Bandwidth Management for Events
February 5th, 2010Anyone who has been to a large event full of people with laptops has experienced that all-too-familiar scenario: Sitting in chair with laptop, about to send that tweet of Elmo doing the Single Ladies dance and *POOF* your internet connection goes out. You look around and for some reason it looks like EVERYONE ELSE still has a connection. You proceed to continuously refresh your wireless connection hoping that something will result while the people around you start dropping like flies… “Hey, are you connected?” “What wireless network are you on?” “Is ‘Bob’s Apartment Wireless; DON’T USE’ password-protected?” and etc.
Large events can be a wireless lover’s worst enemy. Because the bandwidth of the internet connection is only so big but more and more people make more and more connections, it’s like feeding a single pack of Skittles to 50 people. Sure you can give everyone a single Skittle, but just tasting that lone, small pellet of sugary goodness is going to make them want a whole pack and not be satisfied until then get it. In the same way, because there are so many people wanting to access the internet through the same stream, it becomes split so much that each person’s stream is achingly slow if it’s there at all.
Luckily, our very own Dane, Tomas Krag put together an SSC toolbox full of tools to ease the pain associated with managing your internet connection at a large event. Bandwidth Management for Events pulls together tools that improve connection speeds with techniques like caching and reusing frequently-requested web pages and limiting download speed, while allowing bursts, to eliminate queues. Some of this may seem like voodoo, but these tools are definitely worth checking out for the next wireless-enabled event you hold. Any experience with these tools? What do you think?
Have any horrible “large event wireless FAIL” moments? Let us be your safe space to share. 
Blogs + Social Media = ? (Blog Posts to Check Out)
January 25th, 2010One thing that I’m interested in (along with 90% of the nonprofit world) is the connection and potential return on investment between social media and the organization. A few great blog posts have been floating around out there that I thought I should share for those of you looking into the same issues as myself. Check ‘em out:
- Facebook and Nonprofits: Success Stories? ROI?
Nonprofit Tech 2.0 asks Is Facebook just overhyped as a communications tool? Where’s that ROI everyone’s talking about? A good conversation going on in the comments about these issues. Interesting to see the different points of view from different organizations. - How to Bring Facebook Fans to Your Nonprofit Blog: Part 1
Rebecca from Wild Apricot Blog looks at the connection between Facebook and your blog showing you some reasons that you might want to make an effort to move your audience between the two and ways in which to do it. - 6 Essential Social Media Plug-Ins for Your Blog
John Haydon presents a list of plug-ins that you can add to your blog to enhance its connectivity to your social media outlets. You may notice a couple new additions around the blog you’re reading now.
- Micro-Volunteering for the Haiti Earthquake
Beth Kanter takes a look at some organizations that allow average Joes and Janes like us to contribute to the Haiti earthquake relief efforts. Only vaguely related to blogs and social media but sweet nonetheless.
These posts are definitely worth a peruse. Hope they help!
~Matt
Photos for Nonprofits
January 13th, 2010Talking to a small nonprofit looking to get started on Social Media recently, the executive director told me that she’s trying her hardest to get comfortable with Flickr because she knew that it was the place for photos and social networking.
Immediately, I thought to myself: “Wait. Is it?” It seems that more and more Facebook is becoming the place for photos. So I began to wonder whether or not Facebook was taking Flickr’s trick and doing it better. I posted the question on Aspiration’s Facebook Wall, got a lil’ conversation flowing and got some insightful responses:
So I thought I’d move the conversation to the blog and see if anyone else has anything to add. What do you think about Facebook vs. Flickr vs. Picasa with regard to nonprofit photos?
What is your experience with these tools?
Do you think that Google is slowly putting together the ultimate “social-network-that-doesn’t-call-itself-a-social-network?”
Some interesting related links:
- Flickr for Non-Profits: Lessons Learned
Interesting article looking at using Flickr effectively from Social Media 4 Good via our Twitter buddy TACS_NPower
- How Nonprofits Can Get the Most out of Flickr from TechSoup and Beth Kanter, social media guru to the nonprofit stars
Essential FOSS Content Management Systems
January 5th, 2010As many people will tell you, in the nonprofit world, the big Content Management Systems in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) world are
While every Plone evangelist and Wordpress advocate can tell you why their CMS is the bee’s knees, they’ll all agree that it depends on what you’re doing. And while we won’t go into what each one does better today because, well, frankly I want everyone to play in the sandbox nicely, I did want to show you the gold standards for those nonprofits looking to put together a website.
Why go open source in your CMS travails, you ask? The key is community. Because these applications are open source, anybody can see the code and develop extensions, modules, do-hickeys and whozeewhatsits. Plone, Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress are as good as they are and as popular as they are because their communities are large, dedicated and passionate about the tool. So one of the dangers of using a smaller, less-established CMS is that the community is smaller and therefore the wealth of knowledge (trouble-shooting, forums) and resources (extensions, themes) is smaller. Also, if the CMS never takes hold (no matter how cool it is), you’re stuck with a website built in a CMS that no one works in. Eek. But, that being said, there are definitely some interesting smaller open source content management systems out there that have small but vibrant and dedicated communities. A couple examples include Concrete5 and TikiWIki.
What are your thoughts on Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress and Plone vying for FOSS CMS supremacy?
Know any smaller FOSS Content Management Systems that deserve a shoutout?
Let us know! We’re not tools. We’re just tool people.
Getting Around The Man and Keeping Your Privacy Online
December 18th, 2009In light of the recent Facebook privacy settings drama, I thought that this would be a good time to evaluate what control you (or others) have on your online presence. Our very own intern Matthew put together a toolbox of “Circumvention Tools”. Tools for handling online privacy, censorship and getting around online road blocks.
By nature, this can be a sketchy area, so know that none of these tools are perfect by any means when looking at how to address these issues. And just because they’re listed here doesn’t mean we endorse or have tried them, we just want to let folks know what’s available. Security needs vary organization to organization and individual to individual, so we encourage you to vet circumvention and security tools thoroughly before depending on them in any way.
That being said, these are very real problems that a nonprofit or an individual can find themselves having to deal with and there are many reasons why you should at least know what’s up. First of all, anyone can see and track what you’re looking at online. Internet providers, websites, blogs (boo!) can track what you’re looking at. Because every computer is tied to a specific IP address, it’s actually fairly easy for someone to do. Secondly, for some organizations, like Google, it’s a large part of their business model. They track what you search for and look at to give you more relevant search results.
But it’s one thing to track what someone is doing online and a whole other to take action against them based on what they’re doing. Controversial nonprofits and organizations have a legitimate security issue to consider when looking at how they leave a footprint online. For example, if your organization works for freeing political prisoners and your IP address is tracked to a website categorized by the government as “terrorist” don’t think that nothing will happen. While this might sound conspiracy-theory-esque, I just want to use an extreme example to illustrate the point that there can be real dangers when people follow you online and more importantly when you don’t know about it or what you can do. Direct action organizations, protest groups and people advocating for a controversial cause need to know that (just like everyone else), their wanderings and actions online are there for anyone to see.
Tracking where someone goes online isn’t the only way that you can be taken advantage of online. Anyone who followed the protests in Iran over the presidential elections knew that Twitter and YouTube were far richer in content for real-time news than traditional news media. The fact that a government can choose to block sites like this effectively cuts off the vocal cords of a group of people while at the same time stopping others outside of the situation from knowing what is going on. While this also might seem like an extreme example, simply the fact that this is possible must leave you wondering what’s up and what you can do about it.
Luckily, there are tools out there that can help you out. Some tools like Freegate, Gpass and Your Freedom work against these kinds of censorship measures to allow people access to sites they wouldn’t be able to view otherwise. While tools like Tor and UltraSurf work to hide your IP address so your actions are lost in the intertubes. And again, remember that these tools are not perfect. In many ways it’s like an arms race between the tools that work for you and the tools that work against you. It’s only a matter of time before one catches up with the other.
Now that I’ve got you a little paranoid, I say go and check out a few of these tools and see what you think. If all of these online privacy and censorship issues make you a little uncomfortable (as it should!), know that it’s a real issue and that your privacy, identity and access to content online are hot commodities.
What issues have you seen come into play around these issues?
What do you do to protect your control over your online presence?
What tools are missing from the toolbox?
Your paranoid toolbox-er,
Matt
