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Social Source Commons Blog | ||
Nonprofit Tech, Tools and Social Media |
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Hi everyone, we’re going to be tweaking the template here at the Social Source Commons Blog so don’t worry if things start looking a little funky today. We should be all hunky dorey by this afternoon!
Thanks!
-Matt (Your SSC Community Manager and sometimes Template Editor)
Concrete 5 |
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Website Baker |
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Jaws |
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Concrete 5 is a relatively new open source Content Management System designed for easy website development. While Drupal, Joomla and Plone are familiar names to many in nonprofit tech, Concrete 5 may sound like a Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. The trouble is I haven’t heard much about it, but the website makes it seem so darn intriguing. It’s presented as back end website development from the front end. Sound confusing? Check out their demo site. I was wondering if anyone out there in blog land has had any experience with it or has heard anything about it.
Or, for that matter, any of the lesser known CMS’s?
Jaws?
Website Baker?
Good experiences? Bad?
A couple of weeks ago, Aspiration (SSC’s mama organization) held the 2008 Nonprofit Software Development Summit which basically brought over a hundred nonprofit techie geeks together in Oakland, CA to hash out the current state of affairs with regard to, you guessed it, nonprofit software development. So many people and organizations were represented, I really recommend perusing the Wiki to see what was discussed.
One (of the many) session topics that I found intriguing was about a nonprofit’s Carbon Footprint and how an organization can work to make their operation more environmentally friendly. Community IT Innovators facilitated the discussion as they are developing a tool “to calculate the carbon footprint of server and desktop configurations.” The discussion focused, for a large part, on factors that people over look when looking into green operations. For example, we all know that servers must be kept cool and that this cooling can significantly increase the amount of energy that your organization uses. However, many people don’t realize that by organizing their servers in a certain physical orientation, they can use less energy for cooling by creating an air tunnel in the room. These innovative little tricks usually don’t make it on the list with “Use less printer paper” and “Replace old Light bulbs.” One of the things that Greg from CITI stressed, though, was that old adage: REDUCE, REUSE, RECYCLE. Reconsider buying that second server and you may not have to worry about its noxious chemicals leaking into the environment when it eventually ends up in a landfill.
Peter Campbell of EarthJustice recently wrote an interesting post on greening your IT called The Lean, Green, Virtualized Machine over at Idealware where he advocates for virtualizing your servers in order to be more environmentally conscious as well as using hosted applications which take the strain off of your in-house servers. I felt as though this was an interesting argument in the Software vs. Hosted Services debate. I think, however, that at a certain point, trying to find the source of environmentally detrimental actions can get laborious. For example, should we consciously limit the size of website files to limit load time in order to curb strain on the servers which then leads to harm to the environment? On the other hand, it would be interesting to see numbers on the energy use per kilobit of webpage. It’s interesting to start down the “How is this harming the environment?” path and see how far down you get.
EPEAT, a system for evaluating the environmental friendliness of an organization’s computer set-up, was put together by the Zero Waste Alliance with a grant from the US EPA. Federal agencies are required to purchase a certain percentage of EPEAT-registered products for their operations. Does your nonprofit use EPEAT or another similar tool?
So much emphasis is put on environmental hardware considerations, but do environmental concerns play into your decision for software tools? Do you seek out tools like GreenPrint? Do you research a company’s green practices or concentrate on hosted applications? What connections do you make between tools and the environment (if any at all)?
Hey, Marc Laporte and the good folks at TikiWiki are keeping a list called the “Wiki Landscape” that pulls together information on the most popular Wiki engines. According to (who else?) Wikipedia, a wiki “is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language.”
The most famous Wiki is, of course, Wikipedia.org which is a great example of a huge community of people from all over the world being able to contribute to a single webpage. Other examples include:
While problems with the “anybody can edit” philosophy inevitably come up, a truly collaborative information resource is, at the very least, a powerful vision.
I just created a new toolbox called “Wiki Tools” that I posted on SSC based around their list. These tools are all designed to get active wikis up and running easily and, perhaps most importantly, collaboratively. Why not take a peek, poke around or even add your own favorite Wiki example.
Twitter is everywhere these days. If you aren’t Twittering away your life, you can rest assured that your mailman, nephew and boss are. Twitter, for the uninitiated, is a mini-blogging tool that allows you to post small status updates that are no more than 140 characters long. Users can get minute by minute updates on the people they are “following.”
Even though it sounds pretty mundane, everyone and their mother is now Twittering. From Steve Jobs to John Cleese, Twitter is the new blog. With the explosion of Twitter, came a multitude of similar copycat tools like Tumblr, Jabber and Yammer. There has been many a debate about whether Twitter can be a legitimate form of social media or whether it’s simply people telling their friends the kind of dressing they used for their salad.
The question then becomes whether or not Twitter can be used by a nonprofit organization for any sort of good. The debate has strong proponents on each side. If you want to learn more about the pros and cons, check out these links:
Because here at the Social Source Commons we are focused on nonprofit tools, it has come to our attention that there are a MILLION tools for using Twitter. You can find tools for anything from inserting Japanese scripts into your tweets (Chirrup) to tweeting from the Mac OS X Terminal (BLT).
There may be a huge selection to choose from, but which ones, if any, can help out your nonprofit?
Out of the plethora, the profusion, the GLUT of Twitter tools, I chose a couple that I think might have the chance to be put to good use by a nonprofit:
So if you decide that your organization could benefit by squeezing Twitter into its daily proceeding, check out these tools and see what sort of ruckus you can rouse up. And as always, feel free to tell me what tools you or your organization use for Twittering.
And if you get bored and want to shake it up a bit, check this out: Post Like A Pirate
Over the weekend, I went to Bay Area Drupal Camp (BADcamp) and dug into another CMS. Drupal, like Joomla!, is an open source Content Management System that allows you to create websites through content organization and management. In Drupal, you add “nodes” (pieces of content) to a basic framework to flesh out your website. You can also add “modules” which increase the functionality of that framework. This combination creates, in theory, an easy to organize and adaptable structure to create webpages from PHP databases. Some notable websites built on Drupal include The Onion and The New York Observer.
Being new to Drupal, the camp was very informative, from how to download and install properly (set up can be a tad frustrating) to finding the best “modules” that will allow your website to do what you want it to do. The thing that I always find so interesting with open source, and I suppose is the beauty of the entire idea, is that the community behind a good open source program is so effervescent. There are so many tools and modules that someone using Drupal can take advantage of and they are entirely created within the community space (vs. a company selling additional features). If there is a function that isn’t available you yourself can create a module to do it. Drupal camp was a great place to be in the center of a community like this, bringing together programmers, theme experts, module-makers and average Drupal Joes like me.
One announcement that has shook up the Drupal community as of late is the release of Acquia Drupal. The Acquia representative at Drupal camp explained to me that Acquia Drupal is essentially the same program as regular Drupal with the exception that Acquia Drupal comes with additional modules. The main advantage of Acquia Drupal is that one can sign up for a subscription account through Acquia which then provides technical support for the site he or she built with Acquia Drupal. This might be a good option for those who are considering building their site on Drupal but feel uncomfortable going it alone. You can learn more about Acquia Drupal at their website.
During the “Drupal Development – Tools and Resources” session, I received a little insight on some great tools that Drupal users have found useful for managing their sites:
All in all, Bay Area Drupal camp was a great introduction to a powerful, open-source CMS. If you want to learn more about Drupal, check out these links:
Did you know that you can embed any SSC Community Toolbox right into another web page? It’s simple and perfect for when you want to show the contents of a toolbox right within your own web page rather than linking to Social Source Commons. Let’s check out how it’s done:
I want to embed Robert Kee’s “Online Donation – International Availability” Toolbox into the SSC blog. So the first thing that I do is find the toolbox on SSC. The quickest way is to go straight to the Search field in the top right corner of the SSC webpage and type in the name of the toolbox:
When I find the toolbox in the Search Results, I click on the title and go to the “Online Donation – International Availability” Toolbox page.
To the right of the Toolbox window, there is a green window entitled “Embed this toolbox.” Now all I have to do is copy the text (the embed code) from the text box and paste it into the html code of my website. For me, this means taking the embed code and pasting it into our WordPress Blog’s html code:
Make sure that Javascript is enabled and that you’re pasting the code into the website’s HTML. Many blogs have visual text editors that the code will not work in, so make sure you’re pasting the code into the website’s HTML.
And there you go, a perfectly embedded Social Source Commons Community Toolbox right in the webpage. It shows each of the tools, their descriptions, as well as their tags so that people can find related tools on SSC by simply clicking on the tags. The embedded toolbox is fully interactive so a visitor to your website can click on any of the links just like she would on the Social Source Commons webpage. Give it a whirl with our embedded “Online Donation” toolbox courtesy of Robert Kee and SSC Toolbox Embedding:
For more examples of SSC Community Toolbox Embedding, check out these sites:
NOSI Free Web Server Software
Aspiration Open Translation Tools
As always, if you have any questions or comments, drop me a line.
Happy Embedding!
A little while back, I asked my fellow CTC VISTAs what software tools they were using to get an idea about their nonprofit tool use. I received great feedback and took it all to create the CTC VISTA Tools Toolbox on Social Source Commons. After talking to a few VISTAs, I thought I’d share with our dear blog-reading community the tools that they’re taking advantage of. Whether it be helping the user, helping themselves or building community, CTC VISTAs are using software tools in increasingly innovative ways because we all know that, a lot of the time, working for a nonprofit means creating something out of practically nothing. Anyway, let’s check out what a few VISTAs are doing.
Mary Chant, Marketing & Web Strategist at MicroMentor in Portland, OR manages a website for her hometown of Vancouver, WA. First the Basics provides a comprehensive listing of food pantries in the area. Mary uses Google Maps as the backbone to the site, giving users an interactive map to work with rather than just text directions and a link. Because the goal of the website is to increase the access to food pantries for people in Vancouver, Google Maps contributes directly to that goal by significantly increasing the ease with which a person can find the food pantry locations.
Daryl Hall, Media Specialist at Homeless Prenatal Program in San Francisco, CA serves as a web developer, maintaining the HPP website. Because working for a nonprofit means wearing many hats, Daryl has to split his time among a variety of duties and as such, doesn’t have much time left over. To get around his tight time allotment without spending money, Daryl takes advantage of Notepad++, Firebug and the Web Developer Add-on for Firefox. They allow Daryl to find and work with a web site’s code quickly and easily, taking the guesswork out of evaluating a website’s code for an aspect he has never seen before. These tools allow Daryl to improve the website in order to make it more accessible for those coming to visit, increasing the website’s utility.
Morgan Sully, Community Manager at the National Alliance for Media, Arts and Culture (NAMAC) in San Francisco, CA has become the point person for all things web development at his organization. Self-taught, Morgan knows more than a thing or two about working with a Drupal-based website, but occasionally, he runs into a head-scratcher. However, like most nonprofits, NAMAC isn’t about to throw down consulting fees for every small problem, so Morgan finds solutions in the resources that he already has on hand. Using LinkedIn, Morgan is able to post technical questions on their “Answers” boards, getting exposure to a multitude of technical people in his network that would normally cost hundreds of dollars to consult. This allows Morgan to not only solve his problem, but builds community with other professionals in his field and improves his own knowledge base for problems later on.
Another way in which Morgan keeps up with community is by using the Drupal Feed API. It allows him to aggregate many RSS Feeds from NAMAC member organizations into the NAMAC site itself, in effect, allowing the different organizations to automate sending the latest information from their website into their NAMAC organization profile without them (or Morgan) having to do anything. This ‘offloads’ valuable org staff time cross-posting their important causes to multiple sites. NAMAC’s website then becomes a rich resource of the latest content from a variety of member organizations – all the while saving NAMAC members (and Morgan) hours of busy work.
CTC VISTAs take advantage of their software tools, anyway that they can, because we all know that working at a nonprofit it a lot more than sticking to your job description. It’s all about innovation, improvisation and taking advantage of the resources available to make something great. Check out the other tools in our CTC VISTA Tools Toolbox on SSC, a small sampling of the many software tools that CTC VISTAs are using all over the country.
Over the weekend, on Saturday, I was lucky enough to take part in the 2nd annual Bay Area Joomla! Day at Google in Mountain View, CA. For those of you who aren’t in the know, Joomla! is a free and open-source Content Management System (CMS). CMS’s are designed to enable those who have no coding experience to successfully create a professional-quality website. Being open-source, one of the major advantages of using Joomla! is that you have a solid community of users surrounding the program. This community acts as the developers, technical support and its biggest critics and proponents. Joomla! Day, therefore is a chance to bring all of these people together for a collective Joomla! brain dump.
Rather than sticking to a schedule, this self-proclaimed “unconference” was almost completely participant-driven, which just increased the community vibe and answered the questions that people really wanted to know about (instead of watching 3 hours of PowerPoint presentations, desperately searching for a specific answer).
As a Joomla! newbie, myself, I learned so much about the system, it was amazing. After every session, there was this shared vibe of people wanting to break out the laptops and build another website just to play around with the different things we had learned about. Here are a few sample topics that were discussed to give you an idea:
And that’s only a tiny sampling. I must say that it was a great experience and the organizers deserve a HUGE shout out because, being open source, they aren’t doing this for the money. This is their passion for the open-source philosophy and for providing a program that allows basic computer users a means to create a quality website.
If you are interested in Joomla! or want to learn more about open-source or Content Management Systems, check out these links:
Creating a Community Toolbox on Social Source Commons is one of the great ways in which users can become actively involved with the site. Toolboxes are created in order to organize the tools that you use into understandable and useful collections. When your account is first created, you have your “Personal Toolbox”, which is intended to list the tools you use and actively recommend. However, as you document more tools and want to share more specific information, you may discover that you want additional ways to group and publish lists of tools. This is where creating a Community Toolbox can help you out. First you pick a theme and then you add tools. It’s as simple as that.
Let’s look at how I created the “CTC VISTA Tools” Toolbox, a sampling of tools that Americorps CTC VISTAs use at their organizations:
Starting at the homepage, I click on “My Toolboxes” near the top of the screen:
On the “My Toolboxes” page, I click on “Create Toolbox” at the bottom of the green “My Toolboxes” Box:
“Name” and “Description” boxes pop up that I can then edit.
After I click “Create,” SSC takes me to the Toolbox display page and now my Community Toolbox is ready to be filled:
To add tools to the toolbox, I click on “Search for a tool to add.” A search field pops up to find relevant tools to add to the Community Toolbox:
I want to add Open Office, so I type it in the field and click “Search.” SSC takes me to the Search Results Page:
On the search results page, in the tool listing, I simply choose “CTC VISTA Tools” from the drop down list and click on the “Add” button to add it to the “CTC VISTA Tools” Community Toolbox.
Now when I go back to the CTC VISTA Toolbox display page, OpenOffice is nestled inside.
Now that my Community Toolbox has tools, I can add “Tags” to help people find it. I just click on the 
next to “Tags” and a field pops up in which I can write any words that describe the toolbox.
After clicking “Add,” the tags are then displayed along with my tools on the Toolbox display page:
As you can see, creating a Community Toolbox on SSC is an easy way to organize your tools in a thematic way. Whether it be the tools that you use to get through your every day or tools to organize that annual fundraising event, SSC Community Toolboxes can come in handy.
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Paper: Aspiration Manifesto |
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Book:
Open Translation Tools |
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Paper: Creating Participatory Events |
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