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nptech

LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org

by Pearlbear on February 21, 2011

I hope that everyone reading this blog has heard of OpenOffice.org.  OpenOffice.org is a free and open source cross-platform office suite, which can read and write MS Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. It actually has more to it than that, there is a drawing program, a database, a math equation editor and more. It has been in development as OpenOffice.org since 1999, when Sun Microsystems bought the code from a company called Star Division (remember StarOffice?) (You can find an aged, but perhaps useful webinar I did up on slideshare.)

For 85% of what most nonprofits (and individuals) need out of MS Office, you can get in this package for free. Sorry, clippy not included. OpenOffice.org has come an incredibly long way since the old days, and it is, now, quite a credible competitor to MS Office.

But then … Oracle bought Sun. And just like the fears that many in the MySQL community have had about the future of MySQL under Oracle’s watch (Oracle shut down the OpenSolaris project, for example), people were worried about the future of OpenOffice.org. And the cool thing about open source software is that in situations like this, people can fork stuff. And they did. They formed an organization called the Document Foundation, and forked the code from version 3.3 of OpenOffice.org, and called it LibreOffice.

All of the major Linux distributions are going to include LibreOffice, some as the default office suite. I’ve already been using LibreOffice, and intend to stick with it, since IMHO, a good bet is that anything FOSS will flounder and probably die in Oracle’s hands. (Which is why I am also keeping a keen eye on MySQL drop-in replacements, as well. You’ll read about that one here.)

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How to deal with technology change

by Pearlbear on February 18, 2011

I saw a call for a ColdFusion developer on an email list I’m on, and I couldn’t help but think about technology choice and change, particularly in the website world, and how nonprofits deal with technology change (or, don’t deal with it.) ColdFusion has been around for 15 years (more than a century in Internet time), and although it has improved and developed, technologically, it has been surpassed by its successors (including PHP, Java, Python, RubyonRails, and even .NET.) But this article isn’t about CF, it’s about technology change.

Technology is a rapidly moving beast. And the pressure to move forward, fast, is right there, always. It’s part of our culture, from the advertisements to the neatest, newest, coolest phones, to the new TV you should have. And then there are those of us in the Nonprofit technology community who are constantly on the bleeding edge of the next thing, whether it be hardware, software, or web services, are constantly talking about it, and how it’s going to make it easier/better/faster to change the world. Although I often get snarky about this, I am aware that I am guilty of this, too.

Most nonprofits are not run by geeks. Most nonprofit leaders think of technology as something in between a useful tool to be leveraged, and a necessary evil. They are resistant to rapid changes in their technology, as well they should be. And, they depend on geeks to help them get things done.

I have a story about nonprofits with a website they can’t leverage for their mission. Although complete fiction, this story will feel quite familiar. And I know I’ve been a guilty party in a real story at some point in my career.

A small nonprofit has a small staff who know a lot about their mission, but nothing about how to create a website. A friend of one of the board members is a web developer. They hire that web developer to put a new site together. The developer waxes poetic about the capabilities of this platform, called AmazingWebCreator. They imagine the developer knows what they are talking about. The developer builds the website, then goes away. The organization is happy for a while, they have a website with pages they can easily edit using a web form, which is more than they had before. Then in months, or years, they want to add some new pages, or a new section to their site, and a widget on the side. But they realize they don’t know how to do that. They call the developer, who is busy now using AmazingWebCreator on some huge project, or has moved on to SuperDuperWebCreator, and doesn’t have time for them. They have to bring in another developer, who knows AmazingWebCreator, which may cost them time and $.

Of course, the critical factor here is what is “AmazingWebCreator”? If it is a relatively new CMS (like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and others) they may not need to bring in a new developer – they may just be able to get a book, or buy a video to teach them how to use the web interface to create new regions and widgets. If “AmazingWebCreator” is a platform like RubyonRails, Django,  .NET, Java, or ColdFusion, they are most likely going to have to hire someone to do that work for them, and depending on the platform, those developers may be either few and far between (ColdFusion) or in high demand, and therefore relatively expensive (RubyonRails, Java.) Worst, of course, is if AmazingWebCreator is a proprietary, custom CMS that the developer wrote themselves in 2002, and no longer supports.

How is an organization supposed to know how to make an informed choice about a website platform? I have a few suggestions:

1) Assumptions: First, assume the person/people who develop your site might not be around in a year or so. And assume there are things you can’t conceive of now that you’ll want to do in a year. Don’t assume the platform that your buddy chose for their organization’s site is the right one for you. Don’t assume that the most popular platform is necessarily the right one, either.

2) Feature set: Garden variety website, or  very specialized functionality? (By “garden variety” I don’t mean brochureware. I mean average, normal features of most nonprofit organizations. These include such things as donation buttons/pages, membership lists, blogs, etc.)

3) Platform choice: Look at a number of things – if it’s open source – how many developers are there? How many people use it? How easy is it to find developers? Will most new functionality be able to be added via web interface, or will it require back-end coding? Is it a custom CMS, written, maintained and supported by a single shop? (NEVER, EVER, EVER CHOOSE THESE. Here’s why. Luckily, they are an endangered species.) If it is proprietary, or software-as-a-service, are the extra features really worth the cost? Are there many consultants and developers who can assist you with this platform?

4) Lifecycle: Is it early in the life of the platform, at it’s peak, or late (or very, very late)? Bleeding edge might hurt, aged platform might crumble underneath the weight.

There are lots of folks (I do this on occasion on this blog, and Idealware is a great resource) that can provide you with information about specific platforms, and comparisons between them. Read, read, read, and ask many questions before you decide.

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Reader solicitation

by Pearlbear on February 17, 2011

As you can tell, I’ve been writing more lately, and I plan, for the time being at least, to really step up my blogging game. I’ve got a list of posts of my own I want to write, but I realized that some long-time readers of this blog might want me to write about some specific things that fit under my basic purview. Research you’ve been too busy to do, something you want my unique opinion on, something you’re curious about.

So, I’m soliciting ideas. No guarantees I’ll blog about it, but feel free to put in comments (or email me, if you’re feeling a need for privacy) topics you’d like me to cover.

Here’s my list of upcoming topics:

  • Has Open Source won or lost, or is the struggle still going on?
  • Updates on Open Content and Copyleft of things other than code that nonprofits might be interested in.
  • Ruby on Rails (varied topics).
  • Drupal Provisioning
  • A beginners guide to NoSQL.
  • Reasons why nonprofits, and nonprofit technology in specific should work to expand the economic models by which they work.
  • How to be really anonymous technologically (for activist reasons) and the Flipside – how to make sure people know you are who you say you are, and what ways do people spoof.
  • Cloud development platforms.
  • Why technology both sucks for the environment, and is good for the environment – how to find the sweet spot.
  • Podcasting 101.

That’s my list so far, and I’d love to add your ideas to the mix.

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WordPress vs. Drupal … fight!

by Pearlbear on February 15, 2011

As a user and developer of WordPress since 1.x something, and a developer and user of Drupal since 4.7, I figured that with the release of Drupal 7, this would be a great time to do a comparison of the two.  If you want a really detailed look, please read the very exhaustive, recently released, updated Idealware report on OpenSource CMS, which includes Drupal, WordPress, Joomla and Plone. I did the research for the original report released a couple of years ago, so it’s been a while since I’ve come back to comparing these two platforms. Also, this is primarily going to be from the developers point of view, although I’ll talk some about user interface and experience.

(A caveat: I have more experience, especially with larger sites, in Drupal than in WordPress, so there are things that I may be missing. Feel free to make comments on what I got wrong.)

WordPress started out with a focus on ease of use for bloggers and content creators, and secondarily providing a platform for developers to build plug-ins and such. WordPress was born as a blogging tool, primarily, and has expanded outside of that realm, to encompass different kinds of content management use cases. Drupal started out primarily as a web content development platform, with a strength in community features. A focus on ease of use didn’t come about until Drupal 7.

At this point, both Drupal 7 and WordPress are pretty easy for end users to add and edit content, and do pretty simple administrative tasks (moderate comments, etc.) They both have a very nice array of canned themes available to use, and they both have some customizable themes (themes that make it easy to customize without needing to know much HTML or PHP – like Thesis) available. Getting a site up and running in both platforms is pretty easy, although neither are really ready for non-techies to take on. That said, most good webhosts have one-click installs of both CMS platforms.

WordPress still has only two content types: Blog Posts and Pages. You can’t have different kinds of pages, or different kinds of blog posts, or some other content type (news, events, etc.) that aren’t one or the other. That is a deal-breaker for many kinds of sites. There are plug-ins that allow you to create custom content types – I haven’t tried these, so I can’t comment, but it seems a big deal that this is core for Drupal, and an add-on for WordPress. And it seems that this, and the absence in WordPress of a way to easily control the way that lists of content are presented and viewed are the major platform differentiators. That said, many, many websites need neither of these features.

And if you want to get more deeply under the hood, both platforms require some understanding of the respective platforms (how plug-ins work in WP, how modules work in Drupal), and probably a bit of PHP, HTML, or AJAX to add bells and whistles to the theme. Given some big changes in the core of Drupal, such as adding fields to nodes, as well as image handling in core, some things are much easier dealt with in Drupal  7 than previous versions, getting close to the ease of use of WordPress in that regard.

Kinds of sites probably best done in WordPress:

  • Blogs
  • Community Blogs
  • Simple brochureware websites

Kinds of sites best done in Drupal:

  • Large community sites where you need different kinds of content generated by users (blogs, wikis, job postings, etc.)
  • Complex, document-heavy library sites, or sites that need document management
  • Sites where you want complex control over multiple content types – how they are created and viewed
  • Magazine/Newspaper like sites where you want to control how lists of content are displayed and ordered
  • eCommerce sites
  • Sites with deep integrations to CRM platforms and web services

Kinds of sites where it’s a tossup:

  • Medium or large websites with lots of content, but relatively simple organization
  • Community blogs with many authors and identified, authenticated users

Bottom line: They are both such amazing, solid platforms, with rich, deep ecosystems of plug-in/module developers, implementors, designers, etc. that it’s hard to go wrong picking either platform, as long as you are clear on the feature set needed.  They have rock-solid core development teams, security updates, and over all good code, which you could hardly say about either platform 4 years ago.

Also, I have to say, as much as I have respect for other Open Source CMS platforms, IMHO, 98% of websites can be served by either of these platforms. That’s what’s true right at this moment. 3 or so years down the pike, I’m going to be looking at platforms based on Ruby on Rails – as Rails gets more mainstream, and solid CMS platforms start to mature, that will be the space to watch for. But that’s another blog entry, isn’t it?

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Salesforce.com and Ruby on Rails

by Pearlbear on December 17, 2010

Programming languages and I have issues. By now, I’ve learned quite a number of them (I think 9 by last count), but for some reason, I seem to choose my work on them just at the top of the curve, or as they are going down. I have yet to manage to pick one early. I learned C at the height of its popularity, just as C++ was beginning to rise. I learned Fortran when it was almost dead, mostly for fun. I learned Pascal toward the tail end of its reign. In the late 90s, I chose to write a CMS in Perl instead of PHP. Dumb idea.

I’ve been moderately interested in Ruby and Rails for years now, although I haven’t yet spent very much time getting my hands really into coding Ruby. As pretty much all of you in the Salesforce.com world know, Salesforce.com agreed to buy Heroku for a pretty big chunk of change. I’d played with Heroku a little a while back, and I thought it rocked.

What is Heroku? Heroku is cloud Ruby on Rails. Build a Rails app, and deploy it on Heroku. It’s pretty sweet. So why would Salseforce.com buy it?

On one level, it makes über sense to me. As someone who has managed to learn some Apex, which is, frankly, somewhat of a monster of a programming language, it’s pretty clear that it’s not super easy to build complex apps using it. It’s like Java in heavy chains. A well-joined RoR & Salesforce.com platform, all in the cloud, would simply rock. (In case you are wondering, there already is a Ruby toolkit for the Salesforce API, although it looks like it only works on Rails 2.3, not 3.)

One another level, it’s fascinating. The culture of the Ruby and Rails world, the open source, community-driven, gift economy meritocracy, is very different than the Salesforce.com world – proprietary, business oriented, certifications-focused world. Of course, these are stereotypes – there are plenty of business-oriented Rails folks, and plenty of open-source oriented Salesforce folks, but the worlds really are culturally very different.

I’ll have a post soon where I talk in detail about why I think open source has both won and lost the open source vs. proprietary war, but this particular intercultural marriage will be interesting to watch. And the great thing is that our company has had such a marriage for a couple of years now, and it works.

Anyway, I’m dusting off my Ruby books, and diving in. Fun times!

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Plotting my return to Twitter

by Pearlbear on November 28, 2010

In April of this year, I left twitter. I had good reason to leave twitter. And, after a few months, I didn’t miss it. And, frankly I still don’t miss it. But I had a bit of an epiphany lately that you social media mavens out there will very much appreciate. I figured it was worth writing on this blog about.

I joined Twitter in the beginning, because my colleagues were. I didn’t have a reason, or a goal, except to find out what everyone one else was, well, all a-twitter about (sorry, I couldn’t help it.) I knew that my nonprofit consulting practice was not going to be geared toward social media (as you all know, I veer way more to the plumber end of the web technology spectrum.) And, it was fun, for a while, then it got old. I didn’t have a specific set of things I wanted to get out there in the world (save in the realm of what I can easily do by blogging) and I just joined because all of my nptech buddies joined.  I got overwhelmed by the information coming my way and it invaded my life. So I left.

What’s changed for me is that I now have a goal and a focus, and with that goal and focus comes a realization. Aha! Twitter will be useful. It sort of took me by surprise, interestingly enough. I began to think about how I would approach this thing, and what would be the best way to learn more, as well as share, and put stuff out, and … voila, Twitter.

And the lesson, I learned, which I’m sure lots of nonprofits are learning, seems to be: Twitter is a means to an end, and it’s important for me to treat it that way, rather than it being and end unto itself. And I know the social media folks have been saying this all along, but it took me this long for it to really sink in.

I know that at least some of you are thinking “so what’s the goal and focus?” Sorry, it’s not nonprofit technology, ya’ll. Now that I’ll be back on Twitter, I’ll probably do a few tweets now and again from our company twitter account, so feel free to follow. And please don’t feel at all slighted if I stop following you on my personal twitter account (It’s likely.)  Because besides being a web techie, I’m a science fiction writer with some stories and novels to peddle.

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Does Social Media Work?

by Pearlbear on September 13, 2010

I know for many of you this is old news. But since I’m not on twitter anymore, and I don’t read my RSS feeds as often as I should.

In July, Idealware published the Nonprofit Social Media Decision Guide. It’s great – chock full of good information, and some very, very interesting research. One of the most interesting tidbits of data to me was the large gap between people who “thought” social media of varied types either helped them reach new audiences, or helped them raise money, and those that really “knew” this was the case.

And further, the largest change was just an increase in website traffic (20%).  A very close second was substantive feedback and discussions (21%), and a relatively close third was to attract new members or volunteers (16%).

There are some great worksheets to help you figure out what strategies to use, and how to move forward in this space. And there is, to my mind, a lot of fodder for thought and conversation among folks thinking about  how to really measure success in social media, as well as those of us thinking about SocialCRM:  how to best capture that data – whether it be engagement metrics, or actual constituent information.

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I’m not changing the world

by Pearlbear on July 2, 2010

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.

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Betting the Farm

by Pearlbear on April 16, 2010

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.

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Off to NTC!

by Pearlbear on April 5, 2010

Tomorrow morning, I’ll be leaving on a jet plane, to Atlanta, Georgia, for the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference. This will be my 7th NTC since 2001 (or, more accurately, my 5th. I went to two Circuit Rider Roundups.)

I’m looking forward to it. I’m speaking in two sessions: “Collaborative Problem Solving for Consultants” organized by Robert Weiner, and “Earth to Cloud”  part of the fabulous Tech Track organized by Peter Campbell. I’m looking forward to the Unconference on Open Data organized by NetSquared, and getting to see lots of old colleagues. I’ll probably be using FourSquare to check in to places (I’m still experimenting with that one.)

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