Of course, they suck for completely different reasons, which is part of the frustration. And each have places where they shine. Why can’t there be a nice combination of all three? That would be perfect.

Why Mac OS X sucks:

• Apple is becoming a controlling, closed system, and with the advent of the Apple App store, developers have to go through an approval process to get their apps on the store, there are specific things you can’t include in an app in the store, and there will come a time when most people get their software through the store, so there will be less and less incentive to maintain non-app store versions of software apps
• These days, you can find most kinds of software for the Mac, but there still is a relative paucity of apps in comparison to Windows.

Why Windows sucks:

• Viruses, Trojans and Worms, Oh My!
• Although I have only seen the Blue Screen of Death once in my year of Windows 7 use, there are still inexplicable slow-downs, crashes, and weird problems. And it takes FOREVER to boot, even with Soluto.
• Internet Explorer

Why Linux (in my case Ubuntu) sucks:

• I have to go through arcane (and luckily for me, fairly painless) procedures to get simple things to work (like plugging a headset with a mic into my jack!)
• Hardware manufacturers ignore Linux for the most part
• Most software developers don’t make Linux versions

The only good news I can see is that the operating system is getting less and less relevant. And, on balance, for me, Linux is winning. Now that dropbox and scrivener work on Linux, and I’m moving from Quicken to some online cloudish thing (suggestions?), I can pretty much leave Windows behind. (Oh, there is still Netflix. Sigh.)

This example uses an app from the Salesforce AppExchange, called “Salesforce for Facebook and Twitter.” To make things just a tad confusing, this is also called “Salesforce for Social Media” and “Salesforce for Twitter.”

There are likely many more options, but this is one I’ve seen that is pretty cool, although it has its weak spots. It definitely is geared more toward the “Service Cloud” than the “Sales Cloud.”

You can set up multiple twitter and facebook accounts, and each facebook account can have access to multiple pages. It’s all done via OAuth, which is cool. Once you set up the accounts, you can then grab conversations:

You can filter and sort, just like records in any other SF object. You can choose whether or not to send Twitter or Facebook identities to Leads, Contacts, or Person Accounts. You can choose to create cases from tweets or FB posts as well.

You can tweet or post to facebook directly from Salesforce:

And it works:

You can schedule tweets and facebook posts as well.

There is a lot more you can do – it’s a pretty cool tool. The one thing I can’t seem to find – and I don’t know whether this is in development, or they won’t ever do it – is import your social graph into salesforce – your facebook fans or your twitter followers. I’m not sure why this is, exactly. It seems a big gap to me. But then, it is the folks who engage with you who you definitely want to make sure to keep track of.

Anyway, if you are a user of either Salesforce, the Nonprofit Starter Pack, or Convio Common Ground, this is definitely a tool to know about.

As you know, I’m a bit of a technology curmudgeon, but I’m far from a luddite – I’m an early adopter, for the most part. I’m a fairly active user of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and some other social networking sites, and have been for years now. I certainly have followed and friended lots of organizations on these networks (particularly on Twitter, but also some more personally relevant to me on Facebook.) The apps I use most on my phone include the Facebook app for Android and Tweetdeck.

I spend some amount of my Drupal and WordPress development time, both for my clients and for myself, in setting up one or two-way integrations between websites and social media sites. I understand how the varied APIs work, and have to keep on top of whether I should be using a “like” or a “share” button for Facebook. I’ve been using social media to actively promote my new science fiction books.

In other words, I don’t avoid social media, I use it a lot, and I actively facilitate my clients use of social media integration with their web presence. (And I use hashtags in blog entries!)

But I’m still bored silly. Case in point: A new report out from IBM on Social CRM. It’s geared toward a for-profit audience, but it certainly has some reasonably useful lessons for nonprofits, and it has been a topic of conversation in the #nptech world today. But there isn’t anything in this report I haven’t read a dozen times already. It doesn’t help organizations bridge the huge data and workflow gap present between their traditional CRM/Donation management systems and their social media interactions. And if I hear the buzz phrase “game changer” one more time, I’m going to puke. It’s hype designed to sell things. And hype designed to sell things isn’t necessarily going to help make the world a better place.

No one should take this post personally. I’m very glad that most of my #socialmedia #nptech colleagues talk a lot about ROI of social media, and really try and figure out what works, and what doesn’t. But we’ve had, what 3 or 4 years solid of nonprofits using this stuff. Can it be demoted now?

So what do I want us to talk more about? How about lowering the costs of software by using open source and collaboratively developing software? How about data standards to help us share information more easily? How about finishing the work we did on getting the expensive CRM vendors to really open up their APIs so that organizations can better integrate their systems? Maybe talking how to deal with neglected nonprofit verticals like client management? Helping accidental techies get the training they need so that they can do more work in-house? Nonprofits who need tech help partnering with local organizations who provide training to the unemployed and ex-offender? The list goes on and on.

I know a lot of pretty serious geeks read this blog, but I also know some folks who aren’t do too, and I figured it was time to do a quick outline of web application frameworks, and how they differ from things like a CMS.

A web server, in the physical sense of the phrase, is a box sitting in a data center (or under someone’s desk) with a unique IP address, that answers queries from the internet and serves up data, depending on the request. In the software sense of the phrase, it is the actual piece of software (most often Apache, but sometimes something different.) That software runs in the background, and and listens to requests, then serves up the data.  That data is in some form of HTML, CSS and Javascript, because that is what browsers understand. However, how that HTML, CSS and JS is generated varies depending on the system underneath.

In the old days (when I was starting with web programming, back in the early-mid-90s) it was all HTML flat files (and not even much in the way of CSS or JS at the time.) And dynamic elements were less common (you remember those days.) Now, a minority of web servers actually serve HTML files – they serve HTML, CSS and Javascript dynamically generated by software, like, in the case of this page you are reading now, WordPress.

WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla are CMS systems that are written in PHP. PHP is one of many programming languages. Plone, for instance is written in Python. This isn’t really the place to describe what programming languages are, or how they work, but Wikipedia (as always) as a nice entry, worth a read. CMS systems are full-featured – they require no programming to install or configure or get going, or to create a usable interface. They may require some to customize in particular kinds of ways, but I’d say most nonprofit websites don’t need to do that. Most Drupal developers, for instance, don’t spend a whole lot of their time in code unless they work on contributed modules (or contribute patches and such to core.)

A web application framework is one that does require programming to provide the basics of a user interface. The cool thing about frameworks for developers is that it provides a great leg up, and a way to use the model-view-controller design pattern really easily – it’s a powerful way to do development. The advantage of a framework is that it allows you to do great custom apps a lot easier and quicker than before (many web 2.0 apps are written using these frameworks). The disadvantage to a framework is that it does take significant programming to get user interfaces (especially on the admin side) working well. So to use them to build a CMS (or a CRM, for that matter) is probably not a great idea, given the plethora of already-cooked options in the world. People who are working with frameworks are spending much of their time dealing with code.

Popular web application frameworks include Ruby on Rails (using the Ruby programming language,) CakePHP (using PHP), and django (using Python.) Ruby on Rails is arguably the most popular MVC web framework at the moment, but there are a lot of folks using the others. The PHP frameworks (which include Cake, as well as Symfony and Zend) are pretty popular because of the plethora of PHP programmers out there. All of these frameworks get more sophisticated every year, and they are interesting to watch.

And, in my experience over the past 15 years, it’s where organizations are willing to spend the most money on technology – often more than on their website or other technology tools – for good reason. Because of this, the deck has always been stacked against open source tools in this arena. The sheer number of vendors providing this toolset for nonprofits is huge (although rapidly shrinking.) Two of them (Convio and Blackbaud) are even publicly traded companies, which says a lot about the profit potential of this vertical.

On the proprietary side, there is a wide range of available tools, from the relatively inexpensive, like Salesforce (web-based, including Convio Common Ground and the Nonprofit Starter Pack,) eTapestry (web-based, now owned by Blackbaud), Democracy in Action, and GiftWorks (desktop) to the egregiously expensive (you know which ones I mean.) Both NTEN and Idealware are the best sources for information about the range of options for this toolset – that’s out of scope for this post.

As you can tell, I’ve lumped SaaS tools like Salesforce, DIA and eTapestry in with proprietary in this post – that’s because that’s what they are – proprietary. However, Salesforce in particular has a leg up that most other proprietary tools don’t have, because of their open APIs and their incredibly robust development platform. That combination is impossible to beat if you need integration, ease of data movement, and a lot of customization. From my perspective, open data (via open APIs) can sometimes be more important to consider than whether or not a tool is open source – since integration with other tools, as well as using external tools of various sorts is critical. Closed data systems, difficult to integrate systems, or systems that require payment to get access to your data should be avoided at all cost.

On the open source side, there are a number options: you can choose an open source CRM package (designed for business), like SugarCRM, and use it or customize it for use in a nonprofit, use CiviCRM, or choose the desktop-based nonprofit CRM called MPX (built by a company called Orange Leap.) I’m excited about a new Drupal project called “Red Hen CRM” but it’s very fledgeling.

CiviCRM is a web-based open source nonprofit-focused CRM/Donation management tool. It’s been around for a while now, and is used by many organizations, some quite large (like the Wikimedia Foundation.) It is quite broad in its feature set – it has donation pages, event management, e-newsletter functionality, even a case-management system. I’ve installed, configured and administered CiviCRM many times, still work with it, and I have, like most developers, a love/hate relationship with it:

• I love that it’s open source/free software
• It’s got a great community of developers and users
• I love that it’s feature rich – you cannot find the whole set of things it does in any proprietary tool that I’ve seen.
• It is a tool that has unmatched cost-effectiveness for small organizations
• It’s great that it integrates with both Drupal and Joomla (although the Drupal integration is by far the most solid – and it is a very nice integration – hard to get with proprietary tools.)
• It is relatively easy to set up for most functionality

But …

• Data migration into CiviCRM is often nightmarish (this is really where the hate lies)
• Reporting tools are improving, but don’t match the proprietary versions
• It can sometimes be pretty tough to handle complex issues
• It can be tough to troubleshoot issues

MPX is a desktop tool, and although it is open source (GPLv3,) unlike CiviCRM, or SugarCRM, it is built on top of a proprietary stack (.Net/MS SQL Server.) It has primarily been used in faith-based organizations (that is Orange Leap’s primary client base.) But it’s a very full featured product, and quite mature.

So if you are a small organization that perhaps is still working with spreadsheets, CiviCRM is a great idea to check out. But in general, there are a lot choices and, sadly, few of them are open source.

I’ve been using this tool since it actually was StarOffice, more than 10 years ago, when it was first open sourced by Sun in 2000. For most of that time, except when I was doing heavy collaborative editing with colleagues who are using MS Office, it is my Office Suite of choice. There have been many times, over the course of the years, where there are things I’ve thrown at OpenOffice.org that it couln’t handle, but those things have diminished year by year, and over the past couple of years, I’ve had absolutely nothing to complain about (nor have I submitted any bugs, which I did a fair bit of in the early 2000′s.)

I would take a bet that 90% of people who use MS Office don’t need to pay for it, but can do fine with OOo/LO. 70% of people could pick up OOo/LO and use it with no training or help, even if they are used to MS Office. It is the only fully cross-platform office suite with pretty much the same functionality and interface independent of platform. It reads and writes all MS Office formats (except for Access files.) It does have a drawing program, an XML editor, as well as a math equation editor, in addition to the standard word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and database. Oh, and did I mention it’s free as in beer, too, instead of adding a couple of hundred bucks or more to the price of a new PC?

So what are it’s weaknesses?

• The spreadsheet doesn’t yet have all of the functionality of Excel. It’s pretty darned close, but even I have to admit that Excel is darned hard to beat.
• It doesn’t have The Ribbon I think most people would say this is a strength. :-)
• The presentation package isn’t quite as polished as PowerPoint, although you can do most of what you can do with PP.
• It doesn’t have Publisher
• The database has not come anywhere near the functionality of Access.

The days when many a nonprofit were run by Access databases is coming to a close as things move more and more to the cloud. Google docs will take a good long time to make it to the point where the functionality begins to match either MS Office or OOo/LO, so OOo/LO is a very good alternative to MS Office if you don’t need MS Access, and have folks able and willing to make a small adjustment to use this tool. I know that the fact that nonprofits can get MS Office for $30 or so makes a change unlikely, and I’ve carped about that one for years. But at least, for now, it seems that MS is still willing to be generous.

I’ll start with the bad. A mistake I see very often in RFPs is an imbalance in what is articulated in the RFP, and the kind of work that is required to pull off what’s needed. Let me give an example: An RFP for a new website has 2 pages describing in detail needs provided by any modern CMS (web based WYSIWYG editing, drop down menus, new pages easily added, contact forms, etc.) and then a phrase dropped in like “integration with our CRM,” or “event management system,” without any detail as to what these things really mean (like, what is the CRM and what kind of integration is needed, etc.) This invites a world of hurt, as you can imagine. Kind of like the sound made when the Man from Mars starts eating guitars in the Blondie song.

Then there is the ugly. The mistake that organizations most often make is that they have a five- or six-figure imagination, and a four-figure budget.

So what’s the good? What makes a good RFP?

• Do your homework: know what kinds of software options available to build the kind of system you want, and know what their capabilities are, and how much it generally costs to implement those basic capabilities. Learn about how hard customization of those platforms are (some are much easier than others.)
• Understand that integration of most any two different systems is going to be four times as hard as you think, cost at least three times as much, and will do 1/2 of what you expect or want.
• Hire a strategic consultant who really understands technology and the technological details of what you are looking for to help you figure out whether or not you can afford what you really want, and how best to articulate those needs in an RFP. Even an hour or two of their time will save you money and headaches. Someone who is a developer or who has been one in the past is a good bet.
• Read this slide deck by Gunner of Aspiration!!

I’ll write a series of posts, and cover the following topics:

• Desktop software (OS, Office Suites, browsers, utility software, and other good stuff.)
• Comparisons of open source vs. proprietary development environments (i.e. PHP vs. .NET and that sort of thing.)
• CMS
• Non-profit CRM (including “SaaS” in the proprietary camp)
• CRM/ERP more generally
• Document Management
• Other web applications
• Open Source Communities, and how they have changed (and not)

I don’t know what order I’ll write about these things – I guess just as the mood strikes me.

We are approaching a time when just about everyone should be thinking hard about use of fossil fuels, consumption and waste. Global climate change is beginning to affect our lives in a real way. I offer this set of data points, if you will, with the hope that it will spark some thinking and perhaps discussion.

Cloud computing

There is some argument as to whether or not cloud computing is good or bad for the environment. On one hand, you have folks saying that moving organizational data and functions into the cloud means gaining efficiencies not possible in server rooms. Most organizational servers do not run at full capacity, whereas servers in the cloud generally are using more of their available capacity. One could argue that 100 servers running at 1/2 capacity is better than 200 servers running at 1/4 capacity.

That said, we are doing a lot more than just moving stuff out to the cloud. We are creating whole new infrastructures that didn’t exist before (think Facebook, Google, etc.) But it also means that we can use lighter clients. Will the move to, for instance, tablet and phone computing be a net positive or negative benefit in terms of resource consumption?

Green Hosting

There are a ton of hosting companies claiming that they are “green hosting.” Just Google it. And you might see “powered by wind power” or some such. The truth is more complicated. Green hosting companies are just like any other hosting company. They have a big data center that’s attached to the grid, from which they draw power. And they become “green” by purchasing renewable energy credits, or by purchasing carbon offsets. There are some arguments about whether or not these are really helping the environment. Figuring this out is far beyond the scope of this article. But I think it’s fair to say that the jury is still out on this one.

Production and Disposal of Technology Equipment

So this is where it gets ugly. I remember, back in the heady days of the early Circuit Rider movement, when one of the big issues was that nonprofits had old, outdated equipment, and they never budgeted for its timely replacement. I remember we talked about planning to replace 1/4 to 1/3 of the hardware in an organization each year. The logic behind this is very hard to fault. Computing changes at a breathtaking pace. Software is written for current high-end hardware, so upgrading software on older machines is either painful or impossible. The argument goes – nonprofits need up-to-date tools to do their work effectively. It all makes sense, but what results is nonprofit technology’s contribution to e-waste. And as our tools get more and more functional, and slimmer and smaller, and, well, cooler,  we’re more than happy to toss the old stuff in the trash.

We don’t see or interact with e-waste. We leave that to China, Ghana, and other countries. E-waste pollutes the environment and poisons people. And all because this technology, all of it, is “designed for the dump.” (Follow that link, please.)

(And, parenthetically, although it’s not really about the environment, check out this information about Coltan, a necessary ingredient in many electronics, including mobile phones.)

And then there are the resources that go into producing our technological gizmos. For instance, it takes 500 pounds of fossil fuel, 50 pounds of metal, and an enormous 1.5 tons of water to make the average computer. That is a staggering amount of resources. And, between phones, tablets, e-readers, laptops, desktops, servers, routers … it’s an incredible amount of resource consumption and waste.

So what to do? I recently read this article that I found interesting on “Seven Criteria for the Adoption of New Technology.” It’s written by someone who is working at living a simple life, and finds the same kind of conflicts in this that I do:

As the world rushes toward an overcrowded but new and improved grave full of “articulated task lamps” with “industrial style charm,” wines with “velvety” appeal, and cordless window shades that are “safe® for children and pets” (that’s just one section of today’s paper), I find my supposedly simple-living self caught on the same slow slide toward more. The bike I ride now is better than the one I had a year ago. Before long I’ll need a new computer, and it will be better than the one I have now. The force of inevitability takes over.

What is one to do? How exactly, and realistically, can a person resist, or cope, or somehow do something other than just get swept along? My impulse is to rant.

Here are my modified seven criteria:

1) How would the technology affect dynamics of organizations, friends, family and community?

2) Would it help us live and/or work in more stable circles, and strengthen our communities?

3) Is there a way to limit it, or does it push us down the slippery slope to even more?

4) Would it do “work that is clearly and demonstrably better” than the thing it replaces?

5) Who would want us to get it, and who would not?

6) Would it bring joy and satisfaction to life?

7) Does it represent what we believe in?

Thoughts?

“Only the present moment is real and available to us. The peace we desire is not in some distant future, but it is something we can realize in the present moment.” –Thich Nhat Hahn

I have been thinking about why I decided to call this blog “Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology” recently. I named it that back in 2006 when I resurrected this blog (pun not really intended) after my time in seminary.

If you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you know that what’s important is the journey, not the destination. Of course this is a common theme, and it’s one that I try to always keep in mind. For me, the means are the ends, and how we do what we do is easily as important as what we do.

The name of this blog was designed to make me keep that in mind when I wrote about technology. As you know, I’ve given up hope that by helping nonprofit organizations with technology that I’m changing the world. But I do believe, strongly, that we change the world when we pay attention to what’s going on now, to how we accomplish what we do.

I think I just contradicted myself. Or, rather, entered into somewhat of a paradox. What I’m saying is that the ends, making nonprofits super duper amazing users of technology, is not what’s most important. It’s how they get there that is.