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
Not so long ago, nonprofit organizations had software tools, that dealt with specific parts of their organizational process. They had fundraising tools, client management tools, volunteer management tools, HR tools, accounting tools, etc. And the data in these varied tools were siloed – there was no way for one tool to talk to another without:
- painstaking manual entry
- painstaking export/import processes
- tools written by the same vendor designed to talk to each other (which meant that they were generally exceedingly expensive)
Although many nonprofit organizations still find themselves in this situation, there are increasing numbers of tools available to help them out of it. And as more and more organizational processes become web-based (whether “in the cloud” or self-hosted), and as more and more nonprofit-focused software includes open APIs (with some unfortunate exceptions,) nonprofit data is looking less and less siloed, and more and more like an ecosystem – many different software parts talking to others.
NTEN is trying to get a bit of a handle on this with the Data Ecosystem Survey.
I’m very much looking forward to the result – looking to see where this new set of tools that can talk freely to each other is working … and where it isn’t – where there is still work to be done. Please take time to fill it out!
Tagged as:
CRM,
Data,
nptech,
nten,
openapi
This week was a bad week for online blogging services. First the blogging service JournalSpace, with hundreds of users, just, well, died, because they didn’t have a proper backup. Today, the hacking of the blogging service SoapBlox, which was used by many progressive political bloggers, such as Pam’s House Blend, became known, and it is currently unclear how many sites have survived, and what will happen to them.
These are two fairly small, fairly low-profile services (although SoapBlox is considered an extremely important part of the progressive blogosphere.) They hosted a small percentage of the blogs out there (in comparison to, say, TypePad or Blogger.) However, this is, of course, devastating to those who had their blogs there.
Lessons to learn:
- Always have your own backup of your data/content
- Remember when setting up a website or blog that if you use a service, the data is not in your hands, but in someone elses
- Always have a disaster recovery plan
Tagged as:
blogging,
Data,
services