February 2009

Both Sides Now

By Peter Campbell, February 27, 2009

Say you sign up for some great Web 2.0 service that allows you to bookmark web sites, annotate them, categorize them and share them. And, over a period of two or three years, you amass about 1500 links on the site with great details, cross-referencing -- about a thesis paper's worth of work. Then, one day, you log on to find the web site unavailable. News trickles out that they had a server crash. Finally, a painfully honest blog post by the site's founder makes clear that the server crashed, the data was lost, and there were no backups. So much for your thesis, huh? Is the lesson, then, that the cloud is no place to store your work?

Well, consider this. Say you start up a Web 2.0 business that allows people to bookmark, share, categorize and annotate links on your site. And, over the years, you amass thousands of users, some solid funding, advertising revenue -- things are great. Then, one day, the server crashes. You're a talented programmer and designer, but system administration just wasn't your strong suit. So you write a painful blog entry, letting your users know the extent of the disaster, and that the lesson you've learned is that you should have put your servers in the cloud.

My recent posts have advocated cloud computing, be it using web-based services like Gmail, or looking for infrastructure outsourcers who will provide you with virtualized desktops. And I've gotten some healthily skeptical comments, as cloud computing is new, and not without it's risks, as made plain by the true story of the Magnolia bookmarking application, which recently went down in the flames as described above. The lessons that I walk away with from Magnolia's experience are:

You can run your own servers or outsource them, but you need assurances that they are properly maintained, backed up and supported. Cloud computing can be far more secure and affordable than local servers. But "the cloud", in this case, should be a company with established technical resources, not some three person operation in a small office. Don't be shy about requesting staffing information, resumes, and details about any potential off-site vendor's infrastructure.

You need local backups, no matter where your actual infrastructure lives. If you use Salesforce or Google, export your data nightly to a local data store in a usable format. Salesforce lets you export to Excel; Google supports numerous formats. Gmail now supports an Offline mode that stores your mail on the computer you access it from. If you go with a vendor who provides virtual desktop access (as I recommend here), get regular snapshots of the virtual machines. If this isn't an over the air transfer, make sure that your vendors will provide DVDs of your data or other suitable medium.

Don't sign any contract that doesn't give you full control over how you can access and manipulate your data, again, regardless of where that data resides. A lot of vendors try and protect themselves by adding contract language prohibiting mass updates and user access, even on locally-installed applications. But their need to simplify support should not be at the expense of you not having complete control over how you use your information.

Focus on the data. Don't bend on these requirements: Your data is fully accessible; It's robustly backed up; and, in the case of any disaster, it's recoverable.

Technology is a set of tools used to manage your critical information. Where that technology is housed is more of a feature set and financial choice than anything else. The most convenient and affordable place for your data to reside might well be in the cloud, but make sure that it's the type of cloud that your data won't fall through.

Using a Blog Network for Organizational Collaboration

By Laura Quinn, February 20, 2009

It's apparently the month of collaboration, for some reason. I've talked to four people this month about presenting information about the types of collaboration tools that are available, particularly for networks of organizations who want to work together.

And in fact, we're currently working on diagram to easily convey strengths and weakness of different tools in this space. So I'm giving it a lot of thought!

One of the things that's struck me in this space is that there's not that many methods which both help to archive ideas and conversations in a useful way for posterity and also help people to connect to each other and form relationships. Those wouldn't appear to be opposites, but in practice, it's hard to come up with examples.

Which got me thinking about the possibilities of blog networks for this purpose. Let's say you have ten organizations that are trying to coordinate, and each has an incentive to show that they're doing useful things. What if each organization were to keep a blog to talk about what done, what they've found out, challenges, etc? Each of the other organizations could then read the blogs to keep abreast of what others are doing (maybe, in fact, it's one blog with a lot of authors - that could be a better model). Each organization could comment on other people's posts - the tools would even support small discussions or decision making in the comments.

I'm kind of compelled by this model. It would take some start-up and management, no question. But I'm feeling it's a nice mix of structured and not, archive-able but not impersonal.

I've never heard of anyone doing this, though - anyone know of any examples of this? Or are there big downsides that I'm not seeing?

Mobile Applications for Human Rights

By Eric Leland, February 19, 2009

I am excited to learn about a technology and human rights conference entitled The Soul of the New Machine: Human Rights, Technology and New Media. In a partnership between University of California Berkeley Human Rights Center and TechSoup's Netsquared project, the conference is hosting a "Mobile Challenge" encouraging nonprofits and advocacy groups to "combine data, imagery, mapping and social networking to advance human rights." Contestants will be judged with the help of the Netsquared community and online system.

Project ideas I like so far include some interesting integrations of mapping and text messaging, including this tool to anonymously report sexual harassment. Presenters and facilitators at the conference include Patrick Ball, who has worked for years in data and security issues around human rights, Suzanne Seggerman from Games for Change (see related posts here and here) and Yvette Alberdingk Thijm from Witness, one of my favorite human rights organizations, where I got my start in technology for advocacy. The conferences is happening May 4-5 in Berkeley, CA.

Media and Mediums

By Peter Campbell, February 18, 2009

Those of us who actively create internet content -- which includes many nonprofits, at this point - were fairly blindsided by a small, subsequently revoked change in Facebook's terms of service this month. The earlier terms allowed Facebook to use any content that a user publishes to the site in a variety of ways, as long as the user kept the content on the site. The change extended Facebook's rights to use beyond it's time on their system. They could keep using it after the user removed it, and they could even keep using it after the user cancelled their account. Facebook's defense of this action, in a blog post by Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO, was that the intention was to insure that people whom you shared information with, such as emails, links or notes, didn't lose access to that information if/when you removed it. But, since the policy didn't isolate that use example from the broader uses, such as Facebook advertising their services with your content, or providing it to third parties, the reassurance left a lot of us cold. A use policy on a social networking site should establish, clearly, what will and won't happen with the content that you post to it, not leave it open ended to this extreme.

This incident prompted a fascinating post by Dr. Amanda French, comparing the license agreements of a variety of popular social networks. This is an important read, but the upshot is: Google services and MySpace have pretty clear terms; Facebook and LinkedIn claim a broad range of rights to content that we publish on their systems.

To me this is a bit like the separation of church and state. I expect that a social networking site, like an ISP, is a medium that I can use to communicate and share things, including things that i create and hold copyright to; not a magazine that licenses and retains ownership of works that I submit. If that's not the case, then I want to know that and be very careful about what I'm putting up there. In my case, I'm trying to protect my works and personal reputation; a nonprofit should be just as concerned about how a business like Facebook might portray them as they repurpose their content.

There is media -- content, that we create -- and there are mediums, and in the print world the issues of content ownership are very clearly outlined in contracts. Facebook and their ilk should be applying the same standards, maybe even more so, since they are publishers on a much more massive scale than, say Ms. Magazine or Popular Mechanics.

Micro projectors

By Paul Hagen, February 16, 2009

While procrastinating I came across an article about cell phone projectors coming down the pike. It links to a review by the NY Times of one these devices already being sold. It struck an inner geek chord, and I thought, "cool". Amazon shows them selling for $200-300, though the reviews leave a bit to be desired. Mobility is a beautiful thing.

What I've learned

By Michelle Murrain, February 12, 2009

As you might have noticed, I haven't been blogging so much lately. It's because I've been very busy researching and helping to write the upcoming Open Source CMS review that Idealware is going to publish.

I've learned a lot about each of the four systems that we reviewed, and you'll hear all about that soon, but for now, I thought I'd share a little of the over all wisdom that has come from working on this report.

Maintaining a CMS is hard work. Way back when, I was the lead developer on a now-dead open source CMS, so I know intimately what hard work it takes to write one. But I didn't realize how much work it takes, by how many tens and hundreds and thousands of people, to maintain a world-class CMS.
Communities count. Piggy-backing on the above - it is the communities that make these four systems what they are.
Different people have different assumptions about what is the right way to do things. One of the big challenges of writing the review was figuring out how to review these based on equivalent criteria, when each system was actually trying to solve the CMS problem in their own, completely valid, but somewhat different, way.
We are lucky. We are really lucky (well, it probably isn't totally luck) that these open source systems (and others) have emerged, and are able to finally get nonprofits out of the "the executive director's nephew designed the site and we can't put up that event announcement because he went snowboarding" problem in a way that is cost-effective for them.

Tweaking Twitter

By Peter Campbell, February 11, 2009

Twitter is my favorite social network. Why? Because it's easy to use (type a short message and hit enter); it's easy to follow (just keep scrolling through the main page); it's more casually interactive than the competitors; and, because I follow it in Twhirl, which is always in the upper-lefthand corner of my desktop, it's always there. To contrast, I usually have Facebook open in a Firefox tab, as well, but I can go for hours without thinking to click on it.

If you've been curious about Twitter, or you tried it, once, but couldn't see the utility, now might be a good time to try again. Getting started with Twitter can be a bit of a challenge if you don't know many people who are on it, but we have an active community that Idealware readers should fit right in with. The nonprofit Twitter pack gives you a quick index of people that you might actually want to follow. And as we move into nonprofit conference season, with NTEN's big shindig up in April and Techsoup's Netsquared a month behind it in May, there are a lot of people joining in. Just be sure that, before you follow a bunch of us, that you tell us who you are in your profile, and maybe post an introductory Tweet -- most people will not automatically follow back a blank slate.

Convenience, simplicity, immediacy, camaraderie -- these are the terms that I associate with Twitter. There are some features that I'd love to see, though. These could all be implemented by Twitter, or some by a clever third party.

First, I'd like to have the option, and for my followers to have the option, of typing an introductory note to appear in the email announcing that someone has a new follower. That way, if I follow you (assuming that you're on Twitter), I can say "Hi, you, I'm following you because I can tell by your tweets that you read the Idealware blog, and that indicates a refined taste in blogs" or "Hi, you, I see that you have all sorts of tweets about Android and the T-Mobile G1. I'm a fellow G1 user." Make this optional, sure, but the ability to set some context when I'm establishing a social relationship would be a welcome addition.

Second, please, make the user lists (followers and followees) into a manageable interface. Let me sort them by name, location, average number of tweets a day, whether they're following me back, how long since they last tweeted, how many tweets they've posted total. These are all useful metrics, and I can gleam some of them on Twitter; others via useful tools like Tweepler, which takes a stab at this type of manageability. And let me add people to groups, something that I really appreciate in Facebook's feature set. This can be done, in a fashion, by Tweetdeck, but only if you want to donate that much of your screen's real estate to your Twitter client. Twhirl added spellcheck this week, so I'm not going anywhere soon.

Third, while we all appreciate innovations like "Mr. Tweet", a service that analyzes your Twitter connections and makes additional recommendations, the main algorithm for this service seems to be "who are your friends following? You should follow them, too". Seems logical. But the result is that Mr. Tweet tells me, and everyone else, that we should follow the Twitter superstars, mostly social media gurus with followers in the thousands. Analysis of my profile should reveal that I use Twitter to converse with friends and associates, and follow very few people like that to begin with. So a recommendation engine based on my behavior, as well as my friends lists, would be great -- the current options are like a Google without the option to search on terms, just a button that returns the most popular sites on the web.

Those are my top three -- add your Twitter wish list requests in the comments.

What should we rate CMSs on?

By Laura Quinn, February 10, 2009

We're sprinting towards the finish line for our detailed report comparing open source content management systems - specifically, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and Plone - for nonprofit websites. We started with more than ten interviews to understand what tends to be important for nonprofit website CMSs, then did a bunch of detailed research to understand the differences between the system. One of the last steps before our final writing is to define our rating criteria.

The idea of the criteria is to highlight the important differences between systems. We've currently divided this rating structure into twelve categories.... what do you think? Do the below categories (still to be wordsmithed) cover the important aspects of CMSs, and make sense as the key twelve things to evaluate on?

Hosting and Installation: How easy is it to find hosting? How easy to install?
Ease of Setting Up a Simple Site: If you just want to create a basic site with a couple of sections, how easy is it to find a setup a theme, create your navigation, perhaps create a news story or event calendar setup, and ensure your nontechnical users can update it?
Learning Curve in Configuring a More Complex Site: If you have more complex needs, how much time will it take to get up to speed on creating a custom theme, finding and installing add-on modules, and understanding what's possible in the system?
Content Admin Ease of Use: How easy are non-technical content admins likely to find it to edit or add pages, with text, images, documents, and video? Are the admin tools accessible to the visually impaired?
Graphical Flexibility: How easy is it to find a packaged theme? How flexible is the theming system, to create some crazy new layout or design? Are themes accessible?
Structural Flexibility: As you move beyond just pages, can you support deeply nested structures? How can you define what content shows up where? Can you create your own content types? Custom data collection forms? How's the search engine, and multi-language support?
User Roles and Workflow: How does the system think about user roles? Can you define permissions granularly around sections or content types? What features are available to facilitate content moving from one person to another (i.e. from a writer to a reviewer to someone with final authority to publish it)?
Community/ Web 2.0: Are there comments, blogs, multiple author blogs? Support for RSS feeds? Support for profiles or social networking? Visitor submitted content (like for a share-your-story feature)?
Extending and Integrating: How easy is it to extend functionality via code, or to integrate the data with another system?
Scalability and Security: How sound is the infrastructure for huge sites? How common are security vulernabilities?
Site Maintence: How easy is it to backup? How frequently are updates issued, and how easy are those to install? How likely is it that you'll need to take an update that will break your site?
Community Support and Strength: How stable is the system? How easy is it to find help?

Your thoughts welcome - what did we miss? What seems wierd? What did we get right?

Spy on Everything

By Eric Leland, February 10, 2009

I am getting more and more into tracking things online. Who wants to constantly do Google searches anyway, can't everything I want simply come to me instead? After pondering this little bit of laziness, I decided to consult my daughter, who always has a thing or two to say in support of slacking. After all, we both fell in love with the iPhone Google app that you can talk to, especially that day we really needed a Baskin Robbins fix. We agreed that while too much of a good thing can be bad, there is no harm in exploring the options.

I have used Google Alerts to send me updates on keywords and phrases that appear online, its pretty quick and easy to find out who is talking about stuff I am interested in, but it does miss a lot of conversations. Yotify is interesting, I used it to monitor Craigslist for nonprofit jobs involving art therapy for a friend, and after a while it did find a few opportunities I would have missed otherwise. For web work, I recently tried AreMySitesUp.com, which for free allows me to put in several sites and have it notify me if things were down. In particular, I can specify the system to look for keywords on the site, which helps to check if the database is running smoothly on the site. A new one I have not tried yet is called Trackle, which seems pretty similar to Yotify, but more social networky, so I can pick from a bunch of "tracklets" others have created, rank them, etc, and message out discoveries via Twitter.

One one level, these services are adding new ways for me to fill my inbox with noise, but over time I imagine optimizing the tracking to be particularly well targeted to find just what I need, without much effort on my part. Has anyone else had success with using these or other online tracking systems?

Sproutbuilder Update and Alternatives

By Heather Gardner..., February 8, 2009

Last month nifty WYSIWYG online flash widget maker Sproutbuilder announced its plan to move to all pay accounts by March and like a lot of organizations I was pretty concerned about what this meant for my nonprofit clients. Assurances that Sprout Inc. is committed to the sector turned into the news that there would be limited free accounts and some discount for official organizations. Last week a modified pricing structure was announced and some solid information about what is available for nonprofits became available.

The short story is that verified nonprofits can create up to 5 widgets (sprouts) with 100MB Storage and 10GB bandwidth available with a free account. Other pricing tiers will be half price or $30/mo for 5-15 sprouts and $150/mo for 15-30.

While this is decidedly good news, I did feel the need in the interim to see what alternatives exist and if any are worth exploring in more depth. The caveats about any free application or software service still apply of course and the original Idealware post on these developments by Michelle Murrain is well worth reading.

At first it looks like there are more options and decisions to make than on a new cell phone plan. But when I narrowed down the field with the following criteria some likely candidates emerged.

Offers a free version and looks to remain so
Interface to build widgets doesn't require HTML, javascript or programming knowledge
Interface is relatively easy to use
Ability to have many types of content on several pages or tabs - photos, video, feeds, text areas
Ability to customize formatting and style elements, background, text etc.

Alternatives I plan to check out in more depth include Wix, PopFly (from Microsoft) and iWidgets. I have just done a little preliminary investigation and playing around at this point, but here are my notes on each and a longer list of the other options I found.

Wix: http://www.wix.com/
Probably the closest match to Sproutbuilder's ease of use and functionality but definitely geared more towards the MySpace style and audience. This shows in the widget building interface making it a bit jumbled and not that efficient for building tasks. They do have some nice add in elements like Google maps and a contact form. Free version includes a self-promotional footer when the widget is embedded.

Popfly : http://www.popfly.com/
I haven't made it far into actually producing a widget yet because it requires Microsoft Silverlight browser plug in to be installed on my computer and I am not sure I want to make that kind of commitment yet to something I may never use. The orientation here is on flash games and mash-ups, but it does seem possible to create content+feed type widgets as well. I would love to hear from anyone that has tried or is using this since the idea of easy-to-make, shareable game widgets seems appealing for some nonprofits.

iWidget: http://www.iwidgets.com/
Advertising is added to widgets that don't contain any of their own, so the fit for the nonprofit community isn't great. The interface required an initial set up that included URL links to images hosted elsewhere, which might be a slight technology barrier but the actual content addition and customization interface seems solid.

The others
Widgetbox: http://www.widgetbox.com/
Seems powerful but requires pretty solid coding knowledge it looks like.

Yahoo Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/widget-maker
Also a probably a pretty powerful tool for those with tech chops.

Blist Widgets: http://www.blist.com/what-is-blist/blist-widgets
Pretty sweet looking excel spreadsheet type data display widgets with interactive possiblities but limited to data input/output as far as I can tell.

Dapper widgets: http://www.dapper.net
Offers the ability to generate a wide variety of output types (google gadgets for example) from data collected from a web site - static or RSS feed and might be worth another look.

KickApps: http://www.kickapps.com/widgets
Seems like widget creation is part of a larger package that requires a $100 minimum fee.

Clearspring: http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia
A forerunner in the widget field but it doesn't look like they have any free or nonprofit plans available.

These notes were the result of a very quick look around and I would be happy for any additions or corrections to my brief survey and initial thoughts. There are a lot of neat services out there and I know I didn't find all of them or look at all of the functionalities they offer. None of the ones I summarized seems to have the same combination of ease of use and power found in Sproutbuilder though, so for now their 5 widgets for free plan still looks like a good starting place for nonprofits wanting to create their first widgets.