Jon Stahl’s Journal

I spent some time last week thinking about database tools that grassroots environmental organizations use to manage their relationships with members, supporters, etc. After looking at a bunch of the commercial and non-commercial tools available, I remain profoundly unsatisfied with the current state of the landscape. Here’s what I think an […]

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Dr. Arno Schaal at ECOResearch Network out of Perth, Australia has launched US Election 2004, a neat project that automatically analyzes media coverage of the 2004 US Presidential election and provides a variety of analyses: The results reflect media attention and attitude towards the US presidential candidates. Keywords grouped by political party and geographic […]

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Herding free-range cats from the just-added-to-my-blogroll Aldon Hynes is a nice look at the recent CivicSpace developer summit from someone with considerable experience at both software development and group dynamics. There were a lot of talk about usability, the interface and the users’ experience of CivicSpace. There were discussions of architecture and long-term goals. […]

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Security guru and privacy advocate Bruce Schneier has an important op-ed on the increasing amount of “wholesale survelliance” in our society and the importance of the need for checks on its abuse. The effects of wholesale surveillance on privacy and civil liberties is profound; but unfortunately, the debate often gets mischaracterized as a question […]

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SugarSales 1.5 is open-source CRM software. Very interesting. (NB: it’ll cost you $149/user/year for access to their support forums, etc.) If I was thinking about developing nonprofit open-source database solutions, I might nose around here and see if there are any worthwhile ideas/code to borrow.

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Our friends over at Environmental Working Group have just released Skin Deep, yet another in their fantastic series of reports that tease the hidden environmental stories out of large databases. This time, they assessed the ingredients of more than 7500 personal care products, and evaluated them against government, industry, and academic lists of known and […]

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After a long period of “radio silence” the dev team at Groundspring has released some of their internal planning documents — Ebase Enterprise Specifications and Screen Mock Ups. I’ll be reading these closely over the next week or so to get a better idea of where they’re heading, and if you have an interest in […]

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The clever folks at Center for American Progress have just launched Claims vs. Facts, a collaborative database that logs the lies of the lying liars on the right, and matches each lie against the documented facts. What’s really neat about this is that you can submit lies and facts to the database, subject to fact-checking […]

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Nice interview with the CEO of MySQL from eweek.

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Recommended Data Modeling Tools? is a recent thread on slashdot that addresses a topic that we have been thinking about a bit of late.

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I’ve written about Diebold’s notoriously insecure touch-screen voting machines before here. Now Paul Krugman takes up this issue in his recent column Hack the Vote. He ends strong: “You don’t have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why […]

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ONE/Northwest database-friend Matthew Scholtz recently spent some time taking a look at Rekall an open-source Access-like database frontend. Here’s what he had to say: OK, I’ve done a bit of poking around with Rekall… So far my impressions are that it is: definitely not yet mature, very buggy, has a visually lucid but somewhat awkward UI, […]

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Per today’s press release: theKompany.com just recently released version 2.1 of Rekall, a personal, programmable DBMS system for Linux and Windows. Rekall is the only viable alternative to MS Access for Linux. With Rekall you will be able to quickly and easily build database applications using Rekall forms and reports. A full complement of widgets means that […]

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The nerd-news outlets don’t usually do a very good job of covering political stories, but the brewing brouhaha over electronic voting systems is an interesting collision of worlds. Robin Miller (known to Slashdot aficionados as “Roblimo”) recently published this solid overview of electronic voting machine issues. It’s a pretty balanced introduction to a potentially very […]

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Nonprofit relationship database provider SocialEcology announced this week that it is closing its doors. “We were unable to finance the growth we experienced in the last two years,” said founder Michael Gilbert. ” I’m just glad there are some good providers still out there.” Michael and his team have a smart vision of how […]

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Phil Agre recently started publishing Red Rock Eater again. He recently noted the following paper, which looks quite interesting to me: Daniel G. Bobrow, Robert Cheslow, and Jack Whalen, Community knowledge sharing in practice: The Eureka Story, paper available on the Web at: http://www.dialogonleadership.org/EurekaStory.pdf This is one of the best papers on organizational informatics that I have read. […]

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Michael Gilbert just wrote a very nice article entitled Frictionless Fundraising that provides a nice overview of how we should be thinking about the fundraising process from a communications context. It’s filled with pungent, wise insights. My favorite bit: “Modern fundraising is obsessed with the Ask. Prospecting exists only to supply more people to hit […]

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