Jon Stahl’s Journal

My friend and colleague Michael Gilbert, who is one of the more thoughtful and eloquent people in the nonprofit technology space, has written up a wonderful short article titled “Ten Things We Look For In A Client.”  It resonates very strongly with us here at ONE/Northwest.

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Ethan Zuckerman (and I) think you probably are. Some of my geek friends seem concerned that I’ve lost my sense of shiny. Talking with friends at South by Southwest, they were concerned that Global Voices wasn’t very appealing to the social software geek. You can’t vote, you can’t edit our articles, you can only read or leave a comment. Not […]

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What a fantastic meme.  Michelle quotes Deborah quoting some unknown-but-sage librarian, talking about the “free”-ness of open source software:“…all of these technologies are ‘free’ as in ‘free kittens,’ not free as in ‘free beer.’”The point being that open-source software takes care and feeding, and the occasional trip to the vet.

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I’ve uploaded a few photos from the first day of the Nonprofit Technology Conference here in Washington, DC. Everyone’s NTC photos are here. My personal favorite: Carnet and his shoes.

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NewsCloud creator Jeff Reifman offers a nice guide for social news aggregation for organizations.  It describes five increasingly-sophisticated techniques for groups to integrate NewsCloud-powered social news aggregation into their online activities. Add NewsCloud headlines to your Web site or blog Create a Journal to clip headlines from around the Web for your Web site or blog […]

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I’m leaving Tuesday for the Nonprofit Technology Conference in DC, along with my fabulous colleagues Gideon Rosenblatt and Steve Andersen.  I look forward to seeing many of you there!

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It’s been a while since I’ve fallen in love with a new blog (over-exposure breeds cynicism I suppose), but I’ve just been turned on to The Agitator and I’m head over heels for it. The Agitator is the blog of Roger Craver and Tom Belford, both of the well-known DC-based fundraising/marketing consulting firm Craver Matthews Smith.  […]

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Steve Andersen continues his series of relationship management process maps with a great “donation procesing” map:

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Chris Johnson describes a new innovation in speed geeking/lightning talk technique, pioneered at the Plone community’s recent BBQ Sprint: Pintification : The act of conveying your idea before the judge finishes his drink An interactive variant on lightning talks The rules for pintification are simple. the new speaker buys the last speaker a drink […]

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We’re swamped with demand for database consulting work.  So much so that we’ve decided to expand the team here at ONE/Northwest.  My colleague Steve Andersen, our Database Program Manager, has the scoop: I’m not so much looking for someone to work for me, but with me. I want these kinds of skills to help us build […]

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A big love bomb to Gunner, Heather, Tim and the hundred-odd other fellow nonprofit software developers who made last week’s Nonprofit Software Dev Summit a fantastic experience in slightly nontraditional conferencing.Among the highlights for me were: The unexpected appearance of dear nonprofit tech colleagues such as Amanda Hickman, Laura Quinn, Teresa Crawford — in addition to […]

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Last summer, I did a quick count of the number of known security vulnerabilities in common open-source CMS products, and their underlying software stacks. The results were rather eye-opening. I thought it might be time for an refresh. Once again, my protocol was simple: I searched the MITRE CVE list of known vulnerabilities and […]

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One of the best things about working at ONE/Northwest is the fact that I get to sit across the room from brilliant people like Steve Andersen. Over the past few months, Steve has been doing some amazing work helping our small- to mid-sized environmental organization partners build effective relationship management systems. One of the deep […]

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NTEN recently published a solid little paper by Michelle Murrain and Katrin Verclas that sums up the state of open APIs in the nonprofit CRM sector.  It’s an important read if you believe in the importance of integrating tools.There’s a lot of good stuff in this short paper, and I particularly appreciate that they make […]

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Yahoo’s new “Pipes” service is going to enable some really cool RSS remixing, I think.The blogerati are agog.  I am usually skeptical about these kinds of things, but what I think is most intriguing about Pipes is that it is not so much consumer-focused as about providing powerful, easy-to-use tools for building web services. Very […]

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Jason Clark and Victor d’Allant just relaunched SocialEdge.org, now proudly powered by Plone. They’ve got an active community of social entrepreneurs blogging, wiki-ing and discussing away. It’s really nice to see Plone getting used in high-profile nonprofit collaborative/community sites. Migrating an active community site to a new platform is no small undertaking, as Jason attests. […]

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Ryan Ozimek’s piece “Islands and Bridges, the building has begun” is a great hallelujah to the power and importance of integration via open APIs.  It’s clear that PICnet and ONE/Northwest are drinking form the same cup, when Ryan writes: The power of open source, combined with best of breed proprietary systems with open APIs give organizations the […]

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Interesting interview over at Salon, entitled “Software Is Hard“, with author Scott Rosenberg, about his new book “Dreaming in Code” which is about the troubled story of Mitch Kapor’s Chandler software development project.  But really it’s about how hard software development is in general. You’re doing the project because there is this new feature or features that […]

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Yesterday’s big nonprofit technology news was Convio’s acquisition of GetActive, which combines two of the largest players in the big-client integrated CMS/CRM market. The players aren’t really talking about the underlying motivations behind the deal, so it’s pretty easy to read whatever you want into the tea leaves. That said… As I’ve written before, I believe […]

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… ’cause somebody’s got a rant (or two, or three) coming on. Democrats and progressive orgs like the one I work for have to hire website contractors to build, maintain and host our sites. They f*ck us over a lot.This is where we vent - Internet Directors, Directors of Communications, Bloggers, Webmasters, Communications Staff interns whose job it is to […]

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