I’ve been involved in this Telesummit now since the beginning. It’s really fun, and important.
Come join hundreds of women on September 15th at the Women Who Tech Telesummit from 11AM to 6PM Eastern Time. (It’s virtual – all you need is access to a phone line and the web so you can participate from anywhere in the world).
Women Who Tech’s thought provoking virtual panels offer the latest resources and tools for launching a successful startup, tools and apps to build your online community, Social Media ROI, and more.
Among the sessions:
- Launching Your Own Startup
- Creating a Culture of Collaboration and Innovation
- Female Ferocity
- ROI of Social Networking
- Speak Up: Pitching and Public Speaking Mojo
- Building the Ultimate User Experience
- Women and Open Source and Identity
Panelists include a “who’s who” of women on the forefront of social change and technological progress, among them: Elisa Camahort Page, Co-Founder of BlogHer,
Rashmi Sinha, Co-Founder of SlideShare, Beth Kanter, Blogger and CEO of Zoetica, Cheryl Contee of Fission Strategy, Shireen Mitchell of Digital Sistas, Genevieve Bell of Intel, Deanna Zandt, technologist and author, Liza Sabater of Culture Kitchen, Tara Hunt, Author, Lynne Johnson of the Advertising Research Foundation, and Heather Harde, CEO of TechCrunch.
Most days, data is pretty straightforward to us here at
OpenIssue headquarters. Names, addresses, email addresses, the pesky notes field (today’s bane of our existence.) But sometimes, data is political. Or, I guess more accurately, data models.
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.)
Tagged as:
Data
I’ve been working with nonprofit organizations on technology issues (strategy, implementation) for about 15 years now. I remember the heady days, when most nonprofits didn’t even have networks, and some of them still didn’t have internet access. In those days, most nonprofit techies were progressive, and we were sure that what we were doing was going to change the world for the better.
Now, 15 years later, I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world. You’re still more likely to find a progressive nonprofit techie than a conservative one, but there are plenty of conservative ones now. Conservative causes of all sorts have discovered the power of the kinds of technologies I’ve been helping nonprofits with, and are au courant. Plenty of conservative organizations use Drupal, Salesforce, online fundraising, Facebook and Twitter – using those technologies to push for ends that I am far from interested in seeing come to reality. You can bet that the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections will not be a repeat of the 2008 election with such a massive differential in use of technology and social networks.
I remember also, from those heady days, the idea that we could help nonprofits be more effective by encouraging them to be more proactive around replacing their hardware. Come to find out not so much later, that the massive production (and disposal) of computer hardware fuels deadly conflicts, and causes serious environmental damage.
And then there is the fundamental – what is all this technology really for, anyway? I was reminded of this when listening to Marketplace on radio a while ago. It’s worth remembering that one of the two motive forces around all of this technology change is that business (and nonprofits, too) can squeeze more work out of fewer people. That would be fine if we had a great safety net where people who were unemployed could be supported, and perhaps get free education so they could create art, music, or new and interesting things, but that’s not how the system works, is it? The second motive force is simply to empty your wallet so you can get shiny.
I still think I’m doing good. I still think that working with nonprofits to help them grapple with communications and data is good work, helps people, and is right livelihood. But I’m pretty sure I’m not changing the world by doing it.
I’m reminded, of course, by the famous Audre Lorde quote: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
There may be other ways I’m helping to change the world, though, but you’ll have to read my other blog for that.
Tagged as:
nptech,
web2.0
Countless nonprofits flocked to Ning to create social networks. Since I’m not a social media guru, I’ve generally kept my opinions about this to myself. But now that Ning isn’t free anymore, I’m going to carp some.
I think over the course of lo this last few years, I have blogged or tweeted about this very phenomenon what feels like countless times. Nonprofits find services for free. They start depending on them. The free services disappear, for business reasons. The nonprofit community gets up in arms. Lather, rinse, repeat.
There is nothing wrong with software or services that don’t cost anything. Nothing at all. But if you are going to bet the farm, make sure you know what the risks are. Using free services is fine, but know why they are free. Are they free because the company behind them is an ad revenue machine and uber profitable (Google)? Is it free because it’s open source (Drupal, Elgg, Word Press)? Is it free because it is a profitable company that has a clear and well defined donation program (Salesforce.com)? Or is it free because it is a start up in search for a business model (Ning)?
There is an effort afloat (and a petition) to get Ning to make nonprofit and educational accounts free. I’m not holding my breath. They eliminated 40% of their staff. They are feeling pinched, and need to stop their burn rate. I don’t know how charitable this will make them feel. And even if they do, there is no guarantee that Ning will even survive.
Anyway, if you’re looking for a great social network management system that won’t get pulled out from under you, try Elgg. It’s open source, and out of the box, it does just about everything Ning does, without the need for the deep setup required to set up Drupal like Ning. It has an active developer community, and is growing.
Or, if you look for another free service, make sure you understand the risks, and be prepared for possible disaster if it’s a startup in search of a business model.
Tagged as:
nptech,
opensource,
socialmedia
As most of you know, I’m a very long time veteran of web application building. I’ve been involved in web application development basically since they started – when a cgi-bin folder with some perl scripts to process simple forms was the norm. Until just a few years ago, there was very little sophistication about the user experience in web applications – what mattered most was functionality. and to make sure there weren’t too many errors when users did unexpected things.
I’ve considered myself pretty successful at both helping clients navigate the tough waters of web development projects, as well as accomplishing web projects for them. Recently, though, I had two projects that ended up, for wont of a better term, clusterfracks. And I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to figure out what lessons I need to learn from those projects – what can I take away from them so I don’t make the same mistakes again. They were both custom web applications, both projects that I was a strategic, rather than engineering, partner on. Both projects were attempting to accomplish pretty sophisticated database functionality (such as case management). Functionality I knew how to get done, because I’d accomplished it before – so I had a very good feeling for what kind of code it would take to accomplish the task (and, ergo cost and time.) But what I hadn’t taken into consideration is how slick, AJAXy, easy to navigate, and easy to understand user interfaces people have gotten used to in the last few years. And, frankly, have come to expect. And how unwilling people are to sacrifice that for raw functionality.
I did a lot of self-examination: where did I go wrong? What could I have done differently? Was it the client? The developers? Me? I realized a fairly simple truth. It was all three. In reality, I should have looked at the budgets of those projects, and looked at the clients straight in the eye and said, “double, or triple the budget at least, or don’t do the project.” And walked away if they insisted. The vendors should have bid triple what they did, and had more user interface expertise on board. The clients should not have expected to get slick 2009 functionality for a mid 5-figure budget.
The easier a user interface is to use, the more money and time it took to create. It’s that simple. What most nonprofit decision makers don’t completely realize is that the interfaces they work in every day when they shop, or tweet and facebook, or use other online tools, are the product of millions and millions of dollars of venture capital, or, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of person hours of work in open source projects (or some combination of both.) Ground-up custom applications, even when written in great frameworks like Ruby on Rails or CakePHP, which save all sorts of development time, just are not going to have the user experience people are getting more and more used to without very serious investment of time and expertise. In addition, most small development shops don’t have the user interface expertise on hand to accomplish that task, even with a hefty budget.
So the lessons:
1) If you are embarking on a custom development project (such as a case management, for example) exhaust every possible option of using and customizing/modifying existing tools (Salesforce, CiviCRM, SugarCRM, other open source tools) before you begin to consider custom development from scratch.
2) If you have a budget of less than $100,000, go back, and stay, at step 1. I know this is high, but I’m serious. Obviously, simpler projects won’t need a budget of this sort. But simpler projects generally don’t need custom databases.
3) If you’ve got the cash to spend, and have exhausted all other options, when choosing a vendor, make sure the vendor you choose has UE expertise on hand. Look at other custom database work they’ve done. Dig in. Make sure it has the ease of user experience that you are expecting.
4) Remember the mantra: the easier it is to use, the more expensive it is to build.
Tagged as:
Consulting,
Development,
opensource,
user experience
The reason I post these is because 1) I think they might be helpful resources, and 2) you can get a feeling for what I’m working on, or thinking about (or wishing for.) For instance, the reason there are so many links about Amazon is that we are now beginning a project that uses amazon in earnest, with some others possibly on the way.