NP Technology News Feed
Best of Association Jam for July 2010
Salsa, con Sabór: Reflections on the Salsa Conference 2010
(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 ...)
List of Digital Marketing Tools & 10 Step Social Media Assessment
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.
Facebook’s New ‘Like’ Button Features
Wireless Access for Health Project Works to Improve Public Health Care in the Philippines
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.
Salsa Weekly Highlight: Empower your supporters with mySalsa
(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!
Social Media Contests a Big Risk for Small Non-Profits?
Salsa Labs at Netroots Nation
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.
Best Practices for Contest Campaigns: AGC Lessons Learned
Three months without Twitter
As you know, I left twitter 3 months ago today. I figured it was a good time to do a reflection of my experiences over this time – what I miss, and what I don’t miss.
What I don’t miss
- Distractions: I find myself more productive, for sure. I never was very disciplined about turning twitter off, so I was constantly distracted. The lack of distraction has been a really good thing.
- Information overload: how did I keep all that stuff in my head? My mind feels a lot quieter.
- Need to share: I’m happy to leave the somewhat narcissistic impulse that Twitter feeds behind.
What I miss
- Instant answers to questions! And answering people’s questions.
- Banter: Twitter is way better for banter than any other medium besides being in person.
- Opportunities for collaboration: it does seem like a lot of that happens now on Twitter and Facebook (which for me is a friends/family only zone) so I’m probably missing out on some of that.
In general, I’m still happy I left, and have no plans to return. I have, on a couple of occasions, used search.twitter.com when a certain event was happening, so I could see up to the minute what was going on. I’m sure I’ll still do that sometimes.
Git
I became sold on version control fairly far back in my programming life. Back when CVS (C0ncurrent Version System) was the standard. I learned it, although there were varied gaps in my use of it, so it never became second nature. As I learned more about newer version control systems, I tried them out. For a while, I was using SVN (Subversion), which is similar enough to CVS, but has some nice improvements. More and more folks are moving to distributed version control systems. I began to understand the great advantages of those systems, and decided to pick one to standardize on. Git stood out from the others in terms of popularity and resources. And, I figured anything Linus Torvalds wrote was good enough for me. That was last year. This year. drupal.org is moving to Git, making my life oh so much easier.
In my daily life, Git has 2 major advantages: version control and comparison of versions even when I’m not connected to the internet (you have your own actual repository, not just a working copy), and its speed. It takes less time to clone a whole repository of code than it does to check out a working copy using CVS or SVN! It’s really worth checking out.
I imagine Git will become the new CVS – the new standard, until something better comes along to supplant it.
Movie Mondays for Fundraisers
Net2 Think Tank Round-up: Age Segmentation in Social Networking
For this month's Net2 Think Tank, we asked you to share your thoughts and best practices for reaching a particular age group online. We are hoping to understand what tools or practices appeal to different age groups and how organizations can best target their online efforts to those audiences. This round-up is a summary of the responses we received from the community and it will hopefully serve to help you re-think the ways that you're targeting your limited audience.
We invite you to provide technical Assistance on Community Radio initiative in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh NGOs Network for Radio and Communication considers community radio as a special area for intervention. We have been promoting advocacy with the government in relation to community radio with other organizations since its emergence from 2000.
The objective of BNNRC 's Community Radio intervention is to address crucial social issues at community level, such as poverty and social exclusion, empower marginalized rural groups and catalyze democratic processes and on going development efforts.
Salsa Weekly Highlight: Grow your list with the Change.org Salsa Market app
(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.
How would your email list look with a few thousand -- maybe tens of thousands -- more names?
This week, I wanted to share an application available in the Salsa Market to help build your list ... one of the core needs of any online program. If you're still unsure whether the Market can help your organization, the change.org application is a great place to start.
It's Third Thursday!
Third Thursday is upon us and we're getting ready for an exciting day ahead.
At 4 PM today, Salsa Labs' training specialist Trina Zahller will delve into strategies for analyzing and organizing your support data. Then Royelen Boykie of Food and Water Watch shares her strategies for taking those supporter relationships to the next level! It all happens live at our offices:
Salsa Labs
1700 Connecticut Ave NW
Washington DC 20009
(That's just two blocks up from the north exit of the DuPont Circle metro stop. We're right above the Starbuck's on the corner of Connecticut and R.)
Virtual Office Toolkit
We were a small organization and most of us were parents. Our workplace culture was one in which we trusted each other to get our work done, even if it wasn't always between 9 and 5. The org made lots of space for people to take care of themselves during the work day—to go to doctor appointments or a kid's event—as long as we got our work done somehow. I telecommuted from time to time, sometimes for a couple months at a time, especially in the early days of parenting. It was a kind of informal flex time, which NPR reports is an increasing trend in some sectors and can allow for a better work-life balance. For me, working flexibly and virtually in this way has definitely improved my quality of life.
Since I work in tech—obviously a type of work conducive to the virtual/flex office—I am aware of more and more virtual orgs and companies as broadband becomes more ubiquitous, and as more people use telecommuting and flex time for various reasons. Some pros and cons...
Pros:
- No commuting required. Ahh, so nice.
- If you do advocacy work, or promote/cover events, you can use a virtual office setup to work and live blog/Tweet from the field. When appropriate, this can be a great way to promote your cause and engage constituents.
- You can work in your pajamas, outside, in front of the fire, in your favorite cafe, or while you're waiting on the bench at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
- My favorite pro: you can take breaks to exercise, walk, see a friend or your partner or child, take photographs, or make something. This requires some self-discipline, but the payoff is worth it.
- You can work anytime of the day or night, not just 9 to 5.
- You can work anytime of the day or night, not just 9 to 5. Work and life boundaries can be hard to maintain if you're not really disciplined about it (I am not yet there, myself).
- No face time and no spontaneous hall chats that lead to brilliant work-related insights (and fill the need we all have for socializing).
- Laptop, smart phone, and broadband, obviously. I live in a rural area, so I don't take those last two for granted. The town next to mine has no broadband and no cell phone coverage, and a lot of people who work virtually in cafes and libraries as a result.
- Telephone & web conference/meeting software: GoToMeeting or ReadyTalk are the two main ways that I have work meetings with my co-workers.
- Jing and SnagIt for screen casting and screen shots, respectively. These helps me communicate in certain situations when I would otherwise call a co-worker or client over to look at my computer screen.
- Collaboration Software: Basecamp, GoogleDocs, GoogleGroups, CentralDesktop (an alternative to Basecamp), Redmine (open-source ticketing and wiki collaboration software), Groupsite (fancier Ning; hosted social networking, document sharing and collaboration software). These are absolutely key for sharing files and communicating about and managing projects with a group of people.
- Instant one-on-one or group communication: Twitter, IM, Yammer and Google Buzz for instant private group convos. Yammer is my new favorite; you can set up a private Twitter-like group, share documents and images, and communicate socially and about work, almost like a virtual watercooler. For me, IM, Yammer and Twitter can help replicate that missing co-worker hall-chat epiphany experience (and some of the socializing).
Gov 2.0 and the Social Sector
About 250 of us gathered in Cambridge as part of a series of Gov 2.0 summits and informal conferences around the country initiated last year by O’Reilly (the publisher) and other partners. While I have followed these to some degree, this was my first outing. Read more about the national efforts here: http://www.gov2summit.com/. On the related blog, you can sign-up to be part of the nonprofit/public sector connection.
Feeling that my own work straddles the fence between nonprofit and public sectors, I wasn’t sure how I would feel or where I would fit in that day. Right at home: we had an energized mix of public officials, government technology policy staff, nonprofit policy advocates, community activists, software developers, and academic researchers and students. Judging by the conversations at this conference, those working in human services, policy advocacy and political activism need to pay close attention to what is happening here. The public and nonprofit sectors have a lot to learn from each other, they serve common goals, and progress around effective use of data and the web will be mutually reinforcing.
“Data” was likely the biggest buzz word at the conference—open data, sharing data, collaborative data, mapping and visualizing data and so on. This being an unconference, it aimed to self-organized by interest and we started by everyone giving a three words introduction of their background and interest. (Mine way, “share data now.”) Looking at the wordle (word cloud) of those introductions, you can see that data and open information drew many to the conference. (Creative Commons credit to http://www.wordle.net/ for the "Gov 2.0 Camp New England ")
Federal, State and Local Government agencies sit on enormous repositories of data that traditionally gets collected as a matter of course for regulatory reasons. We have business, economic, environmental and other data that advocacy groups need to be more effective. It’s often there but hard to get one’s hands on.
We also have mounds of data extracted from nonprofit social services and educational organizations at tremendous cost of time and infrastructure. Busy staff collect data to satisfy public grants as much or more than private foundation grants. From my point of view, this data may start as your data, yet once it passes to the government, it becomes public data. It makes sense that this data—in aggregated, depersonalized, privacy-protected form—be available back as well for communities to learn from, make their own assessments and evaluations of success and effectiveness.
In the public sector, making public data public serves the general good. Elected officials can commission and use (or ignore, as they see fit) qualitative assessments for policy making. The Gov 2.0 trend represents a desire for transparency around that government policy research.
Meanwhile, social sector advocates and activists have learned a lot about mining data to assess trends, correlate results with demographic and other community factors, and press for results and changes. We are all collectors of data and measurers of outcomes. This experience outside the government is an accelerant that will drive change inside the government. Organizational staff and consultants may gripe about grant requirements, yet we are also increasingly using the experiences to improve our own strategies and organizational management.
Toward a policy of "Data Impact Statements"
What should we look for, expect and advocate for in these realms?
First, the public wants more, easier, fuller access to government data. Yet government agencies have old systems, have legitimate boundaries around confidentiality and privacy, and have tight budgets and overwhelmed staff these days with little room to build elaborate data reporting systems. How do we strike a balance?
Where government agencies collect data, and most do, we should expect increasing transparency about what will be collected, at what cost in agency staffing and in compliance time and cost for those required to submit the data, with what quality, with what expected use internal to the government agency, and with what return back to the public. A few years ago, when incoming Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick asked for testimony to his Transition Teams, I proposed the concept of a standard “Data Impact Statement.” Like an environmental impact statement, government agencies would need to file a statement in a standard, readable format on any new initiative that collected data—individual filings or anything else. The statement would list what was being collected; what privacy, confidentiality, or security concerns there were about it; a pre-emptive judgment of the likely quality of the data; and what provisions the agency planned to make to put the data in the public domain.
In the not so distant future, we should aim that reactive freedom of information lawsuits will fade in favor of proactive Data Impact Statements throughout government. By having Data Impact Statements, at least advocacy organizations and human services agencies would be able to review, comment on, and press for change on what was going to happen with data their communities would provide and what of use they would get back. Over time, we can move toward uniform expectations—and funding to back it up.
Second, we should press that the release of data follow emerging technical standards. Web sites with pages of information, even if searchable, are not the same as reusable, transferable data format. The data evolutionary trajectory goes from text on the web, to tabular data on web pages, to downloadable text or Excel, to XML and now to the emerging concept of RDFa. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RDFa and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-rdfa-primer/. This year’s new Drupal release, for example, will embrace RDFa as a standard for web services and data exchange. I suspect that other modern data and community oriented software will as well.
Helping people ask, "How would this look on a map?"
Third, where the average person might reasonably ask, “how would this data look on a map,” public data should be presented with geographic information right there for use. The Gov 2.0 conference gave interesting attention to opening up data for spatial analysis, using geographical based information in crises such as Haiti and Chile, and innovative light-weight open source software like Ushahidi for social mobilization and response.
Fourth, even in the midst of glaring global policy issues from health care to the economy to the wars, we should give some attention to reinforcing national leadership coming in the tech sphere. The Obama administration has taken a strong stand on the democratizing of public data. The http://www.data.gov/ web site is both a growing repository of data anyone can use in the policy making process as well as a sounding board for developing technical and policy standards. It is a welcome initiative and I part of the framework that makes the Gov 2.0 conferences so timely.
Let data inform the educational policy debates
Fifth, if data is flooding in to government and beginning to steam out, we need keep a steady eye on privacy and confidentiality issues. Protect privacy yet don't let it derail opening things up.
A good example is in the realms of education policy. Policy advocates want to be able to do their own refactoring of data on mandatory testing, the record of charter schools, programs to reduce educational inequality, and other elements of No Child Left Behind and its local equivalents. Often this data usage gets lost or delayed because of how long it takes to resolve legal issues around protecting individual student and teacher performance data. In this day and age, we should be able to keep individual data confidential and make aggregated data public. We should also be able to let public school systems and community-based youth jobs and enrichment programs securely exchange individual level student data where both sides agree, have signed appropriate agreements, and have family sign-offs as well. This is probably the single most recurring technology related demand from staff I work with on youth and alternative education programs.
Mobile and Social Media And the Gov 2.0 Trend
Sixth, there is better access to existing data and there is creating new data. In particular, an additional important trend is the use Web 2.0 and social media technologies to inform, energize and empower the public. At the conference, probably the most frequently mentioned example of local tech initiative was the local transit authority’s initiative to put realtime tracking of buses and other transit in the hands of the public. Yes, others may have started on this long before Massachusetts. Yet it has been remarkable how quickly local developers rushed to create mobile apps and all kinds of technology ideas have surfaced around the transit data. At one level, having this information helps busy people know whether they can grab that extra cup of coffee and therefore promote local business at a time when the state really needs it. At another level, it will also help transit and environmental activists really focus in on questions about which areas of the city get what kind of service.
As we learned at the conference, many local communities are experimenting with mobile phone-based systems that enable people and organizations to report problems, oversee responses, and work collaborative to improve services.
All these trends and more will also aid business planning and development. For the moment, the main learning and drive in the Gov 2.0 trend is collaboration and sharing among nonprofit and public sector technologists and policy makers. If you aren’t yet following this trend, you need to.
Why Use Widgets Anyhow?
There are many great resources and experts out there on viral strategies that apply to using widgets and I won't try to cover all that here. I'll just attempt to provide a brief overview about what some organizations are doing and what they are using to implement their outreach.
In addition to checking back in on what nonprofits are doing now that Sprout Builder is moving to an enterprise level application only, I started thinking about some of the possible uses and options for viral or "moveable" widgets that nonprofits are likely to see as helpful.
Why use widgets anyhow? Well, widgets are basically movable, sharable mini-applications that can be used to raise donations, take action on a cause or spread information and awareness about your mission. The fact that your message and actions can be placed and seen "where the people" greatly increases your exposure to new potential supporters. Let's take a look as some possible uses and options for each purpose.
Fundraising
Widgets or "badges" have been around for a while to promote and measure online fundraising drives. There are quite a few options if you are just looking to have a basic charity badge that allows donors to give and supporters to set a goal and place their progress on their web sites and social networks.
These types of badges are not usually very interactive and only allow for a logo and/or photo, short description of the cause, link to a video or more information, possibly some sort of progress indicator and of course a donate now button.
Network for Good was a forerunner in this space and has built several different styles of their Charity Badges including the celebrity based SixDegrees.org
Other community or peer to peer fundraising sites like Changing the Present have incorporated sharable widgets as part of each personal fundraising campaign.
Some paid custom types of "make your own" donation widgets provide more flexibilty for both the organization administrator and end user such as Giving Impact. Also check with your donation vendor as they might even offer these tools. I am aware that at least Click and Pledge and Convio do.
Some examples:
Kevin Bacon's 6 degrees badge
ASPCA donation widgets (Convio)
Direct Advocacy
This week Change.org announced its sparkly new petition widgets (powered by DIA) that allow any change.org petition to be embedded and shared and even signed by supporters right on your site as well as customized and shared.
Also a new service called Call2Action provides multiple tab widgets offering both advocacy and donations using video as the engagement hook.
Some examples:
The Juvenile Diabetes Research Fund has a whole array of advocacy widget options for supporters including mobile campaigns that are worth checking out. They are built on the Clearspring sharing platform*.
And first noted in 2007 by Beth Kanter, the 18seconds.org widget based campaign is still going strong built on Yahoo widget maker.
Awareness Raising & Mission Based Information
This is a pretty broad category and its impossible to cover all the possible ways a widget can be used to get your message out or to distribute meaningful data to your supporters.
News and Blog feeds to supporters
Widgetbox.com seems to have a fairly active nonprofit following that use their widgets in this way including IFAW and the National Wildlife Federation .
Kaboom offers members the opportunity to post progress update widgets for their playground building campaigns which seems to be built on KickApps and shared via Gigya.
Search and Display relevant information
Here are just a few of the widgets I found that provide supporters or the public with pertinent actionable search results wherever they find the widget online.
Kaboom's playspace finder Built on KickApps
Americorps' volunteer opportunities finder Built on Widgetbox
NRDC's What's Fresh local produce finder Originally built on iWidget (now Transpond ) and made shareable with Clearspring*. (full disclosure, I worked on this widget)
FoundationCenter.org's charity IRS form 990 finder Built on Widgetbox
Some other popular awareness raising tools used in widgets are maps, slideshows, videos, polls, quizzes or other interactive content. And of course many organizations also want to offer forms that collect all kinds of data like event registrations and the like as well. For more complex applications you'll want to check out what's possible with KickApps, Widgetbox and Yahoo Widgets already mentioned and the options below.
And some more widget tools for whatever you can dream up.
Simple Stuff
Display RSS feeds of nearly anything - Grazr
Simple & multi-tab flash banners - BannerSnack
Flexible Flash "mini-site" producers
WIX
Produle
Ahead.com (but I couldn't get their site to load)
Custom application options and intense Facebook integration
Transpond ($2,400 You build. $4,000 We build)
Involver (Facebook applications - some free)
Get Social Apps
And Open Source fans will want to keep an eye on the variety of options that Peter Dietz at Social Actions has collected on his list of Action apps.
And finally a short Sprout Builder update
Via various Facebook comments on Beth Kanter's fan page I found this:
Beth Kanter "Here's what we learned - they're going to continue to serve existing nonprofit clients - reach out to Trudy Marquardt "
Other nonprofit staff have reached out to Sprout Builder and been told that the discount is good for one year only at half off ($1500 paid up front) the regular fee $3000. There is no official word from Sprout Inc yet, so there is no way to tell if this applies to everyone or how long the offer stands. I still strongly recommend Sprout using nonprofits contact them right away to see what can be worked out for your organization.
* And in other widget making news, ClearSpring is now transitioning to AddThis platform for sharing & distribution - so their previous platform is going away. (hat tip Andrew Watson's interesting take on all this) If you build your own widget in HTML or flash and just need the sharing ability it looks like this is still free.
Also, several options I listed in previous posts are now offline including poplfly, iWidgets and Blist. Dapper has split into a paid advertising site and an open source community for data mapping widgets now at http://www.dapper.net/open/
Hopefully all the turbulence these services are experiencing will settle down. If you take a look all the things nonprofits are doing with sharable content and engagement you realize how many more possibilities there are. And its looking like movable apps and widgets are a core constituent in the distributed world of Web 2.0. So if you want to start sharing through widget you'll need to be careful selecting your service partner, keep assets backed up and have a fall back plan. Which of course also applies to pretty much everything.
So have fun widget building and as always, please Share your widgets, strategies and vendor experiences in the comments and help build on this post for your colleagues - after all, its all about the shared content - thanks!
Building Websites for a Mobile Phone
Well, there's nothing magical about it. Most mobile phones can view sites using the same HTML that you would use for regular websites So it's very likely that people currently can see your website on their phone. However, mobile phones tend to intepret HTML standards much more harshly than other browsers, and mobile screens are tiny compared to a computer screen. So what your site looks like or whether anyone can actually use it on a phone is another story.
There's two possible ways to go to create a better mobile experience. You can optimize your current site so that it's more viewable by folks on a mobile phone. This would mean making sure your code is compliant with XHTML standards and moving key content and navigation to the upper left -- so it's more likely to appear without a lot of scrolling. Highlighting the text that's currently selected is also very important for mobile phones, as it's often hard on these devices to tell exactly where your cursor is.
If people on mobile phones are a key part of your website audience, you'll be able to support them much better by making a mobile specific website. This would be a separate website, designed specifically for smaller screens, with less images and text, and to allow people to get the information they're likely to be looking for faster. You could either have a separate URL for your mobile site (like mobile.idealware.org), or you can try to detect that a user is accessing your site through a mobile device, and show them the mobile optimized site accordingly.
Want more information? Here's some good links:
How to Design a Mobile Website
7 usability guidelines for websites on mobile devices
Jakob Neilsen's Alertbox: Mobile Usability
Others have tips or links to share?
