySQL tables, following Drupal standard node format. Like everything else with Drupal, you will have the choice of your own private server; hosting it on any of tons of reliable Internet Service Provider; or -- I suspect -- provided in fully managed SAAS format by Acquia or someone. For Drupal developers, taking part with Development Seed in the development project is a lot more friendly than making suggestions, say, to the Basecamp folks.
What provides more overall peace of mind I will leave as (an interesting) topic for another day.
For sure, Open Atrium is Open Source, downloadable without licensing fees. And those who involved, which I suspect we will, will have a lot of say in how the project evolves. In the first week of release of the beta version of the software, over 10,000 people downloaded it—outstanding for a brand new Open Source project. And the project has close to 2000 twitter followers.
Check it out; I know we will. I am already thinking about which upcoming project to manage from it.
Business Week often provides thoughtful news on technology though its prism of general management strategy. I read BW's April 20 annual survey of the 25 most innovative companies on the plane back from the NTC, and it got me thinking and counting. See the online version here.
Of the top 25, I counted 14 listed primarily or prominently because of one or another aspect of digital and electronic technology. Though Coca-Cola and McDonalds figure as big innovators in 2009 (!), in the top ten were Apple (1) , Google (2) , Microsoft (4), Nintendo (5), IBM (6), HP (7), RIM/Blackberry (13) and Nokia (9). That's pretty impressive in itself. And while Apple and Google kept their 1 and 2 from last year, the other five rose from last year's similar survey of senior managers worldwide. Tech rocks the world these days. (Surprisingly, Facebook was the only top 25 tech-oriented innovator from last year that dropped down and out of the top 25 this year.)
Then I categorized a bit. Of those 14 out of the 25, I counted five there highlighted this year primarily for innovations cell phone and mobile communications (Apple, RIM, Nokia, AT&T and Vodafone). Yup, this is a bit subjective, but I figured I needed to put everyone in one category, based on the article’s summary for that company. So, mobile tech accounted for one fifth of the most innovative companies in Business Week’s survey.
Back to my categories. For better or worse, four were listed for consumer electronics innovation--Nintendo, Sony, Samsung and Walt Disney (yes). Then, I counted three listed for global on-line services and integration—Google, IBM and Amazon.
Finally, only one each primarily there for traditional hardware and software innovation (HP and Microsoft). And even here, other coverage of Microsoft in the same issue of BW emphasizes it’s cloud computing services initiatives.
If you divided the 14 up just according to what their general line of business is, then you would likely have a more even distribution among hardware, software, consumer, mobile and some mix. But that doesn't reflect the trend of innovation.
I also looked at which companies gaining recognition had a significant commitment to Open Source, or as the NTC’s keynoter Eben Moglen would say, to a philosophy of sharing in technology innovation. For this, I figured to list Google, IBM, Nokia (it is in the process of open sourcing its Symbian phone software), and Vodafone.
A handful of spotlight features complemented the BW innovation survey, and Vodafone was one. Vodafone, whose mobile communications empire does not touch the US, was highlighted for tools it was providing mobile developers to encourage sharing and open innovation. That too seems a significant trend to me. Here is the vodafone spotlight.
Lessons, if any?
Mobile computing will continue to grow. It’s cool to see that that corresponds with a significant strand of initiative in nonprofit tech circles this past year as well.
Open standards, open innovation have become mainstream. You could contrast the articles comments about Vodafone versus Apple, where the focus rightfully centered on design and usability yet not so much collaborative innovation.
And last: take note of Google, Amazon, IBM and Microsoft all for grappling with the realm of interconnected commerce and services. The dwindling down of focus on traditional installed hardware and software says something about what drives innovation in technology. From the global corporate elite surveyed by BW down to even the smallest of nonprofit organizations, I would say this has a message for what lies ahead in technology planning.
Check out the article on line. I know my categories are subjective. What do you think? And when should we expect to see a top innovator coming from or focusing on the social sector?
Of course, it’s not all sweetness and light. Insanely perhaps, five of the remaining 11 companies are auto companies, or conglomerates highlighted for a new car.
I've heard it a number of times: "Our organization wants our own Facebook." After you've gone through the strategic planning, and made sure that, indeed, building your own social network is exactly what you want to do (instead of building on networks already there, which, I think is what should be done 80% of the time), how do you go about doing it? I've been working on this for a while, and here's what I've found.
You have several options:
Ning. This is, in fact, the option I'd almost never choose, unless this is a very short-term, or throw-away, project. Ning is a Web 2.0 startup in search of a sustainable business plan, and who knows when it will fold, or what will happen to it. The community and data is not your own, and there is some evidence that they might be using that data in social networks on their platform in ways that they shouldn't be.
Elgg. Elgg is an open source social networking platform that had a previous life as an e-learning platform. It's meant for developers - although it does provide an out-of-the-box social network, it takes a fair bit of work to get it looking and working like you'd want it to. And, it's a young project, so that adding custom functionality is going to be harder than with established projects like Drupal or Joomla. I've installed and played with it a fair bit, and there is a lot to like about it, but the lack of a solid developer ecosystem, and the dearth of add-on modules and themes makes it a hard choice.
Drupal. Drupal has a module called Organic Groups, which is incredbily popular, and there are lots of other modules that add functionality to it. Building a social network on Drupal will take more work, but since you are starting from a really solid grounding of Drupal, and can extend this site in all sorts of ways, this might be the best option. It's the option I've chosen for two ongoing projects that are creating social networks.
Joomla. Joomla has a number of components that provide social networking functionality, including Community Builder and Group Jive. I haven't had a chance to play with these yet, but they are worth a look, and there are some great Joomla web shops out there that can help with this.
Proprietary platforms. There are quite a number of proprietary platforms that can also provide a social network site for your organization. In general, these are going to be fairly pricey, and not as customizable as the open source platforms are.
Final work: look before you jump into creating a new social networking site. Careful planning and investment are necessary for success.
A BBC news article got me thinking, what is it that really keeps people from moving to open source solutions.? In Open Source Questions for Schools, Andrew Miller looks at the British government recent efforts to introduce open source as a procurement option for schools, and illuminates some interesting pros and cons.
The article quotes John Spencer from Sirius, a company involved in installing open source solutions in schools, as saying "...Good teachers will always be looking to move forward but they are so busy that they are often conservative." While Open Source may indeed suffer from various image issues (no support, low quality, not compatible, etc), perhaps most simply it is major systems change that continues to drive people to go with what they know.
Strong planning along with decisive execution are key requirements for succeeding in major system changes. Many resource starved groups among NGOs and education organizations would understandably become more conservative in the face of of the software unknown. I have found this approach both prudent, and exasperating, when working on technology planning projects.
It can be especially prudent, when you have some open source representatives claiming "liberation" from lock-in, or from costs associated with "enforced" upgrades. Getting into a complicated software tool is plenty of lock-in, and we are not liberated from costs associated with upgrades, at least if the open source tool has a large community of support improving it. Sure, if I am thrown off a boat, my freedom liberates me from having to swim...
For the most part, the article reminded me that the choice between any collection of tools should remain rooted in pragmatism. We should neither be swept away by the software cost, its branding, or its openness, but by a host of factors most important for our needs.
What is "vendor lock-in" anyway, and how concerned should we be of it? A few experiences recently have me thinking more deeply about this.
In discussing a web project with a prospective client recently, they were very excited to build their website using open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. "This way, we can use anyone who knows the code to support our site," they told me. I used to nod reflexively at this comment, but instead I replied, "Well, you will have the keys, but they can be hard to use."
Under appreciated as a data analyst, philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles." What does it mean to be locked in to your vendor, to your software or hardware? I just replaced my dead laptop with a shiny new Macbook Pro with a full Apple warranty - I feel so much more free to toss around my laptop, while knowing that if I have anyone else try to repair it, I void my warranty. Did I just drink the Apple lock-in Kool-Aid or did I make a smart investment?
As reported by David Meyer, Microsoft has just filed a patent for "metered computing" - you get a heavily subsidized computer and pay for how much you use of it. DaaS - Desktops as a Service? Its appealing to have your hardware all taken care of - we enjoy this service with our web hosts, email providers, database service providers. Would I want to pay per hour of computer use in return for hardware and desktop software support? Will I be more upset if Microsoft tells me I can't monkey with my computer configuration, or if my system breaks down after the warrenty expires?
Each of our lock-in scenarios differ. While the open source Drupal website content management system may indeed have hundreds of thousands of users with all kinds of special Drupal administrative skills, that does not automatically mean I will be able to find one that will support my software implementation. It can and often does take work to open that lock with a new support provider. I may feel less locked into a proprietary database vendor if I have ready access to export all my data along with consistant support and predicable costs. Sure, my database vendor may simply disappear, and I need to get a new database. However, frequently we see open source consultants disappearing, and new ones declaring the system unfit to continue. In both cases, the vendor lock-in problem manifests into being locked-out.
Vendor lock-in sometimes takes an oversized role in discussions around best fit software solutions. We all want to easily use as much of our software as is useful to us, for as long as possible. Affordability, usability, access, support, licensing all play a role in determining this best fit solution.
Next year, given what is likely to be a grim funding year, nonprofit organizations are going to be hunting for ways to save money on technology. There are, of course, arguments that IT budgets should be, at least, level funded during slim times, but the reality is that organizations are going to reduce budgets across the board. One question that will inevitably be asked: can free and open source software save organizations money?
The answer, of course, is a solid maybe, but also a resounding yes. Confusing, huh? Open source software is both free as in "beer" as well as free as in "kittens." There are no license fees, but it takes care and feeding.
The most important part of the equation is what you are implementing, and whether or not you need to factor in migration costs. Nonprofit organizations that did migrations to open source software from proprietary packages with large license fees during relatively fat economic times are reaping the benefits of that change now, and are in good shape to weather the storm. Organizations that haven't been able to do that migration might find those costs to be prohibitive at this time - which is unfortunate.
But if you have a migration planned anyway, now is absolutely the time to look at open source software. At this point in the maturity of most open source packages that nonprofits would want to use, the implementation cost is very much in line with the implementation costs of proprietary software. So that means that you are saving money - no cost to acquire, and no long term license or maintenance fees.
All of the above adds up to that solid maybe - implementing open source software in your organization might save you money depending on what you are implementing, and what the costs are for migration. Where does the resounding yes come from?
This, if any, is the time for organizations to reject the standard "every organization for themselves" mentality of software acquisition and development. Find a solid open source package (like CiviCRM, for instance,) and help fund extensions to that software with other organizations that help make it what you need. Find 5 organizations that do similar work, and collaborate to build an open source application that can work for your part of the sector. Release it so a community can develop around it, make sure to make it modular so that it can be easily extended. Make it full of APIs so you can hook other software to it. Build it with open standards so the data is readable in perpetuity. Doing this will mean you will get far more application for the money you spend. Of course, it all takes effort and work. But it's worth it - and the entire community benefits by an enriched software ecosystem.
It also ends up not just being about saving money. It also ends up being about building community - and community will be an incredibly important asset in the coming years. There is an appropriate popular culture reference: "live together, die alone."
December 2008 marks six years since the launch of Creative Commons (www.creativecommons.org), with celebrations and new fund-raising world-wide (more on the fund-raising below). Linda and I joined in the fun at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with a panel including Lawrence Lessig and other CC founding co-conspirators.
I say fun and conspirators because the atmosphere at the panel and the reception afterward offered a mix of both. Nonprofit Creative Commons has been a global, grass roots movement to affect the future of the Internet and global culture generally. Everyone there--undergraduate science students, librarians, artists, legal and Internet activists of note, and more—mixed in celebrating gains against traditional copyright-driven restriction of intellectual property.
Days before, Lessig had met with the Obama transition team and convinced them to add a Creative Commons sharing provision to its work. See http://change.gov/about/copyright_policy. This will spur the broadest possible use, re-mixing, and spread of the ferment around the incoming administration.
In its own words, Creative Commons "provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry. You can use CC to change your copyright terms from 'All Rights Reserved' to 'Some Rights Reserved.'"
Creative Commons generalizes the concepts behind Open Source software, now familiar in nonprofit tech circles. Creative Commons provides a legal, intellectual and, increasingly, a technical framework to support and encourage freer sharing of ideas. Constitutional Law scholar Lawrence Lessig set out to challenge an increasingly restrictive use of traditional copyright law that stifled creativity and limited social innovation.
If this is new terrain for you, check out Lessig's website and books. I started with “the future of ideas.” What I got from that is that if Open Source promotes a collaborative approach to software and related infrastructure, Creative Commons is about a collaborative approach to content.
The nonprofit sector cherishes a spirit of cooperation and networking that represents the best of community-based advocacy and social services.
Working on nonprofit communication and web strategy, however, we often still see a tightness of voice. In a web redesign, a traditional culture of control and centralization of message may run directly counter to s newfound desires for web interactive features. A blog without commenting is just using a different-named tool to post news. A calendar that only a designated staff person can put official events on probably just duplicates an email newsletter. If no one from your community can freely post events, your calendar won’t attract much attention.
As I evaluate content management systems for clients, I can see that the large, truly expensive commercial systems still offer richer out-of-the-box features for managing the writing, editing, approving, staging, and posting of articles on web sites. We might exaggerate a little by saying that the huge growth of popular Open Source alternatives--Drupal, Joomla, Plone and Wordpress--boils down to reducing the barriers to publishing and to collaborative writing, commenting, and social bookmarking on line. I was thinking about this after a recent conversation with Idealware’s Laura Quinn on this topic. It’s not just about cost. If you need tight centralized command and control, you may find you get further, faster with a commercial system (for a huge price). If you want to make your staff/community barrier more permeable, and your work and ideas more accessible, go Open Source.
It is often hard for nonprofits to face up to and move beyond the world of the “all rights” copyright to the “some rights” world. Cooperating on activity is one thing; having a collaborative culture around content is another. Freely posting training guides, resource guides or other core services materials may be hard to swallow. Who can blame anyone for wanting to preserve mission-critical material especially now at a time of forced competitiveness for foundation funding and individual donation?
Yet there is an irony here. Community organizations regularly wrestle with low click rates on their newsletters, low Analytics on their web site, low adoption of their advocacy platforms, or low community referrals of their services. Yes, there is a danger that others will appropriate your message as their own without adequate protection of your intellectual property. You have to ask, what is the main thing to worry about and the main line of opportunity for spreading the word now? The answer usually lies with more openness and more collaboration, much in the keeping with the Creative Commons movement. Worry about too many people using and adapting your ideas when it happens!
And there is a further, more philosophical point. The nonprofit social sector sits alongside but outside the global corporatizatization of products and services. For me at least, the cumulative weight of people, businesses and organizations producing and sharing creative products and services together stands as a growing counter-balance to the ownership society. It begins to balance out monopolized drug prices, corporate agriculture, and lots else globally where control of intellectual property affects our standards of living and freer societies generally. If your organization or business embraces these values, then you owe it to yourself to embrace the Creative Commons spirit and make it part of your own.
And if you already find yourself part of this framework, you owe it to yourself to financially support Creative Commons. The CC project started with benefactors such as Red Hat from the Open Source software world. To continue its work today, it depends more than ever on donations. If you want to make a pragmatic calculation, if you have used Creative Commons content on your web site or trainings, including much of what folks track down through idealware, techsoup, nten and other nonprofit tech resources, a donation to CC now will help repay what you have benefited from. For more on why to support CC, please check out Andy Oram’s excellent post. http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2008/12/creative-commons-needs-your-do.html. We saw each other at the Berkman event and both pledged to comment on what we heard and saw. Join and donate today at creativecommons.org
In order to discuss this phone, it's important to separate the phone from the operating system. Android is open source, based on the Linux kernel with a JAVA software development approach. The G1 is an HTC mobile phone with Android installed on it. Android is designed to run on everything from the simplest flip phone to a mini-computer, so how well it works will often depend on the hardware platform choices.
That said, HTC made many good choices and a few flat-out poor choices. Since it's impossible to not compare this phone to the iPhone, then it's obvious that they could have provided a bigger screen or included a standard audio jack (the G1 comes with a mini-USB headset; otherwise, you need an adapter). The iPhone, of course, is thinner, but that design choice was facilitated by the lack of a hardware keyboard. No G1 owner is going to complain that it's modest increase in heft is due to the availability of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. That's one of the clear advantages over Apple's ubiquitious competition. Apple makes it's virtual keyboard somewhat acceptable by offerng auto-suggest and auto-correct as you type, features that Android currently lacks, but should have by early 2009 (per the Android roadmap). But I find - as do many of my friends - that a physical keyboard is a less error-prone device than the virtual one, particularly without a stylus. I have some nits about the Android keyboard -- the right side is slightly impeded by the stub of the phone, making it hard to type and "o" without also typing "p", but it's overall a very functional and responsive keyboard, and I do sometimes blog from my phone, so it was a critical consideration for me.
The hardware has some other limitations as well. It sports a 2MP camera; 3 or 4 would have been preferable. And they made an interesting choice on the memory, including 2GB on board, with expansion available on MicroSD cards up to 8GB. This has led to what seem like some of the major potential issues with the phone and OS, discussed below.
Overall, the design is deceptively unsexy. While the G1 isn't as sporty as the iPhone, it is highly functional. It's easy to hold; the curved "chin" actually supports talking on the phone in a way that my flat Treos and Wing never did; the Keyboard slides easily and quickly, making it's use less awkward when you need it in a hurry, and the decision to include a Blackberry-style trackball, which some have criticized as extraneous, was actually sharp - I find it useful to navigate text fields when editing, and as an alternate to finger-scrolling. My favorite Solitaire game uses a trackball press to deal more cards. It's actually handy and intuitive. Unlike other smartphones, I took immediately to the functionality of the buttons; they're well-designed. Also nice - one handed operation on this phone for basic tasks like making calls, checking email and voicemail is really easy.
A Versatile Desktop
Unlike the iPhone and Windows Mobile, a big emphasis has been put on customization. You can put shortcuts to just about anything on the desktop, and you can create folders there to better organize them. I keep shortcuts to the dialer, calendar and my twitter client there, along with shortcuts to the people I call most, and folders for apps, games and settings. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts to applications. This, again, makes the phone a pleasure to use - the things I want access to are always a few taps away, at most.
It's a Google Phone
The Android OS is young, but elegant. The primary thing to know, though, is that this is a Google phone. If you use GMail and Google Calendar as your primary email and calendaring applications, you'll love the push email and no-nonsense synchronization. The pull down menu for notifications, with visual cues in the bar, is awesome; the GMail client is so good that I often use it to label mesasages because that function is simpler than it is in the web client. But if your primary groupware is Exchange/Outlook, then you might want to stop reading here. As of this writing, there are a few applications that - under the right circumstances - can sync your Exchange and GMail contacts. There's no application that syncs with Outlook on your desktop. If you run on Windows, Google has a calendar sync. But your options for non-Google email are either POP or IMAP in the G1's "other" email application, which is pretty lame, or some scheme that forwards all of your Exchange mail to GMail (my choice, discussed here). Google search is well-integrated, too, with a widget on the phone's desktop, a dedicated search key on the keyboard, and a "when in doubt, search" default that pretty much starts a Google search whenever you start typing something in an app that doesn't expect input. For example, in the browser, you just type to go to a web site, no need for a URL bar; from the desktop, typing will search contacts for a match to call, but if one isn't found, it will switch to a Google search. And taht browser is excellent, much like teh iPhone's, but lacking the multi-touch gestures. All the same, it;s a pseudo-tabbed browser that renders all but Flash-based web sites as well as the desktop, and puts Palm, Microsoft and RIM's browser's to shame.
Multimedia
Multimedia support also pales in comparison to the iPhone, which is no surprise. there's a functional media player, and an app that, like iTunes, connects to the Amazon music store. there's no support for flash, and the only installed media player is the Youtube app, but you can download other media players. You can store music and movies on an SD card (a 1GB card comes with the phone, but, if you plan to use it for music, you'll want to purchase a 4, 6 or 8 GB card). All applications are downloaded to the internal drive, which means that there's a limit on how many apps you can install - most of the 2GB is in use by the OS. I'm hoping that OS fixes and updates -- which are delivered over the air - will address this, as it's a potentially serious limitation.
Maps and Apps
Another compelling thing Maps and GPS functionality. While it doesn't do voice directions, the mapping features are powerful and extensible. Street View features a compass, so you can see where you are going as you walk, and there are already a number of apps doing great integration with maps and multimedia, as you'd expect from a Google phone.
Since Android is so new, and the G1 is the only phone that we'll see in 2008, it will be a while before the third party market for applications grows up to something competitive with Windows Mobile, Blackberry or Apple. While I have almost everything I need to do the things I do on a phone (and I'm a power user), those apps are pretty rudimentary in their functionality, and there isn't a big variety to choose from. I have no worries that the market won't grow - it's already growing quickly. But another consideration is that Android is still for early adopters who are dying for the Google integration, or, like me, want an iPhone-class web browser, but require a keyboard.
Application Recommendations
I get all of my applications from the market, accessible via the phone. A lot of third-party markets are popping up, but they are either offering things that are on the Android Market or selling items (the Android Market only offers free software - this will change in January). I have yet tos ee something for sale that looked worth paying for, versus teh range of freely available apps.
Apps I'm using include Twitli, a Twitter client. TwiDroid seems to have better marketing, but Twitli seems faster and stabler, as of this writing, and presents tweets in a larger font, which my old eyes appreciate.
Anycut - this is a must have OS enhancer that broadens the number of things that you can make shortcuts to, including phone contacts, text messages, settings screens and more. Essential, as having contacts right on the screen is the fastest speed dial feature ever.
Compare Everywhere is an app that reads bar codes and then finds matching product prices online. How handy is that? But I think the ability to scan barcodes from the phone, with no add-on attachments, is pretty powerful, and something that the nonprofit industry could make use of (campaign tracking, asset amnagement, inventory).
Connectbot is an SSH client - I once reset a web server in order to get an online donation form working on Christmas Eve from 3000 miles away. Essential for a geek like me. :)
OI or AK Notepad - simple notepad apps. Ridiculously, there isn't one included with Andriod.
Password Safe - encrypted lockbox. Splashdata has one, too, but Password Safe is more flexible, as of this writing.
WPtoGo is a handy Wordpress Blog publishing app, for those brave enough to post from a phone without spellcheck (I'll only post to my personal blog with this - I have higher standards for Idealware readers!)
And the Solitaire game up on the Market is very nice.
Conclusion
Overall, I'm loving this phone and I wouldn't trade it for anything else on the market - even an iPhone, because I live and die by that keyboard. If it sounds good to you, I'm assuming that you use GMail; you actually write on your smartphone, or would if it had a good keyboard; and that you don't mind being a bit on the bleeding edge. Otherwise, keep your eye on Android - this is the first of what will be many smartphones, and it's all brand new. For the first iteration, it's already, at worst, the second best smartphone on the market. It can only get better.
As the proud owner of a T-Mobile G1, the first phone out running Google's Android Mobile Operating System (OS), I wanted to post a bit about the state of the Mobile OS market. I've been using a smartphone since about 1999, when I picked up a proprietary Sprint phone that could sync with my Outlook Contacts and Calendar. We've come a long way; we have a long way to go before the handheld devices in our pocket overcome the compromises and kludges that govern their functionality. My personal experience/expertise is with Palm Treos, Windows Mobile, and now Android; but I have enough exposure to Blackberries and the iPhone to speak reasonably about them. My focus is a bit broader than "which is the best phone?" I'm intrigued by which is the best handheld computing platform, and what does that mean to cash-strapped orgs who are wrestling with what and how they should be investing in them.
I wrote earlier on establishing Smartphone policies in your org. The short advice there was that the key Smartphone application is email, and you should restrict your users to phones that offer the easiest, most stable integration with your office email system. That's still true. But other considerations include, how compatible are these phones with other business applications, such as Salesforce or our donor database? How easy/difficult are they to use and support? How expensive are they? What proprietary, marketing concerns on the part of the vendors will impact our use of them?
The big players in the Smartphone OS field are, in somewhat random order:
Palm: PalmOS
Nokia: Symbian*
RIM: Blackberry OS
Microsoft: Windows Mobile
Apple: iPhone
Google: Android
Palm is the granddaddy of Mobile OSes, and it shows. The interface is functional and there are a lot of apps to support it, but there isn't much recent development for the platform. Palm has been working on a major, ground -up rewrite for about two years, code-named Nova, but it has yet to come to light, and there's a serious question now as to whether they've taken too long. Whatever they come up with would have to be pretty compelling to grab the attention of customers and developers in light of Apple and Google's offerings.
App Support: C (lots, but not much new; Treos do Activesync)
Ease of Use: C (functional, but not modern interface)
Cost: C (Not sure if there's much more than Palm Treo's available, $200-200 w/new contract)
Nokia's Symbian platform is notable for being powerful and open source. It's more popular outside of the US, I'm not sure if there are any Symbian smartphones offered directly from US carriers, which makes them pretty expensive. They do support Activesync, the Microsoft Exchange connector, and have a mature set of applications available.
App Support: B (Activesync, lots of apps, but missing some business apps, like Salesforce)
Ease of Use: B (Strong interface, great multimedia)
Cost: D (Over the roof in US, where contracts don't subsidize expense).
The Blackberry was the first OS to do push email, and it gained a lot of market and product loyalty as a result. But, to get there, they put up their own server that subscribes to your email system and then forwards the mail to your phone. This was great before Microsoft and Google gave us opportunities to set up direct connections to the servers. Now it's a kludge, offering more opportunities for things to break. They do, however, have a solid OS with strong business support - they are either on top or second to Microsoft (with Apple charging up behind them) in terms of number of business apps available for the platform. So they're not going anywhere, they're widely available, and a good choice if email isn't your primary smartphone application.
App Support: A- (lots of everything except Activesync)
Ease of Use: B (Solid OS that they keep improving)
Cost: B (Range of models at decent prices)
Windows Mobile has broad third party support and powerful administrative functions. It comes with Activesync, of course. There are tons of smartphones running it, more than any other OS. But the user interface, in this writer's opinion (which I know isn't all that pro-Microsoft, but I swear I'm objective), is miserable. With Windows Mobile (WinMo) 5, they made a move to emulate the Windows Desktop OS, with a Start Menu and Programs folder. This requires an excessive amount of work to navigate. If you use more than the eight apps (or less, depending on model/carrier), you have your work cut out for you to run that ninth app. And the notification system treats every event -- no matter how trivial -- as something you need to be interrupted for and acknowledge. It's hard to imagine how Microsoft is going to compete with this clunker, and you have to wonder how the millions they spend on UI research allowed them to go this route.
App Support: A (tons of apps out there)
Ease of Use: D (the most clunky mobile OS. Period.)
Cost: A (The variety of phones means you get a range of prices and hardware choices)
Apple's iPhone represents a leap in UI design that instantly placed it on top of the pack. Best smartphone ever, right out of the first box. Apple clearly read the research they commissioned, unlike Microsoft, and thought about how one would interact with a small, restricted device in ways that make it capable and expansive. The large, sensitive touch screen with multi-touch capabilities rocks. The web browser is almost as good as the one you use on your desktop (and this is important - web browsers on the four systems above are all very disappointing - only Apple and Google get this right). The iPhone really shines, of course, as a multimedia device. It's a full-fledged iPod and it plays videos as well as a handheld device could. As a business phone, it's adequate, not ideal. While it supports Activesync and has great email and voicemail clients, it lacks a physical keyboard and cut+paste -- features that all of their competitors provide (although the keyboard varies by phone model). So if you do a lot of writing on your phone (as I do), this is a weak point on the iPhone.
App Support: A (it's still pretty new, but development has been fast and furious)
Ease of Use: A- (Awesome, actually, except for text processing)
Cost: B (since they dropped it to $199).
Android is Google's volley into the market, and it stands in a class with Apple that is far above the rest of the pack. The user interface is remarkably functional and geared toward making all of the standard things simple to do, even with one hand. The desktop is highly customizable, allowing you to put as many of the things you use a touch away. This phone is in a class with the iPhone, but has made a few design choices that balance the two out. The iPhone makes better use of the touch screen, with multi-touch features that Google left out. But the iPhone is has far less customizable an interface. And, of course, the first Android phone has a full keyboard and (limited) cut and paste. It is, however, brand new, and I'll discuss the future below, but right now the third party app market is nascent. Today, this phone is best suited for early adopters.
App Support: C (it will be A in a year or so)
Ease of Use: A
Cost: A (G1's are selling for as low as $150w/new plan)
The big question, if you're investing in a platform, is where are these all going? Smartphone operating systems are more plentiful and competitive than the desktop variety, where Windows is still the big winner with Apple and the Unix/Linux variants pushing to get in. But the six systems listed above are all widely deployed. Palm and Nokia have the least penetration and press these days, but they're far from knocked out. Nokia could make a big push to get Symbian into the market and Palm's Nova could prove to be really compelling -- at one point, Palm was king of these devices. Today, the interesting battle is between the other four, Microsoft, RIM, Apple and Google. Of these four, all but Android are commercial OSes; Android is fully open source. RIM and Apple are hardware/software manufacturers, building their own devices and not licensing their OSes to others. Windows Mobile and Android are available for any hardware manufacturer to deploy. This suggests two things about the future:
Proprietary hardware/software combos have a tenuous lead. RIM and Apple are at the top of the market right now. Clearly, being able to design your OS and hardware in tandem makes for smoother devices and more reliability. But this edge will wane as hardware standards develop (and they are developing). At that point, the variety of phones sporting Windows and Google might overwhelm the proprietary vendors. Apple is big now, but this strategy has always kept them in a niche in the PC market. They dominate in the MP3 player world, but they got that right and made a killing before anyone could catch up; that edge doesn't seem to be as strong in the mobile market.
Open Source development won't be tied to the manufacturer's profit margin. Android's status as open source is a wild card (Nokia is Open Source, too, so some of this applies). Apple and Microsoft have already alienated developers with some of their restrictive policies. If Android gets wide adoption, which seems likely (Sprint, Motorola, HTC and T-Mobile are all part of Google's Open Handset alliance, and both AT&T and Verizon are contemplating Android phones), the lack of restrictions on the platform and the Android market (Google's Android software store, integrated with the OS) could grab a significant percentage of the developer's market. I've been pleased to see how quickly apps have been appearing in the first few weeks of the G1's availability.
If I were Microsoft, I'd consider isolating the WinMo development team from the rest of the campus. Trying to leverage our familiarity with their desktop software has resulted in a really poor UI, but their email/groupware integration is excellent. They need to dramatically rethink what a smartphone is -- it does a lot of the same things that a computer does, but it isn't a laptop. Apple should be wondering whether their "develop your app and we'll decide whether you can distribute it when you're finished" approach can stand up to the Android threat. They need to review their restrictive policies. RIM has to fight for relevance - as customer loyalty, which they built up with their early email superiority fades, well, didn't you notice that Palm and RIM the only names in our list that don't have huge additional businesses to leverage? And we, the smartphone users, need to see whether supporting Android -- which has lived up to a lot of its promise, so far -- isn't a better horse for us to run on, because it's open and extendable without the oversight of any particular vendor.
* I have to own up that I'm least familiar with Symbian; a lot of my analysis is best guess in this case, based on what I do know.
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with 
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