Weblog
1 hour ago: Two NPTech Pipes
Inspired by Marshall’s excellent post on using an RSS setting up a microsite, I decided to spend a bit playing with Yahoo! pipes, Aide RSS, dapper, and feed.informer. The result? NpTech Digest and NPTech Popular. Both are based on the same set of feeds — nptech from del.icio.us and technorati and a selection of searches in run in Google’s blogsearch. The NPTech digest is the various feed items, run through feed.informer to de-dup (though that wasn’t actually necessary) and then cleaned up a bit to remove bold tags from the headline (thanks for the help there, Marshall). The NPTech Popular takes the same set of feeds, runs them through AideRSS, puts the popular items RSS feed into Yahoo! pipes, cleans up the headlines and sorts by popularity. I probably could have done this in a more elegant way but it does work, I think. I still want to do some more tinkering here to get to a better understanding of how to use this. And my search feeds could absolutely use refinement (they are pretty simply and there could be a few more set up to capture more synonyms — like charity, npo, nonprofit, non-governmental organization, ngo, etc). But it’s a start.
Anyhow, I’m sharing the link to the pipes above on the off chance that anyone else finds ‘em useful. You can subscribe, embed, share as you may wish.
13 hours ago: And the change is closer
CA Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban:
The California Supreme Court has overturned a gay marriage ban in a ruling that would make the nation’s largest state the second one to allow gay and lesbian weddings.
The justices’ 4-3 decision Thursday says domestic partnerships are not a good enough substitute for marriage. Chief Justice Ron George wrote the opinion.
The city of San Francisco, two dozen gay and lesbian couples and gay rights groups sued in March 2004 after the court halted San Francisco’s monthlong same-sex wedding march.
The case before the court involved a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn a voter-approved law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman.
As the kids say: w00t!
4 days ago: Follow the nonprofit pulse
When I saw Eduardo Bejar‘s tweet this morning announcing nonprofit pulse, I almost came undone. And have been peppering him with wish list items since:
- RSS-enable the bits — the most shared lins and the tweets — to make it easy to move it around via things like Sprout (as well as subscribe and all the other RSS goodness)
- Filter the replies out of the cloud (or provide that as an option anyway)
- add a search box
I suggest because I love. Seriously. Good stuff and a nice example of pulling the conversation together.
And, not so by the way, this seems to me a great example of the nptech crowd on twitter going from network to community.
5 days ago: Creating Bridges to Change
Intel’s Perry Gruber has a good post up at CSR@Intel about how people can come together, with and without traditional NGOs and development organizations, to work on the tough problems of the world. Perry writes:
But when you consider the upstarts and the results they’re producing, it’s plausible that in the not-too-distant future “development” and “aid” will be more directly dispensed by “we the people” instead of being bureaucratically administered on our behalf by international, bilateral and large aid agencies.
I may be wrong. Perhaps there’s room for everyone at the table. Afterall, the problems these agencies are working are big. But with the growing effectiveness of these new entrants, I think the game’s been changed.
I think he’s right about the change. The fact that individuals are increasingly able to come together to create solutions without the help of traditional nonprofits. I also think that this kind of bringing together is what is required to truly make change. I also think that NGOs need to change to take advantage of these tools.
I don’t think that it’s fair to say that the sector is broken. I think that there is a lot broken and there is a lot that is hard to make work right. It’s tough to work on long term problems when you customers, the people who need your services, by definition cannot afford them. You are always trying to mix and match things in productive ways and that is more or less possible depending on the size of your organization and your relationship with funders.
Fundamentally, though I think the questions he’s asking are the right ones and I think the organizations he points to are on the forefront of creating the kinds of bridges that are necessary to make that change.
I also think that this is part of what we are working on at NetSquared. We are working on, if I can use a phrase that pops up in our funding proposals, the human capital part of this problem, right now. How can we unlock the brainpower of hundreds of thousands of smart people to help create platforms and projects that can result in greater exposure of data. That’s what I think mashups are about, by the way. Ways to combine and expose data so that individuals can interact with the information in ways that allow them to change their behaviors, contribute where it matters or most, or just generally understand something in ways that they hadn’t before.
Perry Gruber put his questions to his colleagues in CSR-land. And they assume that NGOs aren’t a part of the solution but that business can come in and make the change that is required to either bypass the sector or get the sector on track. But let me reframe his questions: How are you working with corporations? How do you think the sector can work with corporations? How are you working together to bring together groups to create change? Do you think it’s even possible?
(credits: hat tip to vsef for the post pointer; the photo is mine)
7 days ago: Week 7: It's all upcoming
By now, you are developing a strong online presence. You should be continuing to add feeds to your reader, friends to your twitter stream. You are blogging and watching your own audience grow. It’s time to start connecting your online work with the face-to-face events.
Upcoming is an event listing service. You’ll need to sign up (you should use a name consistent with your other services to make it easy for people recognize you). Of course, you want to fill out your profile, pointing to the blog that you’ve been working on. The service is pretty straightforward. Spend some time clicking around and looking at how it’s set up. Pay particular attention to the groups. You might not find anyin your topic area but you might find some groups that have the kind of people you want to connect to. They might be techies or activists or political groups. Join the ones that look interesting.
Now that you’ve spent some time looking around. Sign up for some events. Don’t worry, right now, about whether or not they are in your area. You can say that you are watching them. This will help expose you to other people who may be interested in the same topics you are. Like many of these services, you can “friend” people which can also be a good way to find events.
So why are you doing this? Well, the point of using these tools isn’t to use them and build up a lot of web friends. Though that can be nice. The point is to use these tools to make change and coming together with people, in a physical place, just can’t be underestimated. This exercise is to start getting you thinking about the kind of events that happen in your area, either geographical or topical.
As you continue your work over the coming weeks, you’ll have occasions to add things to upcoming. It’s easy to do and you don’t have to be an event organizer to make that happen. And, I’ll prepare you know, host a few events of your own.
This is an easy week. Keep the practice going.
(Photo credit: The Birds by Anthony & Farren)
7 days ago: Needed: A designer with good textpattern knowledge
I’m looking for more than just another template for the blog here. If you are a designer that can do some lightweight logo work and give this blog a thorough face lift, integrating some of the Textpattern goodness that will allow me to tweak forms and settings in the future, I want to hear from you. Send me an email.
Tags: textpattern, txp, designer, blog
9 days ago: How do Communities and Networks Relate to Each Other?
Nancy White writes about the magic between communities and networks and points to some tweets on the topic. I’ve been trying to work out the difference between the two. Or if not the difference, the way they interact with each other.
In the comments to Nancy’s post Beth Kanter says that she’s been thinking about this two and in relation to the nptech tag.
I’ve been trying to work this out too. I think it matters for design of a web site and the architecture of the community. Often, I find myself using the words almost interchangeably. But they aren’t. When I think about it, LinkedIn feels like a network but Twitter feels like a community. And the nptech tag? Well, that feels like a way to share knowledge. But I do think that’s it lead to people finding each other and becoming engaged in community activities on places like Twitter and certain in the work that NTEN does.
So, what’s different about this? To me, it feels like a network is a place where people perform actions because it benefit them but those actions also benefit the community. Del.icio.us is a great example of this, as is Flickr. In both cases, I use the services because it helps me organize my bookmarks or my photos. But my behavior, using tags and sets or bundles, adding comments, helps the other members of the network be providing them interesting or valuable information. And if I stop at that. Using the network platform as a tool to enrich my own experience and, perhaps, borrowing from others use of it. Well, that’s a network. And that’s a lot. It’s very good and very helpful.
In a community, people start behaving in ways that aren’t immediately helpful to them but build the space — physical or ideological — that is jointly shared. This happens on Twitter when people answer questions of other users. And when they share what they are working on to continue a conversation.
Does that sounds like it’s going in the right direction? What do you think? What is the difference and the overlap between the two?
(Photo credit: D’Arcy Norman’s “Map of Online Communities”)
10 days ago: Things I should be writing about
I’m a list maker and here’s the stuff I’ve told myself I should write up as blog posts:
- FriendFeed – doesn’t crank my tractor. I mean, I want context not just a stream of info.
- Attention is the marketplace. And social benefit projects have a secret sauce. Twitter friends think it’s about the story (1, 2, 3, 4). I think it’s about the data. And the juxtaposition of that data. Social benefit organizations collect a lot of stuff — how many people need food, get food, need shelter, are seeking mental health assistance, need a surgery, leave near a polluted water source, don’t have access to water. How do they use this secret sauce to make the change they seek?
- Does social networking, and the way it helps you reach out to the like minded, just give us more ways to preach to the choir? It’s the think tank, baby.
- What can Facebook do to be less annoying? Anything? Anyone?
- It’s a post-fact world. How about a post context world? Blogging lost some context. Twitter loses more. Good? Bad? Does it matter?
Whatcha think? Any of those worth more effort than that?
Tags: net2, blogging, lists, friendfeed, nptech, socialnetworking, facebook, post-fact, attention
13 days ago: It's got to be easier than this
Marhsall Kirckpatrick has a great detailed post on putting up an RSS-based microsite. Though this was done to support an event, it’s easy for nptech readers to translate to an issue-based site. Such a microsite could be great for managing information internally or externally.
But what he writes about is hard. Frankly, we need at tool, out-of-the-box, to do some of the basic things he’s suggesting:
- figure out way to measure “popularity”
- get rid of duplicate posts
- measure the various links
Marshall does a fantastic job of cobbling together a variety of tools but should that be necessary?
[From Marshall Kirkpatrick » How to Build an RSS and Blog News Site for Your Project]
