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News for January 2006
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 29 January 2006 |
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| World Social Forum Coverage from Terraviva |
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The 2006 World Social Forum gathering in Caracas just finished. If you're interested in what happened there (and there was more than you or I could ever hope to digest), you should peruse Terraviva's coverage. Today, I particularly recommend "Organized Civil Society Takes Action on a Global Scale" and "Should the WSF Become a Political Movement". You'll see familiar (and tiresome) issues right alongside inspiring cooperation on the international stage.
Posted: 1/29/06; 11:59:20 PM # |
| Resources at Tools for Change |
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The free resources offered by Margot Adair and Bill Aal at Tools for Change are well worth your time. Tools for Change is a smart and compassionate training and consulting organization and this page contains PDFs on such things as "Creating Shared Intent for Perilous Times", "Helpful Approaches to Conflict", and "Principles of Applied Meditation".
Posted: 1/29/06; 11:49:34 PM # |
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25 January 2006 |
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| Building Communities from the Inside Out |
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I was inspired years ago by the asset mapping techniques of John McKnight, who believed that urban communities needed to build on their strengths, rather than on their needs. More than a decade ago, he and John Kretzmann wrote a book called Building Communities from the Inside Out, which I would like to recommend to you today. All of their techniques, from "releasing individual capacities" to "capturing local institutions for community building" can be leveraged to great effect with online communication. New technology has dramatically lowered the cost of asset mapping and asset based organizing, but even projects specifically related to new technology seem to be dragged down by needs assessments and the like. This book is full of fantastic tools and resources which I recommend to any planner, organizer, or online community builder.
Posted: 1/25/06; 1:46:04 PM # |
| Friends on the Path |
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Thich Nhat Hanh, poet, peace activist, and zen master, lives, teaches, writes in the Plum Village community, a meditation center in southern France. The role of community in an engaged spiritual life interests me profoundly, so of course I had to read Friends on the Path, compiled by Jack Lawlor, with essays by Thich Nhat Hanh and others. The language used is Buddhist of course and so it might be inaccessible to those whose spiritual or cultural background doesn't leave them open to it. But the concepts and lessons are powerful and universal. The book is a great balance of case studies, principles, and practices, including building intergenerational community, creating refuge, starting communities, and nurturing a mindful culture.
Posted: 1/25/06; 1:31:56 PM # |
| Thematic Axes of the World Social Forum |
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The World Social Forum is underway in Venezuela today, a truly enormous gathering of people united by the desire to find an alternative to rapacious globalizations. One of the things that fascinates me most about this is the extraordinary diversity of causes that find themselves with a common purpose. If, like me, you would like to see the work of civil society organizations be less fragmented, you might get something out of studying the World Social Forum. One place to start is by reading the Thematic Axes of the World Social Forum. Although the language is a little abstract at times, it's short enough to really convey a solid idea of this emerging framework for global collaboration.
Posted: 1/25/06; 1:31:42 PM # |
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24 January 2006 |
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| In Cold Blood - A Nasty Public Service Announcement from the American Red Cross |
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If you already envy the Red Cross a bit for the ease with which they raise money in the wake of any disaster, you're probably a little embarrassed by that envy. But now you have good reason to be upset. In a nasty new ad campaign, the Red Cross is promoting blood donations by ridiculing activism. Seth Stevenson's critique of the ad is sharp and to the point. He calls the ad both insidious and unfair. I call it a disgustingly poor display of nonprofit citizenship. Furthermore, as Stevenson points out, sometimes giving to an organization that changes the world is far more effective than another bandaid, especially with an organization like the Red Cross, whose handling of the massive funds they raised after Sept. 11 and Hurricane Katrina have come under legitimate criticism. Ultimately, of course, we all know that social service and social change are not incompatible and that most of us support both. I hope you'll consider contacting the Red Cross about this, especially if you work on child labor or other issues ridiculed by their ad.
Posted: 1/24/06; 1:20:28 PM # |
| South African NGO Web Awards 2006 |
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There will be a new event at this year's ICTs and Civil Society Conference for Southern Africa: An award for NGO web sites. Once upon a time, such awards would have been based upon visual design, with the frequent result of rewarding ineffectiveness. The field has matured enough that such awards can now be firmly grounded in communication goals, with content, technology, and even visual design playing an appropriate supporting role. I've been invited to contribute my perspective to these awards and I'm excited about SANGONeT's opportunity to learn from the mistakes we've made here in the northern hemisphere.
Posted: 1/24/06; 1:01:46 PM # |
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22 January 2006 |
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| Asking the Wrong Questions |
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I've written an article on the subject of nonprofit technology planning, entitled Asking the Wrong Questions, for the inaugural issue of N-TEN Connect, the association's new newsletter. Using NPower and TechSoup as my case studies, I find that our planning methods are technocentric, are serving our constituents poorly, and are in desperate need of reinvention. We keep saying that we are promoting technology in service of organizational mission, but I don't think that's true nearly as often as it ought to be. I'm teaching an online workshop later this week on the subject.
Posted: 1/22/06; 10:39:38 PM # |
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20 January 2006 |
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| Spatial Hypertext and the Practice of Information Triage |
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More and more we find ourselves having to make judgments about written information without fully reading that information. It's just part of life in a world where our own decisions, rather then the limits of the media, determine how much information comes our way. I have a fascination with how people make such decisions and what could empower them to do so more effectively. As a visual thinker myself, I enjoyed some of the insights in Spatial Hypertext and the Practice of Information Triage (10 page PDF), a paper written quite a few years ago by Catherine Marshall and Frank Shipman.
Posted: 1/20/06; 2:05:41 PM # |
| Google Rebuffs Feds on Search Requests |
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It's nice to see Google refusing to cooperate with yet another sweeping invasion of privacy of U.S citizens. The Bush administration evidently wants to search through who has been searching for what over a week long period. No probably cause. No limitation to specific people or even to foreigners. I wonder how long they will hold them off.
Posted: 1/20/06; 1:50:57 PM # |
| The Futility of Boycotts |
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Boycotts, as you probably know, are rarely very effective at influencing corporate behavior. I believe that they can be valuable for consciousness raising, but I am very disappointed when people think that consumer actions will change the world. One of my favorite local columnists, Geov Parrish, wrote today about The Futility of Boycotts, and I hope his piece gets widely read. I particularly hope that organizations who use feel-good strategies such as boycotts (petitions being another) consider the integrity and impact of teaching people that this influences corporate behavior when most of the time, it doesn't. Now, if you have inside supporters or can influence government at the same time, that's another story. Then a boycott becomes a smokescreen for a more aggressive form of politics.
Posted: 1/20/06; 1:48:00 PM # |
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19 January 2006 |
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| New Online Seminar: The Permeable Nonprofit |
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The pressures on nonprofits to collaborate are growing every year. Weblogs, social bookmarking, email, messaging, and all the permutations of network centric communication are dissolving the traditional boundaries of the organization. What does this mean for your organization? Will you even be around in five years? Or will you find a way to thrive and pursue your mission with even greater vigor? If you're interested in these questions, you will want to sign up for our online seminar on February 23, 2006, called The Permeable Nonprofit.
Posted: 1/19/06; 6:19:08 PM # |
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18 January 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal: January 2006 Edition |
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The January 2006 Edition of Nonprofit Online is now available. We have some great articles this month: Katha Pollitt of The Nation looks back on 2005 and finds some bright spots. I've known Andy Himes for twenty years and it is a pleasure to finally be able to write about this extraordinary man in a profile about his work. Phil Cubeta dives headfirst into the issue of the awkward fragmentation of the field of philanthropy. We are publishing the results of the 2005 DonorTrends survey, from Cravers, Matthews, Smith, and Company. Stever Robbins offers some excellent ideas for dealing with email overload, in an organizational context. We also have our usual features: The 60 annotated resources are organized into dozens of useful categories and include nine book reviews. This month's Quicksheet is on the process of deciding to implement a wiki.
Posted: 1/18/06; 5:21:09 PM # |
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17 January 2006 |
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| The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820 - 1875 |
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Gary Clayton Anderson's The Conquest of Texas is unlike any other book I have reviewed in these pages, but it may well be the most important. The subtitle gave me my first inkling of the book's broader relevance: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land, 1820 - 1875. But as I got deeper into the book, it became clear to me that the frightening connections of its themes to the realm of today's world politics were far from superficial. The author's depth of research and even handedness builds the case that the Texas Ranger version of the region's past is an ideological fabrication that masks a history of systematic racial violence and ethnic warfare. What frightens me more deeply, of course, is not that the mythology of Texas is a lie (I wasn't attached to it in the first place), but that this mythology, which was used to effectively cover up ethnic cleansing for over a hundred years, might be successfully repurposed on the global scale. The world's greatest imperial power, its client states, and its corporate allies, have a swaggering Texas wannabe at the helm and the American Texas Ranger metaphor is all too apt and popular. If like me you are struggling to understand the place of our work in these historic times, then you must read this book.
Posted: 1/17/06; 7:43:50 PM # |
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16 January 2006 |
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| Remembering Martin Luther King Jr. |
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Blair Golson has compiled a timely set of resources for Remembering Martin Luther King Jr., including his famous speech against U.S. foreign aggression, records of the FBI's spying on King, and many good general sources. I pray that we choose action as our form of remembrance today.
Posted: 1/16/06; 11:43:55 PM # |
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15 January 2006 |
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| ‘Worker Centers’ Pick Up Where Unions, Govt. Leave Off |
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You can see the benefits of a strong labor movement in the standard of living in the social democracies of Western Europe, but labor unions have gone through a multi-generational decline in the United States. It's encouraging to see that labor has other organizing outlets than traditional unionism, especially in the rise of workers' centers.
Posted: 1/15/06; 11:50:32 PM # |
| Beginners Guide to Search Engine Optimization |
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For many years, I have discouraged organizations from paying much attention to Search Engine Optimization. This was because it was probably a pointless exercise for most organizations and because gaming the engines seemed artificial and dishonest to me. Slowly but surely however, the search engines themselves started to change this. Today, ranking highly in a search engine might just be a sign of relevance. While I still think that many of the techniques are to be avoided, I think it's worth being familiar with the basics of Search Engine Optimization.
Posted: 1/15/06; 11:29:48 PM # |
| Truth Commissions |
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Many years ago, when I was a lobbyist, I learned that one of the greatest assets possessed by the organizations I supported was the truth. If we could get the truth out, then we had leverage, even if it was only because policy makers seem to possess a teenager's fear of embarrassment. Years later, I watched the end of apartheid in South Africa and witnessed the power of the truth and reconciliation commissions there. Compare the relative peace of South Africa to the ongoing lies and violence of the Middle East or Northern Ireland and you will see what I mean. If you have an interest in this approach, I recommend you start with some of the research on the subject of truth commissions.
Posted: 1/15/06; 11:25:39 PM # |
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13 January 2006 |
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| Webstractor |
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In one of my larger research projects this last year, I had the chance to put a tool called Webstractor (Mac only) to the test. Webstractor is an elegant assistant to web based research. It collects web clippings which you can then edit, keeping the reference URL, but removing all the extraneous navigation, branding, and advertising content. You can search your material, reorganize it, annotate it, save it to PDF, and give it a table of contents. It's ideal for keeping highly directed research in one place and readying it for analysis and publication.
Posted: 1/13/06; 1:03:30 PM # |
| TAMS Analyzer |
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I lot of the research work that I do involves text, sometimes very large quantities of text. Sometimes, it's critical to be able to mark up that text in ways that reflect my research questions. That's when I need a tool like TAMS Analyzer (Mac and GNUstep). TAMS (Text Analysis Mark-up System) is an open source application for analyzing themes in documents. It is particularly useful in media analysis and similar sociological investigations. If you are ever in the position of wanting to genuinely understand trends in your field, you would want to give TAMS Analyzer to a trained group of volunteers (or graduate students) and use it to build a coded understanding of the documents (or web sites) that mediate your communities of practice.
Posted: 1/13/06; 12:51:29 PM # |
| DevonThink |
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If you do research or writing, or you are just an information hound, you may want to consider a remarkable piece of software that I have spent more than a year trying to incorporate into my workflow. It's called DevonThink (Mac only) and it's a desktop file management and information discovery tool. It blends classic taxonomic organizing with full text search, wiki style cross links, concordance, and an inference engine that learns from how you categorize things. It's a smart tool for writers and researchers who work with a diverse range of information nuggets. It is extensible, scriptable, and capable of organizing, viewing, and editing a huge range of data types. The company behind it provides solid support and the user community if vibrant. Finally, it's easy to get your data into and out of it, which is to me an sign of great respect for the user.
Posted: 1/13/06; 12:33:28 PM # |
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11 January 2006 |
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| Online Professional Briefing Calendar |
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Our online workshops have matured into a rather rich set of offerings over the course of the last year. In order to help people plan their participation a little further ahead, we have put together an Online Professional Briefing Calendar. We will be posting workshop sessions there soon after they are scheduled. Right now, upcoming briefings include: Email Newsletter Marketing, The Permeable Nonprofit, Frictionless Fundraising, Nonprofit Technology Planning, Nonprofit Knowledge Management, and The Modern Nonprofit Website.
Posted: 1/11/06; 6:54:32 PM # |
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8 January 2006 |
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| Contemplative Toolbox: The Social Justice Program |
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If you have an interest in cultivating greater mindfulness in your work life or in your organization as a whole, I recommend that you explore the Contemplative Toolbox from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. With examples from many traditions, it has small and large practices for both groups and individuals.
Posted: 1/8/06; 10:40:07 PM # |
| Microsoft Takes Down Chinese Blogger |
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Rebecca Mackinnon has a good run down on how Microsoft is getting into the political censorship game by shutting down a Chinese blogger. It used to be that the Chinese government would block politically undesirable sites themselves, but now they have Microsoft doing it for them. Do you use MSN Spaces for a blog? It's probably time to move.
Posted: 1/8/06; 10:35:22 PM # |
| Wholesale Problems: Retail Changes |
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Writing in Body Impolitic, Laurie Edison and Debbie Notkin use the mercantile concepts of wholesale and retail to describe different scales of social change and social service work. They pay particular attention to the ways in which people who help others on a small scale can find their work trivialized. I would add that this depends on the circles in which you travel. I have found that different subsectors work very hard to identify how they are different from other organizations, rather than what they have in common or how they depend on each other.
Posted: 1/8/06; 10:31:26 PM # |
| The Them Me Us |
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Several recommendations came in this week for Alan Rosenblatt's The Them Me Us, which describe his three categories of journalism and media at the start of the twenty first century. Them Media is corporate mainstream media. We Media is grassroots journalism, the dominant form being weblogs. Us Media includes the newsletters, magazines and email alerts published by associations, non-profits and advocacy groups. He calls it "Us" Media because these organizations represent collectives of members with shared interests and stakes.
Posted: 1/8/06; 10:19:57 PM # |
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5 January 2006 |
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| Upcoming Email Newsletter Marketing Briefing Sessions |
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Our Email Newsletter Marketing workshops are among our most popular and its easy to understand why. We provide a logic model that truly reflects the best practices being taught by consultants and a complete framework for the kinds of metrics that lead to predictable results and improvement. Our next series is on February 7 - 9, 2006.
Posted: 1/5/06; 4:32:25 PM # |
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1 January 2006 |
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| My Three Wishes for 2006 |
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I have three wishes for the nonprofit sector in 2006. I hope you will help me make them come true. In brief, my wishful thinking is this: (1) Mainstream leaders across US civil society wake up to the fact that the fundamental underpinnings of our sector are being destroyed. (2) The traditional silos and boundaries of nonprofit corporations loosen and open enough to take advantage of the power of networks. (3) Those who concern themselves with innovation in the sector will stop confusing it with hipness and will start investing in true structural enablers of new ideas.
Posted: 1/1/06; 11:05:59 PM # |
| 2005: Year in Review |
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The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy has published a robust Year in Review for 2005. Available as a free PDF, the document includes: The Best and Worst of Public Policy, The State of the States, The DMI 2005 Injustice Index, Eye on the Right, The Year in the Blogosphere, The 2005 Reading List, and How 2005 Changed America. This is solid reading for a sense of how we enter the new year in US civil society and politics.
Posted: 1/1/06; 10:55:49 PM # |
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