Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology
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You don’t hear me talking much about social media. One of the reasons is that there are a number of really good bloggers out there who know the field far better than I’ll ever be able to. I would argue that Beth Kanter is the best social media blogger there is in the nonprofit space. Her careful writing about the strengths and weaknesses of social media, the in-depth knowledge of strategy and approach, her on-the-cutting-edge understanding of trends and issues and how they relate to the work that nonprofits are doing has been an incredibly important resource to the sector. If someone asks me about social media, I just say “ask Beth!”
And, it’s her birthday! A big bunch of us are blogging today to talk about what she’s contributed, and also to let people know about the charity she’s been working with for a while, now, the Sharing Foundation. She’d like folks to donate in honor of her birthday.
Beth, thanks for the expertise and intelligence you’ve lent to the nonprofit sector for quite some time now! And thanks in advance for all the great upcoming posts in 2010 and beyond that will help me sound intelligent when I talk about social media. :-)
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It’s taken me a while to write this blog post, mostly because I have been working hard at various things (like building a business and building new websites.) This is the last installment in my CRM/CMS integration series, that started almost a year ago (wow!) And I’m skipping Joomla/Salesforce Integration because there isn’t any publicly available documentation or code about the integration that PICnet did with Joomla and Salesforce, called J!Salesforce. [update: see Ryan's comment below.]
So what is the state of Drupal/Salesforce Integration? It’s not as mature as the Plone/Salesforce integration, for sure, but it is coming along nicely. There are several contributed modules:
All of these modules are in alpha or beta, although I know for a fact that some of them (or versions of them) are working in production sites. There are a fair number of bugs that need to be fixed before there is a stable release. There are a bunch of outstanding issues that need a lot of work (like caching, for instance). There are two other modules that are related, but don’t use the main salesforce api module – one for ubercart, and one for web-to-lead (called salesforcewebform). That module has a stable release, but only provides the ability to integrate between Webforms and leads, not other objects.
Right now, the salesforce module allows for integration of contact, lead and campaign objects only. so that’s another big area that could use some work.
There is a good screencast done by one of the folks (Jeff Miccolis from Development Seed) who has worked a lot on this project.
I’d say that in a year, we’ll have a good solid module release, providing lots of features for integration between Drupal and Salesforce.com.
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One of the great things about the nonprofit technology field is the collection of nonprofit organizations that provide what is often called “Intermediary” services to other nonprofits: information and resources that help nonprofit organizations do the work they do in the world, by helping them make good technology decisions.
I’ve been involved in one way or another with a number of these intermediary organizations. One of them, Idealware, is an organization whose goal is to provide the sector with unbiased, analytically developed reviews and information about software that nonprofits use in their everyday work. This is incredibly important stuff, and it’s darned hard work – I know, I’ve been involved in doing a bit of research for Idealware.
If we don’t have this sort of research in our sector, nonprofits won’t have the kind of analytical approach to software available – it is much needed. As you might imagine, funding this sort of work doesn’t come easy – they need our help to be able to continue to provide great research.
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Yesterday, I spent the day in Manhattan, at the UNICEF building, with a bunch of folks passionate about the technology in mobile phones, and the ways to use that technology for good. I’ve been a very long time cell phone user (had one since 1998), but I haven’t been involved in implementing a mobile system for an organization, so I had a lot to learn.
The place to find reports on what happend is on the wiki. Also, check out the twitter stream for the #omc09 hashtag.
I was especially interested in the issue of mobile data collection. (I was so interested, I facilitated a session.) And, even more specifically, I’m interested in how to leverage CiviCRM and mobile devices for a range of interesting applications. There are a number of ways to get data from mobile phones into a CRM – and all have advantages and disadvantages, depending on a lot of things.
One thing that would facilitate this would be a more robust API system in CiviCRM – access to the data via REST or JSON, which would allow CiviCRM to talk with some of the tools out there like Mesh4X.
I learned a ton. Thanks to MobileActive.org and the Open Mobile Consortium for a fabulous event.
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These are the last 10 sites I bookmarked on delicious.com:
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Security Camera - Photo by Sirius Rust
Beth threw down the gauntlet, and I had to pick it up. I’m sort of surprised I hadn’t written about this before. I think a lot about both of these, not so much for myself, but for organizations that I work with whose work is fairly sensitive.
First off, some definitions – I think that these two terms do get mixed up quite often, and understanding what’s really being meant by them in a technical context is important.
Security, in this context, is the concept that your personal computing resources and data are safe from both prying eyes, as well as hijack by crackers and spammers who will use those resources and data for their nefarious ends. In the case of your computing resources and personal data inside that box you call your laptop, or protecting the whole of your home or office network, security is a matter of using specific tools that prevent unprivileged outsiders from getting in. Wifi passwords, firewalls, password protected fileshares, virus protection software, etc. are the tools of the trade here. Security of your private data that is “in the cloud” is largely at the mercy of the software developers who hold your data. Luckily, most of them take security quite seriously. (That said, your data “in the cloud” can be compromised by lack of security on your network or laptop – someone installs a key logger, for instance, and grabs all of your passwords.)
Privacy, in this context, is that you can control, in a granular sense, what information about you is exposed to whom. Privacy is, as Beth says, primarily a matter of human behavior, but there are very interesting intersections with technology and security. In some instances, services have default privacy settings that are a lot less private than someone might like – and it takes some know-how to figure out how to correct those settings. Privacy is, also, a set of decisions that get made – sometimes in haste, or without much consideration. Your drunken decision to post that picture of you (or a co-worker) dancing in your underwear on a table at a party, the cat is out of the bag, and may never be able to be put back.
Security and privacy in the context of online communities, as Beth points out, are different beasts. The software that drives online communities (such as Drupal, phpBB, and others) have options to allow for varied levels of security. You might need to have a password to see anything. Or you might just need a password to make comments. You might not be able to just register for an account – you might need to go through an admin. These days, most software driving communities have roles you can assign people to, with specific privileges granted per role.
But privacy is made up of policy (the policy of the organization running the community) as well as the behavior of the members – their collective agreement that “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”
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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:
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!
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