Jon Stahl’s Journal

Alison Fine just wrote a report on the use of social media tools among Overbrook Foundation human rights grantees, for, um, the Overbrook Foundation.  Her top-line finding: “a perpetual state of anxiety” among nonprofits about “Web 2.0″ tools: Overall, the grantees are firmly entrenched in the Web 1.0 world, meaning that grantees use the web largely as […]

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Very interesting.  Facebook has announced that it will no longer rank popular applications by raw number of users, instead choosing to measure “engagement” those users have with the apps they’ve installed.  This is a great, smart shift, and I think it presages lots of changes to how online activism is measured. We define engagement as the […]

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Marty shows yet again why he is one of the keenest observers in the nonprofit technology space: Direct online interaction robs the very important inattentive trust building components to relationships. Twitter, facebook, etc. provide a unique window into watching someone without paying direct attention to them. How many of you log on to do work late […]

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Zack rants, Marty riffs. Most the people talking to you (especially nonprofits) think of the web/internet as a tactical support for the rest of the operations. They want the “web” guy to support our restoration initiative, the web team to support fundraising, the web team to support field, the web to support membership. Web is a tactic […]

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Jeff Brooks channels Roy Williams.  Good to stay grounded: Just remember, a new medium is not a magic bullet. As brilliantly riffed by Roy Williams in his MondayMorningMemo: The Media Is Not the Message, the real issue is what you say, not where you say it: Relevance is what determines whether an ad works or […]

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Or does WiserEarth, Paul Hawken’s new web 2.0 community mega-wiki-directory project, seem an awful lot like a reimplementation of Idealist.org?

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My friend Jonah Bossewitch has been involved with a fascinating ‘online direct action’ campaign targeting Eli Lilly, who had been conducting an illegal “off-label” marketing campaign around their drug Zyprexa, despite knowing about the drug’s lethal side-effects.Jonah’s case study of the campaign weaves together simple, freely available technologies such as bittorrent file sharing, anonymous web […]

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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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As Washington Toxics Coalition’s multi-year campaign to pass a first-in-the-nation ban on toxic flame retardant chemicals (known as PDBEs) comes to a rousing finish, check out what they’re doing with user-generated content. They’ve invited members and supporters to send in photographs of them with their own “I Want To Be PDBE-Free” message. They’ve taken a smart, […]

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This sounds like a very creative and effective use of Google Earth as an environmental advocacy tool.  Environmental advocacy group Appalachian Voices has joined to Google to deliver a special interactive layer for Google Earth that tells the stories of over 470 mountains that have been destroyed from coal mining, and its impact on nearby ecosystems. I hope […]

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Duane Raymond of Fairsay has got the first three parts of a six-part series on the state of online advocacy/e-campaigning.  Worth a read.  It’s really great to see some big-picture reflection coming from a hands-on campaigner.  I’m particularly enjoying the latest installment, Part III, in which Duane considers some of the “key campaigning gaps” that […]

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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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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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David Hsu brainstorms up some great ideas for green software mini-applications (now commonly called “widgets”).My favorite is actually his first, a paper calculator: Paper calculator: [I’d like] A nice little toolbar application that tells me how many pages I’ve printed today, this week, this month and this year. If someone could combine this with this useful […]

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My colleagues and I from ONE/Northwest recently signed onto the Integration Proclamation, a first step towards encouraging funders, software developers and those of us who work with them to invest resources in making tools that play together better.If you agree that social change activists need tools that assume they’re part of a larger picture, not […]

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Apparently, I was only a moderately-good nonprofit technology pundit in 2006. Jason’s keeping score. On the plus side, at least I made falsifiable predictions, unlike many of my peers. Jon Stahl, ONE/Northwest “The Web 2.0 bubble will burst” Ruling: Since “Web 2.0″ has been famously impossible to define, this is a tough one to score. On […]

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Jonathan Peizer offers up some skepticism about Time Magazine’s designation of “you” as Person Of The Year: I am just not ready to give into a rose-colored panacea that seemingly lulls me into a false sense of who is in charge and the life-changing benefits of a “thing”. Just because a new form of interactive, networked […]

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Joshua Levy has a nice post at Personal Democracy Forum on using MySpace (and other social networking environments) for advocacy & political campaigns. Nothing radically new here, but it’s a good, concise restatement of the obvious: You have to go where the people you want to reach are already at. (Organizing 101 […]

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Ethan Zuckerman (who probably doesn’t remember me following along two years behind him at Williams) has a nice review of Cass Sunstein’s new book “Infotopia.”  I’m adding it to my reading list. Sunstein is still concerned with the formation of ideological cocoons. In his new book, Infotopia, he’s become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would […]

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Why would the CEO of an explicitly progressive political tech consulting firm out himself as a “supporter” of McCain?  And then take a “leave of absence” from said firm?  Odd.  Disturbing. I don’t know what to make of this.  There must be more going on here than meets the eye.

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