NP Technology News Feed

Beth Kanter and Allison Fine's book, The Networked Nonprofit, is now out and starting lots of conversations. But what's everyone talking about? Below I've shared some excerpts and resources to get you started and ready to join in!

Getting Started

Let's start at the beginning: what is a "networked nonprofit" anyway? As Beth and Allison explain:

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Net2 Recommends is a monthly series of news and blog posts from around the web that the NetSquared team recommend. It is a round-up of items that caught our eye that we want to share with you.

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Turnfront is organising a conference on using the web for activism on 7th August in London.

It will have a mixture of presentations from activists and technologists, along with time for more open conversations between the participants. The talks will cover activist video, open source social media, hi-tech direct action and online democracy (to name a few).

You can register at: http://turnfront.com/dotactivist

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Written by guest blogger, MeiMei Fox, @meimeifox and cross-posted to TechSoup blog.

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In order to update our website and provide you with some new functionality, the NetSquared site will be down intermittantly between the hours of 5 p.m. and 9 p.m. Pacific Time both today and tomorrow.

If you have any questions, you can contact us via email or Twitter. 

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

I've got a great little feature to share with you this week to give your pages more user-friendly web address URLs ... like

Instead of

As of yesterday, you should have started seeing this new feature available in all your Salsa-built pages, in the floating yellow box where you can also switch the page's template.

We've heard from a lot of you that a constant frustration is the lengthy URLs produced by Salsa.  Besides being really difficult to use in emails, they can be quite the eyesore. We heard your concerns and that's why we are releasing the Short URL feature to set your own customized URLs for any webpage.

Recently, Mashable posted a list of upcoming social media and technology events, which got me thinking about the must-attend events for techie do-gooders! I did a bit of research and here are a few that caught my eye:

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Join Cynthia M. Adams for a free webinar that offers a short tour of the GrantStation website. Learn how to use the tools that GrantStation provides to help you identify the right grantmaker for any program or project.

If you're interested in learning more about GrantStation before the TechSoup special offer on August 17 and 18, this tour will help you understand whether it's the right tool for your organization and how to get started.

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In most CRM systems, especially older ones, and ones that are less flexible, some fields can be points of contention for some of us. Gender is one, marital status is another.

CiviCRM, to it’s credit, allows for an arbitrary number of genders – you can define them however you like. My bet (although I could be wrong) is that it’s one of the few out there that allow that. Gender is not a standard field in Salesforce.com contact records, so if you want to add your own, you can customize it however you’d like. There was a very interesting and lively discussion about the gender field in Drupal profiles. Of course, one can always customize these things in Drupal.

For a couple of projects we’ve been working on, we’ve been getting very interested in putting together a really expanded and fleshed out data model for gender, sexual orientation, and marital status. Here’s the first draft. We’d love feedback on this (besides “this is silly/too radical/dangerous/from the antichrist/etc.”). And we also know that even for those who agree that sex and gender are different things, people will differ on how to divide these categories and make sense of it.

• Sex: Male, Female, FTM, MTF, Intersex
• Gender: Male, Female, Genderqueer
• Sexuality: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, Straight
• Marital Status: Straight Marriage, MA, DC, IA, VT Domestic, CA-SF 2004, CA 2008, Canada
• Relationship Status: Single, Partnered, Divorced, Dating, Poly  (There probably could be some field dependencies of Marital Status on Relationship Status)

And if you maybe thought that OpenIssue headquarters was in San Francisco, I’m sure this list made you sure. (Yes, we are.)

(Thanks to Ilyse Kazar, technology consultant for NPOs and educational organizations at Adept Digital Evolution, for sharing her thoughts as a participant in the 2010 Salsa Community Conference!)

Tech conferences are for nerdy computer mavens, right? Hundreds of high-I.Q., awkward folks milling about in their propeller beanies, salivating over software and code, eating Twinkies and drinking Jolt, right? Over the course of my tech consulting career (which began with an "IBM clone" that would have been at home in Fred and Wilma's house) I have been to quite a few tech conferences and expos. And in actuality, I have discovered that people who work in technology are a fascinating and diverse and creative lot. I have made solid friendships lasting decades with many colleagues -- who are also involved in everything from making music to helping in Haiti after the earthquake.

So, when I headed to D.C. for my first Salsa conference this summer, the event was slated to be stacked up in my mind against memories of some very well-done, informative and fun "devcons" I had attended in the past, that were populated by an interesting crowd. The bar was set high! And ....

(insert drum roll here....)

In every way, the Salsa Conference of 2010 was the best I have ever attended!

(Read more ...)

As part of my recent transition from my digital marketing/social media job to the nonprofit sector, I decided to put together a list of digital marketing/social media tools and a 10 step social media assessment for nonprofits to keep my brain working in high gear. I had found that a lot of the "top social media tools" type lists that you can come across online often seem to be either way too high level, listing tools that everyone already knows about, or they list very specific tools that may not be useful for the majority of organizations.

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On June 22nd and 23rd Wireless Access for Health (WAH) announced the results of its first year piliot project at public events in Moncada and Makati, Philippines.

WAH is a broad public-private partnership in the Philippines that has succeeded in enhancing a locally developed electronic medical record system and introducing it into four rural health units in four different municipalities in Tarlac Province, Luzon. The enhanced system is capable of generating and transmitting all 23 reports required for the Philippine Field Health Service Information System (FHSIS) over the SMART 3G mobile phone network.

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(From this week's Weekly Highlight email. Click here to sign up to receive it in your inbox every week!)

Greetings!

It's the "Salsa Weekly Highlight," your quick hit on what's new in Salsa to help get the most out of your online program. As always, you can find plenty more news, updates, and conversation throughout the week on SalsaCommons.org.

This week, online organizing got a little bit easier. Now, you can put the power of the Salsa organizing platform directly in the hands of your supporters.

mySalsa is a cutting-edge platform that wraps all Salsa's core features into an easy-to-use community portal empowering your people to connect with others and to:

• host events
• start groups
• post updates
• fundraise
• ... and more!

Netroots Nation 2010 is this week in Las Vegas and the Salsa Labs team will be there in full force.

Netroots Nation is a gathering of some of the best and brightest minds in the progressive community and we're really excited to take part in discussions about new and emerging trends in organizing and advocacy campaigns.

If you are a Salsa/DIA/WFC user and are going to be in Vegas, make sure you sign up for our Twitter list to more easily connect with other members of the Salsa family.  You can sign up for the list here: 

Salsa Market director - Ali Savino - will be hosting a meet-up for the developers/coder/hacker crowd at Netroots as well.  Details can be found below or RSVP on Facebook.