Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

One of our core values here at NPower Seattle is that nonprofits should be able to update their website content without having to understand coding - HTML, .NET, Cold Fusion, ASP, PHP or anything else.

We’re making that happen for our customers by using Plone, and open source content management system (or CMS).

Still - pictures are content, too - and unless you have the right imaging software handy you might not be able to place that terrific picture on your website. It might be too big, too bright, need to be cropped and so on.

Well - help is on the way! If you don’t have a great image editing tool installed on your computer but you DO have access to the internet, there are tools that can help. As you may imagine, they come in various sizes and shapes (and some have extended features that aren’t free) but you can use these to get started.

Christian Watson has a pretty good list of tools, and particuarly likes a tool called Picnik - I haven’t had time to try all of them -  but having an online service for editing pictures - especially if you are editing your website via an internet browser - makes a lot of sense!

There’s a great article in the New York Times that offers a series of solutions (pros and cons) of the different methods for moving all of your data (and maybe your software programs, too) from one computer to a new one.

There are great tips. A couple of things to think about in ADDITION, though:

1. Do you really know where all of your data lives? If you’re like me - you probably don’t. You’ll forget to make a copy of your QuickBooks file, or to snag a copy of your Outlook information. Or maybe you’ll have downloaded an important software program - and while you know it is on your hard drive - you might not know where! Make sure you ask all of those questions and more. TIP: Call a friend and tell them you are wiping your hard drive - and ask THEM what they would look for. And then call another friend or two and ask the same questions!

2. Make sure you have both your original software media (CD’s, floppy discs for really old software and so on) AND that you have the appropriate license keys.

3. If you have the space - don’t de-commission that old workstation for a month or two - you’ll feel much more comfortable knowing you can turn it on to look for something that you might have left out when you copied your data!

There’s a lot of conversation in the technology and nonprofit community about what is possible - an end to genocide, data integration, web 2.0, user generated content, and much, much more.

The team that brought us TechSoup have launched another initiative, called Net Squared (or net2) - and their mission is to spur responsible adopotion of social web tools.

They are holding a project contest right now - more than 150 agencies such as NPower Seattle, Idealware, and Freecycle have posted projects - and those (and the rest, too) deserve your consideration and a vote!

NPower Seattle has posted a project regarding our Earned Income Tax Credit project.

Idealware has posted a project regarding Nonprofit Software Knowledge Sharing.

And Freecycle is lookig to do more with their recycling meets giving initiatives.

I hope so - and if you’re not sure - NPower Seattle can help you measure!

On May 8th, thanks to generous support from Microsoft, we’ll send volunteers to nonprofits in and around Seattle - and they’ll use a simple online assessment tool to check for basic strengths and vulnerabilities in your technical infrastructure. This Stable and Secure Scan uses a set of 12 benchmarks that we’ve established - and the scan will result in a personalized set of technology recommendations for ways  that you can strengthen your infrastructure.

On top of THAT - it will contribute (anonymously of course!) to a wider snapshot of technology in the nonprofit sector.

You can register online if you’d like to have a volunteer come and help. We’ll also make the survey broadly available, too - so you can test on your own - more details to come!

I’m just back from the annual NTEN conference (well - not really back. The folks at United Airlines are making me wait in the airport for an extra 90 minutes.) Lucky for me, I am using a free tool called Windows Live Writer, which lets me write blog entries offline (and spell check them, even better!) and then post when I have an internet connection.

Some really good stuff at the conference again this year - and not all of it just in the hallways or in the sessions - there was a lot of both.

For instance - I connected with the Salesforce Foundation team - and they are really committed to the nonprofit sector and to supporting the database needs of nonprofits.  Steve Wright was both fun and articulate - and has a strong commitment to improving the tools. And IN session, Steve and representatives from Kintera and Convio talked a lot about their API’s (or lack thereof) - which was a friendly and invigorating debate. The big takeaway from those conversations? Nonprofits really can shape the landscape. If you want or need (or both) to have your Plone website talk with your Salesforce data - the world is your oyster. And while it might be a bit more time in coming - you’ll be able to connect that website to Kintera one of these days, and Democracy In Action, and Convio. It really is very exciting to see progress in these areas - it supports my hope for a nonprofit community that uses technology tools effectively!

It was also terrific to hear that NPower’s “Tech Savvy Communications” guide is a hit - it was mentioned in a pair of sessions that I attended. My colleague at NPower Seattle, Peg Giffels, did a great job putting that toolkit together.

And in a funny turn of events - Sprint had an area wide network outage just before I was due to present at the conference. I was working with Laura Quinn from Idealware, David Geilhufe from CivicSpaceLabs, and Ryan Ozimek from PICnet - the four of us were presenting about Plone, Drupal and Joomla - three terrific open source Content Management Systems. Laura framed the conversation (and highlighted the great research from Idealware on the topic) and then each of us were supposed to demo the tools.

Well - no internet made for a moderately challenging presentation - save for the fact that I’d created screen shots of my presentation late the night before.

I finished the presentation, answered a handful of questions, and then was able to check email a bit later when Sprint came back online - and received a message from my team in Seattle. Turns out there was a Plone fan in my session that sent a message to the Plone world that said I did a nice job - it is a very small world!

It was also great to meet with my NPower colleagues from around the NPower Network, to see our collaborators from ONE/NW, and to make some new friends along the way.

Next year, the conference will be in St. Louis - see you there.

I’ll be traveling to the NTEN conference in Washington DC this week - it is shaping up to be a terrific conference. I’ll be speaking with the local Plone users group in DC, I’ll meet with one of my remote database experts, and I’ll be presenting at the conference, too - more talk about Plone and Content Management Systems.

I’m looking forward to connecting with vendors, friends, and colleagues from around the NPower Network - so it should be a great trip. That does mean that it’s likely that I won’t have time to update my blog until I return - but I do hope to return with a lot of great information and better ideas for moving the nonprofit community towards more effective use of technology!

As the manager of database and website services at NPower Seattle - my over-arching goal is to move nonprofits towards effective use of technology. I’m working with my team and colleagues at NPower to start defining that - but I DO know that integrating data sources, reducing duplicate data entry and so on are all going to be a part of that definition. That means looking for tools that offer a 360 degree view of your constituents, and providing them with choice regarding how they interact with your content.

What if you were able to segment your donor list, create an html newsletter (and a print one, too), syndicate your content, publish a blog and maybe a podcast - and then the people that wanted that content could get it HOW they wanted it? That sounds pretty effective to me!

And I have a practical example of effective use, too - even though it lands more in the infrastructure area than in data and websites.

I had to travel unexpectedly to Victoria on Friday - and I wasn’t done with some important work. I grabbed my laptop, worked in the car and on the ferry, and when I arrived in Victoria - was able to synch back up to my network at NPower. Unfortunately, I forgot my battery charger - but I was able to borrow a friend’s laptop, set up a remote desktop connection to my home computer, and keep on working - I had all of the tools I needed at my disposal.

You can see that working effectively is getting easier and easier. But that means that the volume of data is growing - and the need for those 360 tools is increasingly important.  At NPower - we’re going to work diligently to define effective use so we can keep helping nonprofits head in that direction!