[Printer Friendly Version]

News for May 2006

30 May 2006

Surfing the Rolling Cloud of Connectivity: ICT and the Developing World

I wish I could attend this NetSquared session entitled Surfing the Rolling Cloud of Connectivity: ICT and the Developing World. Some of the things that interest me in this context include: What is the best use of the connectivity that is there already, especially in the form of cell phones? What is the nature of the African blogosphere and how can its success be amplified and replicated? What existing, empowering, local social networks can very carefully leveraged with the right ICTs? Posted: 5/30/06; 3:29:09 PM #

Different Kinds of Elites (and Different Kinds of Elitism)

Ivan Boothe of Genocide Intervention helps us distinguish different kinds of elites and different kinds of elitism, in the context of the kind of leaders needed by effective social movements. I find his four types of elites to be conceptually powerful and practical: Power elites are the traditional decisionmakers. Resource elites are those who have the infrastructure. Idea elites are the ideological leaders who emerge. Literacy elites are those who can "read" the situation. Posted: 5/30/06; 12:44:06 PM #

NetSquared Conference Schedule
	Although it's uncomfortably hype-filled for my tastes, given some of the excellent speakers they've recruited, the NetSquared Conference is likely to have a few juicy tidbits worth savoring. Posted: 5/30/06; 9:27:55 AM #

22 May 2006

Nonprofit Online News Journal: May 2006 Edition

The May 2006 Edition of Nonprofit Online News Journal is out, with the usual features and a new Quicksheet on analyzing a sector for its innovation potentials. Our articles this month include: Seth Godin on turning donors into fundraisers, Chip Berlet on the failure of funders to build a progressive culture, Robert Weiner on choosing online fundraising software, Just Associates on understanding power relations, and finally, another installment in my series on nonprofit knowledge management, this time on nimbleness and building capacity for learning. Posted: 5/22/06; 4:42:19 PM #

21 May 2006

The Black Stake in the Internet: Net Neutrality is an African American Issue

Writing about the black stake in the Internet, the Black Commentator's Bruce Dixon makes the case of how Net Neutrality is an African American Issue. He is responding to the shameful deception being perpetrated to enable telecommunication companies to destroy the basic freedom of the Internet. If your stakeholders are wealthy corporations, then you can ignore this issue. Otherwise, you're in the same position as all the minority constituencies for whom the Internet has made the concept of "freedom of the press" come true. Posted: 5/21/06; 10:48:05 PM #

Net Neutrality Makes for Strange Allies

I have been writing for some time now about how the current U.S. government is undermining the fundamental enablers of civil society. In a vivid example of the kind of broad mindedness that is needed to respond to these threats, please read of how Net Neutrality Makes for Strange Allies. Groups from the left and right are lining up to help preserve the basic freedom of the Internet. What is your organization doing? Posted: 5/21/06; 10:40:50 PM #

The Truth About Open Source in the Social Sector

I was very pleased to read Nick Gleason's article on The Truth About Open Source in the Social Sector. I am a serious supporter of open source software, but I am an even stronger supporter of the open standards that allow open source software to thrive. Just as important is the fact that open standards allow organizations to affordably mix both open source and commercial solutions, depending upon their needs. Posted: 5/21/06; 10:30:18 PM #

14 May 2006

Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems

One of my concerns about nonprofit technology funding and many nonprofit tech projects is how they fail to take a systems approach to nurturing innovation and leveraging resources. Thinking about nonprofits and nonprofit technology in ecosystem terms can be a very powerful alternative to winner-take-all vanity projects. A strong example of that kind of thinking is provided in the Berkman Center's Roadmap for Open ICT Ecosystems (45 page PDF). For example, the Openness Maturity Model promulgated in this report is a particularly valuable approach to judging nonprofit tech projects. Posted: 5/14/06; 6:11:06 PM #

Copywriting 101

In addition to my own writing, I have a long history of working with other writers. (Stay tuned for new projects related to that this year, by the way.) Every now and then, I come across some guidelines for writers that I think are particularly useful or timely. Brian Clark's Copywriting 101 is an excellent ten part tutorial that is well suited to the demands of online writing. Posted: 5/14/06; 5:59:10 PM #

Five Minute Flowchart

If you follow my work, you will know that I am a believer in the power of flowcharts to describe systems. There are lots of great software applications for building such charts, but the collaborative tools are expensive or awkward. So, I was pleased to see a low tech option: The Five Minute Flow Chart is a word template that you can use to print out flow chart elements and use them in a group exercise on a table top. Posted: 5/14/06; 5:50:57 PM #

Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters

John Grohol has written a great article entitled Anonymity and Online Community: Identity Matters at A List Apart. Although he doesn't deal with the value of anonymity in authoritarian contexts, he does an excellent job explaining how persistent identity (even if it's pseudonymous) contributes to an online community. I agree with his essential premise of Membership as a Filter and his Six Steps to Better Online Community are sharp and provocative: (1) Know thy users. (2) Simple registration is not a burden. (3) Segment your registration system. (4) Address issues of user email verification. (5) Provide a rating or reputation system. (6) Keep the communication flowing. Posted: 5/14/06; 5:41:04 PM #

12 May 2006

Trance of Scarcity
	The very last session I dropped in on today was on the topic of the Trance of Scarcity. Victoria Castle is referring to the way in which the paradigm of "not enough" (money, time, love, whatever) rules us. I have seen enough of this in organizations to be particularly impressed with her choice of the word "trance" to describe the phenomenon. Disturbingly accurate. Posted: 5/12/06; 6:50:34 PM #

Identity Woman

Kaliya Halman gave a lecture this afternoon on Networks in the Noosphere (using Teilhard de Chardin's term), in which she carefully laid out the connections between living networks, the Internet, and human networks, while emphasizing the importance of openness (of both source code and standards) as support structures for community. She blogs at Identity Woman and at the end of her session it was clear that the difficult concept of online "identity" was central to the entire discussion. Posted: 5/12/06; 6:44:42 PM #

Peggy Holman of the Open Circle Company

One of the great pleasures of conferences is to discover all of the many ways in which people are working to heal the world. One of the presenters at a session on "Engaging Common Wisdom" was Peggy Holman of the Open Circle Company, which focuses on empowering models of group work. She has a nice collection of papers online, including a good introduction to Appreciative Inquiry and another on the concept of emergence. Posted: 5/12/06; 11:38:40 AM #

Social Artistry

I am attending the Sacred Activism conference, where the opening speaker today was Jean Houston. She was eloquent, as always, and spoke, as she has been doing recently, on the topic of Social Artistry. Social artistry is her brand for the kind of creative leadership that is needed today, a leadership that bridges the gap between the mythic and the practical. Needless to say, she is a marvelous speaker. Posted: 5/12/06; 11:05:13 AM #

10 May 2006

Trust, But Cut the Cards
	Putnam Barber cuts to the heart of the man-bites-dog issues of ethical breaches in the nonprofit sector in his latest piece for us, entitled: Trust, But Cut the Cards. He takes a look at the higher vulnerability of nonprofits and offers three things that every organization should do to protect themselves. This is a must read. Posted: 5/10/06; 1:00:21 PM #

7 May 2006

Email: Asynchronous Communication, Creativity and Time-Management

For several months now, I have been critically examining my work contexts, to determine what sort of work gets done best in what sort of contexts. Because so much of my work is online, it's easy for me to fail to identify different online work modes and assign tasks to those modes so that they can get done most effectively. This is very much a symptom of the overall trend of ICT convergence: It requires us to set new boundaries because it's dissolving the artificial ones. I think this is a good thing. So, Steven Berlin Johnson (whose books you should read) has also been thinking about this, and reflects on it briefly in Email: asynchronous communication, creativity and time-management. Posted: 5/7/06; 10:59:49 PM #

Interview with Kumi Naidoo - Building Bridges Across Divides
	Allavida has published an interview with Kumi Naidoo, the General Secretary of CIVICUS. I had the pleasure of meeting him briefly at the SANGONeT Conference in 2005 and have enjoyed following his work since then. Posted: 5/7/06; 10:53:23 PM #

Pricing a Project
	Brian Fling has written some great guidelines on Pricing a Project that I think will be of value to consultants and others who serve nonprofit organizations. He takes a transparent approach that challenges me somewhat, but I think that's a very good thing. Posted: 5/7/06; 10:47:45 PM #

4 May 2006

Nonprofit Online News: Best of 2005 (New Free PDF)

For the fourth year in a row, we are publishing a free compendium of our best resources from the preceding year. Nonprofit Online News: The Best of 2005 is available now on our Free PDFs page. It contains 127 resources, organized into 44 categories including Evaluation, Strategy, Leadership, Communication & PR, Software, Community Building, Knowledge & Learning, Collaboration, Planning, and a good number of cross cutting issues. At a record 98 pages, I think you'll find it to be a valuable source of reference material. Posted: 5/4/06; 9:35:38 PM #

3 May 2006

Nonprofit Knowledge Management: Three Essential Seminars in Support of Learning

We're slowly publishing some of the things we know about nonprofit knowledge management in a series of articles in Nonprofit Online News Journal. You can also dig into this material with me personally next month when I teach our online series on the subject: Nonprofit Knowledge Management: Three Essential Seminars in Support of Learning. This series, which will be held on June 20 to 22nd, 2006, is evolving into a bedrock piece of work for us. This is the second time I'm teaching it in this form and I feel we have made new headway in understanding some of its core topics: avoiding the major mistakes of KM, effective ways to get started on the right track, basic principles to guide KM projects, creating systems that support learning, and building communities of practice. Posted: 5/3/06; 3:23:35 PM #

1 May 2006

Why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool
	Central Desktop Blog gives us he reasons why Email Is Still The Most Adopted Collaboration Tool. The reasons include the fact that email is: easy to understand, accessible, personalizable, manageable, searchable, and in your face. Posted: 5/1/06; 10:30:08 PM #