Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

Not that recent, but if you haven’t seen these, they’re worth your time:

Playing by the (Wrong) Rules over at Mark Rovner’s Sea Change Strategies blog talks about how some fundraising conventional wisdom misses the larger point.

More bad news over at the NetSquared blog: Nonprofit Marketing Report: Organizations Failing to Connect. It’s interesting in this case that their data is self-reported. This isn’t an assessment from the messagee standpoint that things aren’t clear — the organizations are diagnosing this problem themselves. Which I guess means this isn’t news at all — you already knew.

Finally, here’s a link to the audio of Care2’s webinar Connecting Advocacy to Fundraising. They start off showing some statistical evidence that donations are more likely after advocacy actions. Great food for though and action for all of you out there trying to connect with people on both of those levels.

CrisisCamp Haiti is a project of Crisis Commons, an organization that brings together technology volunteers to help with disaster relief and humanitarian crises.  This weekend, in DC and several other cities nationwide, tech-savvy volunteers will be gathering to contribute skills to compile information and resources to help the recovery in Haiti.  Anyone with a laptop and internet-savvy can help, and programmers or those with mapping/GIS skills are particularly encouraged to attend.

View additional details on the January 30th CrisisCamp in DC.

Another great project I saw at the Dev Summit was Ushahidi — an open-source crisis tracking and management platform that was developed quickly to track the violence that followed Kenya’s 2008 election. Ushahidi allows data collection via the web, email or SMS. Within minutes of the presentation, various Bay Area developers were planning to roll it out to track ICE raids in their area. There are plenty of other uses from the community level on up.

Ushahidi is getting a lot of well-deserved funding lately, which points to a bright future for the tool.

When I was at Aspiration’s Nonprofit Dev Summit 2009 in Oakland, I heard about All for Good, which is a relatively new volunteer opportunity aggregator. They roll up opportunities from many of the biggest volunteer opportunity listing services out there, and you can also submit opportunities directly, via an XML feed. If your organization is looking for volunteers, you should definitely investigate the various routes to adding your listings to their feeds.

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Beth Kanter is serving up a series of guest posts on Beth’s Blog. Her guests are stepping up to the honor with great posts.

On Confessions of a Non-Profit Executive Director, there’s a blow-by-blow of why Allan chose Drupal for a new site, with modules and all. If that’s not inside baseball enough for you, the comments are full of nitpicking about technical specifics.

I haven’t been posting much lately, partly because I haven’t come across much that really interested me.

But today we have The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online, notes from (or for?) a talk today by Danah Boyd. She spends most of her time looking at the MySpace vs. Facebook divide, particularly among teens. The demographics aren’t news — they are key information for any online strategy. But Boyd takes those numbers out of the marketing perspective and instead forces us to consider them in the light of class and social justice. Her takeaways are understated, giving a smooth landing at the end of a short, but heavy read.

I highly recommend it.

There was a large, organized conversation called an “Unconference” in Washington, DC recently. The purpose? To get innovative-thinking people from business, nonprofit and public sectors talking seriously and collaborating on ideas, policy direction and practical solutions on a variety of good business practices for an environmentally sustainable future … all this based in a hope that such conversations may lead to action of sizable leaps. The Environmental Defense Fund and Ashoka co-hosted the event on June 11 at Google’s offices. Quick note:  an Unconference has no agenda when you show up – the participants create the topics (a facilitator gets you going), host the sessions and drive the direction of the conference.

Here are a few highlights:

• Smart grid: Have you heard of this? Also called the “energy internet”. The idea is that your home or organization’s electricity use could be at your fingertips, in real-time, which would enable us all to see information and that will help us make different choices about our energy use. Right now even the utility company has to send someone to read the meter. But what if you could see the results of the meter anytime of day, via the internet in as close to real-time as possible? Here is a demo of a power meter Google is developing.

• Green certifications: We want and understand the need for a 3^rd party credible certification, and  there are many certification programs developing. What are common standards? How do you know which one to go for? Conversation on this topic popped-up several times during the event.

• What is the purpose of business?: Does business exist only to only make a profit? Or does it have a greater mission, one that is concerned about how it can contribute to the social fabric of our communities and environment? This topic came up in more than one session. For Community IT Innovators we are a voice for the latter, that business exists for a greater social mission and is responsible for considering the environment in its operations, with profit-making as a means to support its greater mission … it’s this greater mission that drives what we each do every day.

• Innovation is asymmetric: How are problems solved? Oftentimes it’s the people on the periphery, not the actual persons trying to solve the problem – it’s when the problem solvers reach out to their nearest colleagues, who have some insight into the topic, who can really help bring about the solutions. And people recognize each other as innovators, not just for the their innovations (no matter what field or specialty one may have). In this way, innovators across disciplines can help each other.

• Green metrics — benchmarks and standards: The details of what businesses, nonprofits and the public sector are measuring, and on what standards we base these on, really varies. From one company to another in the same sector (even competitors) are not reporting the same metrics. Green metrics are being tracked – this is a good thing – there was a sense in multiple conversations that for the benefit of the public and other key stakeholders, we need to move towards having some standards for green metrics.

Our hope it that these and other important topics will be carried further along by innovative thinkers in the Boston, Austin and San Jose ‘Green Innovation for Business Unconferences’. We will be awaiting further communication from the Unconference hosts about next steps, possibly involving working groups, that can get to working on actionable steps.

Notes from the Washington, DC  Green Innovation for Business Unconference are available here if you wish to peruse them.

Visit this NTEN website to view videos of the key speakers from the Nonprofit Technology Conference last month.  Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations talks about the impact of self-organized online communities on traditional organizing.  Eben Moglen, Professor of Law, Columbia Law School and Founding Director of the Software Freedom Law Center, gave a thought-provoking talk in favor of open source software and open knowledge sharing in the technology community.  I highly recommend taking time to view these insightful speakers if you were not able to attend NTC.

I got a timed power strip for home, to plug in my wireless router, the cable modem, and some other accessories that really don’t need to be running all the time. We also use them here at CITI to turn off printers and the like overnight. Both CITI and I bought this Westek from Amazon, but there are certainly other brands and sources.

I’m also hoping this extends the life of this new router, which would mean a triple payoff — green benefits, saving on electricity, and extending the life of the device.