Aug 12, 05:46 pm: [NTEN Bay Area] The Next Generation of Open Source Tools

Live blogging: NTEN Bay Area: Next Generation of Open Source Tools

(all dangers of live blogging apply: misspelling, misquotes and mistakes)

Presenters:

Notes:

From the panel, what does web 2.0 mean to you?

  • Billy: 2.0 is about giving your members/users/constituents the tools they can play with to be creative and speak to your mission and vision. Creating the framework and giving them a mix of tools.
  • Chris: Look at web 2.0 from where we came from. Web 1.0 was pushing content down the pipe, what we’re seeing now is a participatory culture, able to engage and be involved and actually empowered to talk back to what’s being told to them. SpreadFirefox leveraged the volunteer efforts of over 80k members—loosely joined people around the world and able to put firefox on the map. Creating a dialogue and social space on the web.
  • David: excited about the combination of taking a software tool that everyone has some familiarity with—web browser—and create applications that work inside that browser. Also, the idea that nonprofits, ngo need to be able to organization information about their donors, constituents—what additional power can be gained by exposing parts of that information to the world and create a platform to allow them to create.
  • John: Thinking of tools such as blogs and wikis and the ability to share stories on the web—particularly relevant to fundraising. Story is powerful for your ownself but provides other connections for your organization—ways that you can’t think of. A starting point of “I don’t know what’s possible” and letting that get picked up by connected folks.

John:
About open source: open source tools offer very small capitalization for nonprofits to achieve their mission—lesson from the for-profit world. Helps eliminate vendor lock-in.

Growth in blogs show that the storytellers are moving from mass media to everyone.

Nonprofits have to the tools to think about how to use their constituency as more than just a check book.

David:
Open source process can get community input on a variety of things—folks offer a wide-range of expertise to the project.

Chris:
from Spread Firefox: a .pdf that explains firefox in 5 minutes. People can download these and use them to share with people in workplace, etc. First few revisions: copywriting and graphic changes. Quickly: document translated into a variety of languages without any assistance from the developing group (extend capacity)

Billy:
The real big idea is that people are really interested in doing something meaningful. Experience at meet-up: if you give people the tools they will use them; give people a voice, they will speak.

John:
Requires: a shift of thinking to work openly. Nonprofits locked in a competition mind-set.

Chris:
When you give people a chance to really own a piece of you—not fake ownership but real ownership—they will help you in ways that are completely unexpected. ex., SpreadFirefox New York Times ad. Also, drupal hosting problems—raised $11k to get new servers within 48 hours. They do this because they own a piece of the project.

David:
Web 2.0 gives you the chance to have distributed people work closely together. Tools make collaboration easy.

from the room (Phil Klein):
This requires that nonprofit re-envision themselves and give up some of their control. And they are scared of that. How do you make that change? How do you create an environment in which it’s possible? Asked Billy, about the CompuMentor wiki that he mentioned in the opening.

Billy:
Lead in an open way so that you make it possible for people to speak. Openness from the top; it’s not a top-down organizations. The best ideas will emerge and need to be supported.

[missed some]

from the room (Phil):
How do you give ownership and maintain that culture?

Chris:
Stay humble: keep the idea that you need a whole lot of help. Let the community support us. Encourage discussion, discourse but keep the conflict creative.

from the room:
Seems like multiple tracks in the engagement sphere:

  • internal knowledge management
  • open source projects
  • engaging constituency in a controversial topic
    Process and tools need to be developed to be able to support the process.

    Flock demo:

  • flock currently in closed beta.
  • Flock is a social web browser (based off of Firefox). Doing a number of things to enhance people’s ability to use their web browser to communicate—build in ways to disseminate information, create content and talk back to the web.
  • Currently on .2
  • Build in ways to have a more social experience on the web
  • working on breadcumbs: their version of bookmarks—buids in social bookmarking capability
  • breadcrumbs public and you can create watchlists to see what other people are flocking too
  • building in a blogging tool – gives people a free blog but then also integrates if you have a blog someplace else (drag-and-drop blogging)
  • automatically blockquotes quoted date and creates a level metadata for you
  • (very slick. But, I’m not sure how it differs from the various bookmarklets that I use to accomplish much the same kind of functionality within my browser)

CiviCRM demo:

  • CiviCRM
  • parnters with CivicSpace
  • important to have the CRM live inside a larger content management system
  • ability to build on top of a variety of tools as well as take advantage of a variety of developers and tool sets
  • able to do database work inside a web browser and from any computer
  • NOT everything is exposed
  • organizations can make decisions about what to share and what not to share
  • soon will be released as a part of civicspace and will be installed as a part of that install process
  • CiviCRM can still work with a variety of other systems (open standards)

(wiks and blogs are not necessarily open source. I think we need to be careful in talking about these to think about what we mean with open source)

Tagged: , , , , , civicrm

Marnie Webb  |