From the monthly archives:

December 2008

Top 10 blog posts of 2008

December 26, 2008

Here’s the top 10 list for 2008:

1) Remember when 1 MB was alot? I wrote this post back in 2005, and it is the most popular in 2008! It’s actually because someone included it in a Wikipedia Article (no, it wasn’t me.)

2) Carnival of Nonprofit Consultants on July 27th. Don’t know why this rose to the top, but the carnivals are fun to do.

3) No More Custom CMS. Where I rail against web shops that continue to suggest that people use their CMS, when it’s just not possible for one shop to replicate the robustness, features, security and upgradeability of the Open Source CMS offerings.

4) Blackbaud Buys Kintera. The proprietary consolidation of the CRM/Donation management system space continues apace.

5) The Search for Good Web Conferencing. An exploration of options with my own particular requirements in mind.

6) Google Analytics vs. Sitemeter. Wow, this post is from 2006.

7) Getting Naked: Being Human and Transparent. This blog entry from 2007 is about being open about one’s mistakes. I think it’s the word “naked” that does it. It has one of the highest bounce rates of any post on this blog.

8) What is Cloud Computing? I define it, and explore it a bit.

9) Linux Desktops? One of my frank and painful posts on the topic.

10) Cake vs. Symfony Where I explore these two PHP frameworks.

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My Top 16 tools of 2008

December 26, 2008

These span the range from tools I use every day or every week, to tools use more occasionally, but depend on. They also span the range of proprietary, SaaS, and Open Source. They are on this list because I think they are great, because they have undergone a lot of change or development this year, or because they are game-changing.

Open Source Tools

1. WordPress. I use WP pretty much everyday, between my own blogs, and helping clients maintain theirs. WP as a blogging tool rocks my world, and although I certainly could move blogging to Drupal, since I seem to be becoming somewhat of a Drupalista, it’s just not worth it. WP is clean and easy, and virtually hassle-free. There are lots of really great themes out there, and there just isn’t a reason I can find not to use it.

2. Drupal.  I’m somewhat of a latecomer to Drupal. Having been bogged down with my own open source CMS tool before 2005, then having taken a break from development, I missed out on the prime years of Drupal’s development. But now, here I am, and I’m impressed. It has become arguably the most popular open source CMS, and is a very able platform for creating all sorts of great web applications.

3. Xen. I use this everyday, although I don’t really interact with it much. I am administering and/or responsible for a couple of Virtual Private Servers that use it. Virtualization has really come into it’s own this year, and will continue to be a force to reckon with. I’m betting that in 2009, many folks will move from shared hosting to VPS servers. There are a lot of good reasons to consider this.

4. Songbird. Songbird is a brillant idea: build a music player using the Mozilla framework. Songbird was a buggy mess just a year ago, but with the recent release of 1.0, it’s absolutely an application to get to know.

5. CiviCRM. Oh what a difference a year or so makes. CiviCRM continues to mature, and is providing an interesting and important new model for nonprofit software development. It is becoming more popular, and is also highly recommended by those who use it. I’ve been getting to know it this year, and begun implementing it. I like it more and more.

6. Freemind. This is an awesome cross-platform mind mapping tool. I use it to create sitemaps, mostly, but it’s also great for brainstorming.

7. Elgg. Elgg is the open source social network management system. Install it on your own server, control your own data. Don’t use Ning, use Elgg. It finally looks like a project which will allow me to explore the strength of that platform is coming around the bend. Stay tuned.

8. MAMP. Wanna set up a easy development environment on your Macintosh without struggling with Fink or MacPorts? Use MAMP. Easy, fast, robust, and powerful.

Being a pragmatist, I do use proprietary tools, both the Software-as-a-Service, or basic desktop tool types. I use these tools because I haven’t found open source alternatives for these functions that work as well, or are as user friendly.

SaaS Tools

9. last.fm. I love last.fm. I love discovering new music, seeing what people I know are listening to, and learning more about what I listen to over time.

10. Twitter. This was the year for twitter. This was the year that nonprofits discovered twitter, and the year I integrated twitter into my workflow.

11. Evernote. I haven’t yet become an Evernote devotee, but I might. It’s an online note-saving service, with desktop and iPhone clients. It’s great to be able to take notes on my iPhone on the fly, and know they are saved, and will show up on my desktop when I want them. And it’s great to have my notes wherever I go, without bothering to sync my phone.

12. Intervals. Having tried a variety of project management and time tracking tools over the years, from the open source tools like ProjectPier (used to be ActiveCollab) and GnoTime (abysmal), as well as SaaS tools like BaseCamp, I have finally come across what is, for me, the perfect mix of project management, time tracking, and invoicing. It’s not cheap, but it works well, and saves me so much time invoicing, that it pays for itself several times over every month.

Proprietary Tools

13. Adobe Air, and applications. Adobe Air is an impressive framework for rich internet applications. I use TweetDeck, Twhirl, and the Analytics reporting suite among others.

14. Balsamiq. This Adobe Air application deserves its own entry. (I’ve been meaning to blog about it for a while.) It’s a really great tool for creating very rapid mockups of sites that you are working on. It actually is good enough as a wireframe tool.

15. Coda. Panic software makes really good stuff. Coda is a great editor for developers. I like it better than Textmate, which I know is another popular editor for developers.

16. VMWare Fusion. Even being the semi-religious Mac and Linux desktop user that I am, every once in a while I am forced to use Windows. This makes it tolerable. There’s a nice full-screen view, if I want to really feel the pain. There is also a mode called “unity” which allows you to run a Windows application in a regular Mac window. It’s kinda cool.

So what tools did you come to depend on in 2008?

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Can open source software save organizations money?

December 19, 2008

Next year, given what is likely to be a grim funding year, nonprofit organizations are going to be hunting for ways to save money on technology. There are, of course, arguments that IT budgets should be, at least, level funded during slim times, but the reality is that organizations are going to reduce budgets across the board. One question that will inevitably be asked: can free and open source software save organizations money?

The answer, of course, is a solid maybe, but also a resounding yes. Confusing, huh? Open source software is both free as in “beer” as well as free as in “kittens.” There are no license fees, but it takes care and feeding.

The most important part of the equation is what you are implementing, and whether or not you need to factor in migration costs. Nonprofit organizations that did migrations to open source software from proprietary packages with large license fees during relatively fat economic times are reaping the benefits of that change now, and are in good shape to weather the storm. Organizations that haven’t been able to do that migration might find those costs to be prohibitive at this time – which is unfortunate.

But if you have a migration planned anyway, now is absolutely the time to look at open source software. At this point in the maturity of most open source packages that nonprofits would want to use, the implementation cost is very much in line with the implementation costs of proprietary software. So that means that you are saving money – no cost to acquire, and no long term license or maintenance fees.

All of the above adds up to that solid maybe – implementing open source software in your organization might save you money depending on what you are implementing, and what the costs are for migration. Where does the resounding yes come from?

This, if any, is the time for organizations to reject the standard “every organization for themselves” mentality of software acquisition and development. Find a solid open source package (like CiviCRM, for instance,) and help fund extensions to that software with other organizations that help make it what you need. Find 5 organizations that do similar work, and collaborate to build an open source application that can work for your part of the sector. Release it so a community can develop around it, make sure to make it modular so that it can be easily extended. Make it full of APIs so you can hook other software to it. Build it with open standards so the data is readable in perpetuity. Doing this will mean you will get far more application for the money you spend. Of course, it all takes effort and work. But it’s worth it – and the entire community benefits by an enriched software ecosystem.

It also ends up not just being about saving money. It also ends up being about building community – and community will be an incredibly important asset in the coming years. There is an appropriate popular culture reference: “live together, die alone.”

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The Power of Open

December 15, 2008

Songbird screen

Songbird screen

I’ve known about Songbird for a long time. It’s a cross-platform music player based upon the Mozilla framework. I thought it was a brilliant idea years ago, but it was a buggy mess the last time I tried it (about a year ago.)

However, Songbird has emerged, like many open source projects do, as a mature, stable, and, in Songbird’s case, a truly awesome application, because of the incredible extensibility of the Mozilla framework (and the talent of the Songbird developer community.)

I’ve only been running Songbird for about 20 minutes, and already it’s linked with my last.fm account, is showing me a picture search based on the artist I’m playing, as well as showing me a list of all of the concerts happening in the Bay Area by artists in my library. I can read reviews, browse videos, and read the lyrics of the song playing. It’s happily notifying Growl when new songs play.

This qualifies as a killer app, and it will give iTunes a run for it’s money. I don’t really have a good reason to use iTunes anymore.

Between open standards that allow songbird to grab data from all sorts of places, as well as the open architecture of Mozilla, allowing hundreds or thousands of people to write their own cool plug ins that we all benefit from, this really does show the power of open.

Next question: can we get the nonprofit version of the killer open source and open platform app?

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Digging deeper into the portable social graph

December 7, 2008

Facebook Connect was announced a few days ago, and, of course, it’s the talk of the Web 2.0 world. Beth Kanter, as always, has a nice overview of what it is, and what it might mean. Google Friend Connect has been around for a few months, but they just opened it up to everyone last week.

What do these two toolsets mean? Are they truly open, and based on open standards?

Just a quick definition: the “social graph” is, basically, your data about who you are, and who is connected to you – who your friends are. A portable social graph would be one that you can take with you, wherever you are – so the friends that are connected with you on one network are also connected with you on another. It’s the holy grail of social network connectivity – you are connected to who you are connected to, no matter what site you are on.

Google Friend Connect is a toolset based on three standards, two of which are open, one of which could probably be considered an open standard, but it originated with Google: OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial. Any social network that can use these three standards can be drawn into the open social network web using Google Friend Connect. Any user on any of the social networks that use these standards can connect with their friends on others that use these standards.

Facebook connect, on the other hand is a proprietary process that competes with OpenID, and is only a two way communication between other sites and Facebook – it’s not at all open. And, if you are not on Facebook, that other sites use Facebook Connect won’t matter to you. (For instance, it won’t help connect LinkedIn with MySpace.)

Facebook Connect is not the portable social graph we’ve all been hoping for – Google Friend Connect is a bit closer to it. Both Google and Facebook are interested in being the repository for your credential and social graph data. However, the fact that Google uses the open standard OpenID means that you can actually control where that data lives – and that is not the case for Facebook.

What is most annoying to me is that Facebook Connect is proprietary, and it competes with an open standard, OpenID. They could have just as easily implemented the open standards – but they chose to go in a different direction. For most of the social networks except for Facebook, the walls of the gardens are coming tumbling down. But Facebook is basically just enlarging their walled garden.

What does this mean for most nonprofit organizations: not a whole lot. This is going to take a long time to shake out, and only the most Web2.0 savvy nonprofits are going to be doing technology projects that will involve implementing either of these new toolsets.

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We want video!

December 5, 2008

YouTube is everywhere – you see videos as a common part of websites, and almost everyone has an internet connection with high enough bandwidth to play video. This means that a lot of nonprofits are interested in having video on their sites.

So what does it take, and what considerations should you think about as you embark on adding video to your site?

First, it is almost always a mistake to upload a video to your website without thinking about the ramifications, both in terms of bandwidth, as well as performance. If you have a standard hosting account, or even a VPS (Virtual Private Server) do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make sure you won’t end up with sticker shock at the end of the month.

Video is very bandwidth intensive. It is not at all difficult to overshoot your bandwidth limitations on your hosting account with one short video on your home page. A client of mine put a short video on their home page after election day, and we had to take it down a week later, or else they would have started to have to pay for extra bandwidth. Take your average traffic for the page you’ll add the video on, and multiply by the size of the video. For instance, if you have a 3MB video, and you get 1,000 visits per day on that page, that’s potentially using 3,000 MB (3 GB) of bandwidth (of course, most people won’t play through the entire video, etc. but that’s the place to start.) And 3 GB of bandwidth for a month will exceed the bandwidth limits of many virtual hosting plans. In terms of performance, lots of people streaming a video from your website can bring a webserver to its knees. If that video is more popular than you expected, you may end up paying for it, both literally and figuratively.

What about putting it somewhere else? YouTube is the easy answer. Google pays the hosting costs, you get easily embeddable video that can be viral, and you can drive traffic from YouTube to your site. But what if it’s not a public video (perhaps you want to provide video for your members only, for instance) or you want to stream live, or use a different format than flash? There are a number of services you can pay for. StreamGuys and Limelight Networks are two examples of companies that can provide that sort of service for you.

Putting video on your website takes both strategic thinking (why are we doing this? What are the goals?) as well as tactical, technical thinking (what’s the best way to get this video to the eyeballs that we want to see it?)

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How’s that donor database of yours?

December 2, 2008

In general, although I am sometimes asked, I tend to avoid assisting clients with choosing a donor database package. Mostly because, although I actually know the field pretty well, it’s at the 10,000 foot level, rather than the 50 ft level that clients really need. And I know there are plenty of folks out there who know the field really well at 50 ft, and can step in with the best advice.

As a 10,000 footer, NTEN’s new Donor Management System Survey is of keen interest. There is, of necessity, a lot of overlap betwen CRM systems and Donor Management Systems. Many of the CRMs also show up here, although there are quite a number of packages that did not show up in the earlier survey.

In some ways, it is astonishing how many different donor management packages there are. In most ways, however, this is far from a surprise – donor management is a primary way that money gets funneled into nonprofits, and, unsurprisingly, organizations often spend significant dollars on their donor management packages.

By far the most popular DMS of the ones surveyed was … you guessed … Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge. 18% of users surveyed use that one, which also accounted for 35.5% of use in very large organizations. Others I think about: CiviCRM had 4.8%, Organizer’s Database at 3%,  Salesforce was at 2.6%, Democracy in Action at 0.6% and MPower at 0.4%. I  also have to wonder (shudder) how many home grown Access and Filemaker databases fall into the “Other” category of the survey, almost 20% of the total.

So how did people like these? They ranked the percentage of folks who would recommend a package. In a three way tie for first included two proprietary packages I’d never heard of: NEON CRM and Donor Pro. In that trio was Organizer’s Database, the desktop open source DMS. 4th (since there was a 3 way tie) was CiviCRM. Included in the bottom four are 3 properties of Blackbaud: Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry, and Kintera Sphere which was in dead last place. (iMIS rounded out the bottom four.) Salesforce was somewhere in the middle (ranked 9th).

What’s interesting is that they did a size of org and recommendation analysis – to break down recommendations by size of organization. Raiser’s Edge, for instance, did much better among large and very large organizations, and very poorly in small orgs (which probably shouldn’t be using it anyway.) The reverse was true of Salesforce. (The numbers aren’t always quite large enough for these to be solid, but it’s a great indication of what’s going on.)

What can we say about the open source packages? There are only three in this race: CiviCRM (web) Organizer’s Database (desktop) and MPower Open (client/server). CiviCRM and ODB were at the top of the pack in terms of popularity, reccomendations and grading, and MPower had very few respondents who used it, and it wasn’t included in the ones that were ranked. But its safe to say that these are good contenders, and did well.

Last but not least, the grading. Who’s going to get into med school? DonorPro and NEON CRM are at the top of the class, and will, I’m sure, get into Harvard Med. Donor Perfect, CiviCRM and Antharia’s On Deposit have solid A’s, and will for sure get in. There is a large group of packages, like Salesforce, ODB, Giftworks, that will probably make it, but they might have to settle for second tier schools. Raiser’s Edge, eTapestry and iMIS are going to have to get themselves into a special tutoring program, if they have a hope of making it. And Kintera Sphere, I think, is going to open a car repair shop.

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