Last week, I covered the Richard Scoble dust-up. Thanks to twitter (hat tip to marshallk), I learned about today’s big news: Google, Plaxo and Facebook joined the Data Portability working group. This, of course, doesn’t mean that all of a sudden, everyone’s social graph and data will become portable, but it’s a very good sign that perhaps, after all, things are moving in that direction.
I think that people are getting wary of social networks where they have no control over their own data. And, of course, nonprofits should be especially keen on being able to keep control of their data. This is a good sign that things are going in the right direction. I’ll keep you posted, for sure.
Read/Write Web and TechCruch have good coverage of this.
Update: LinkedIn, Flickr, SixApart and Twitter have now joined Dataportability.org. This is, of course, great news. But the real question is: will this actually result in data portability?
In my work with NOSI (the Nonprofit Open Source Initiative,) I’ve become really interested in how FOSS is used in nonprofit organizations. I think this is data we need to know, so that we can understand better what gaps are preset, and what we can do to fill those gaps.
This is the first of an annual survey, and we’ll be releasing a report next month with the results of the survey.
It will take about 5-10 minutes to fill out. Please take it no matter what the level of use of open source software is in your organization – data on as wide a range of organizations will be helpful to us.
Please encourage your colleagues and clients to take this survey as well.
Take the survey
This is an amazing example of the kinds of flexibility that is difficult or impossible to get with proprietary software. Miro, the free and open source media player, has released a Firefox plugin, which automatically inserts their affiliate code when you buy something from Amazon. It’s really simple to use, and one doesn’t have to have links on your website, etc.
This seems like something many nonprofits might want to try out.
Hat tip to Jon Stahl for the heads up.
I am in the process of writing a survey for NOSI, which you will hear all about next week. I had originally done the survey in Surveymonkey, which is a slick on-line survey tool. But, a very nice soul at MayFirst/people-link, where we house the NOSI site, set up Limesurvey for us, so we’re using that.
Limesurvey is actually quite powerful. Like many free and open source software tools, it leans toward the powerful, flexible side, rather than the slick, easy to use side. So it has its challenges. The admin interface is nice looking, and fairly intuitive. The surveys could stand some graphic design help, but you can design templates for it.
It’s a LAMP stack application. Worth a look if your organization does surveys.
Some interesting things are happening in Web2.0 land. There has been quite the dustup, started by Facebook kicking Richard Scoble off, because he’d violated the Facebook terms of service. As a result, Scoble joined the group dataportability.org, which I’ve been monitoring for a few months now. Why did Scoble get booted (he has since been reinstated)? Because of a script that scraped names and email addresses from Facebook, called Plaxo Pulse.
I think people are finally realizing that the current state of affairs – where we can pump data into Facebook and other social networks, but not get data out of them, is untenable. There’s a poll on mashable.com, where the sentiment is most certainly heavily in favor of Facebook opening up the social graph.
So after my brief lapse, I’m going back to my promise: no more social networks until the data flows both ways, and I can take my social graph with me.
Before the holidays, I promised that I’d do 100 posts this year on free and open source tools. So, I’m starting with Mozilla Thunderbird. I use it every day, nay, almost every waking minute, since email is such a critical beast.
Generally, Thunderbird falls into the category of free and open source software that “just works.” It’s easy to set up accounts, move mail around, and do sophisticated filtering of mail, and such. And, because it’s in the Mozilla family, it has a plug in architecture which can add some really neat features. I’m using one that allows me to see a calendar (I use it to view my google calendar) – it’s a good quick way within Thunderbird to see if I’m free on a certain day.
Thunderbird is cross platform, too, so if you’re like me, and hope between platforms, Thunderbird is there with you. And its secure, makes doing GPG signatures and encryption easy (although I haven’t gotten around to doing them, though. Shame on me.)
Thunderbird is in the process of being spun out of the Mozilla Foundation into it’s own organization, dubbed “MailCo.” I don’t know if that name will stick. But I think that Thunderbird has suffered from the Mozilla Foundation’s focus on Firefox, and some good solid focus on it as a product is welcome news to me, as a daily user.