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News for September 2006
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 27 September 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal: September 2006 Edition |
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Are you stuck at the top of a short hill? The September 2006 Edition of the Journal is now available and has a Quicksheet on the subject of The Problem of the Local Optimum. This month's articles are mostly about relationship building. My piece on "The Permeable Nonprofit" looks at how organizations can walk the middle path as the world of communication changes radically around us. "Harnessing the Word-of-Mouth Power of Influentials" reminds us that we are part of a web of relationships and that the web itself needs tending. "The Taxonomy of Public Communication Campaigns" will help you think critically about how purpose, scope, and maturity affect the planning and evaluation of your communication efforts. "Please Don't Send Me Microsoft Word Documents" reminds us that we can care for the web of our communities through our choice of tools. Finally, my look at "The Dialectics of Knowledge Management" presents four recommendations on how to be mindful as we prepare ourselves for the vast amount of learning that will be expected of us in the years to come.
Posted: 9/27/06; 10:39:59 PM # |
| Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy |
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The dotOrganize project has released the results of its nine month study of social change groups, technology providers, and nonprofit technology capacity builders: Online Technology for Social Change: From Struggle to Strategy. (The report is available in a thoughtfully presented web format, as well a 33 page PDF.) It should come as no surprise to any of my readers that lack of data integration and interoperability emerged as a major impediment to effective organizing. The report actually focuses on a rich set of recommendations, including: (1) Define Best Practices for Online Organizing. (2) Enhance Strategic Support and Information Resources. (3) Provide Robust, Flexible, Documented, and Sustainable Software for Social Change. (4) Support Adoption of On-Demand Software. (5) Prioritize Documentation, Ongoing Support, and Training. (6) Aggregate and Share Information on Technology Costs. (7) Increase Offerings to the Full Spectrum of Social Change Groups. Although I'm not sure that any of them will successfully address the data integration issue that they raise as a key issue, I think they have compiled a fantastic set of high level capacity building ideas here.
Posted: 9/27/06; 11:47:06 AM # |
| Online Politics 101 |
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Colin Delany's Online Politics 101 (44 page PDF) is a great little guide to current electoral practice. I particularly like his Five Simple Rules for Online Politics: (1) Think about the ends before you think about the means. (2) Brilliance almost always takes second place to persistence. (3) Integrate, integrate, integrate. (4) Content is key. (5) Is selling an idea (or a candidate) like selling soap? Yep.
Posted: 9/27/06; 11:27:30 AM # |
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25 September 2006 |
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| Blogs and Community |
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Nancy White is someone with whom I wish I worked more closely. Providing me with yet another reason, she's written a great overview of the key issues of and connections between Blogs and Community. In this paper, she clearly identifies the differences between the destination-centric and bounded community building environments of the past (such as bulletin boards and mailing lists) and the person-centric and emergent community building aspects of blogging.
Posted: 9/25/06; 1:34:54 PM # |
| The Living Library |
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The Living Library of the Dropping Knowledge Project is both intriguing and a little opaque. Since that's what some people think of my own work and since I appreciate the payoff of the occasional learning curve, I have found it to be a rich and powerful environment for social and political media sharing. Check it out and take your time.
Posted: 9/25/06; 1:15:44 PM # |
| Civil Society in India |
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Ever since the start of my relationship with SANGONeT and Southern African civil society, I have been investing time in studying the forms and issues of civil organizations in developing nations. In this short article on Civil Society in India, Patralekha Chatterjee describes their sector in the context of the Gandhian tradition of volunteerism.
Posted: 9/25/06; 1:06:10 PM # |
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20 September 2006 |
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18 September 2006 |
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| Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail |
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In Failing to Learn and Learning to Fail (35 page PDF), Mark Cannon and Amy Edmondson look at how successful organizations actively use failure to foster improvement and innovation. This is one of the best analyses of healthy relationships to failure that I've seen in a long time. Their recommendations focus on overcoming both the technical and the social barriers to (1) identifying failure, (2) analyzing failure, and (3) experimentation.
Posted: 9/18/06; 11:26:52 PM # |
| Voicing Our Values: A Survey of the Guiding Principles of the Nonprofit Sector |
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Voicing Our Values is a project of the Nonprofit Congress. They are conducting A Survey of the Guiding Principles of the Nonprofit Sector, which I encourage you to look at. Their strategy is to try to identify real common values across very large portions of the sector. To that end, the survey is asking you to rank a number of nonprofit roles and concepts, including: Catalyst for Change and Innovation, Commitment to Serve Others, Dedication to the Betterment of the Communities We Serve, Ethics and Integrity, Promotion of Civic Engagement and Volunteerism, Respect for Individuals and Groups, and Sustainers of Hope.
Posted: 9/18/06; 11:20:05 PM # |
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12 September 2006 |
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| Nonprofit Online News Journal August 2006 Edition |
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Our much delayed August 2006 Edition of Nonprofit Online News Journal is now available. It's a very solid issue with pieces on knowledge management (especially failure and weaknesses), learning by grantmakers, and social innovation. The Quicksheet this month presents a new model, called The HIMS Matrix, for assessing how well you're listening to your stakeholders. It's great stuff.
Posted: 9/12/06; 7:28:37 PM # |
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11 September 2006 |
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10 September 2006 |
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| Managing Oneself |
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Ed Batista reminded me about this great article last year, but I'm only now getting around to recommending Peter Drucker's Managing Oneself (10 page PDF). The article deeply reflects my own biases toward building on strengths and on self-knowledge as a key to self-management.
Posted: 9/10/06; 11:18:12 PM # |
| Word of Mouth Research Blog |
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The Word of Mouth Research Blog is very commercially oriented, but it's the best ongoing source of meaningful research about online word of mouth marketing. If you do any online outreach that relies on networks, this one's worth paying attention to.
Posted: 9/10/06; 11:11:21 PM # |
| Scott Berkun's Essay Archive |
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Scott Berkun, author of The Art of Project Management, has a collection of 53 essays available online. Topics include: Work versus Progress, Why You Must Lead or Follow, Why Smart People Defend Bad Ideas, and How to Run a Design Critique. Much of it's very simple, some is off base, but all in all, a valuable collection.
Posted: 9/10/06; 11:08:25 PM # |
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7 September 2006 |
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| Online Seminar: Frictionless Fundraising |
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We've developed a great new model for the delivery of our program on Frictionless Fundraising. On Friday, October 20th, we'll be teaching An All-Day Online Seminar on the Essentials of Internet Fundraising. We've set the timing of the seminar so that we can have participants from nine or ten time zones attend and the all-day format creates a tremendous focus and momentum of learning. If you've been waiting to study this material, you should take advantage of this new model.
Posted: 9/7/06; 5:27:56 PM # |
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1 September 2006 |
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| Mobilizing Public Will for Social Change |
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Charles Salmon, L.A. Post, and Robin Christensen wrote a paper in 2003 entitled Mobilizing Public Will for Social Change (43 page PDF). It's a great overview of communication theory as it applies to social change strategies. Some of the interdisciplinary models and theories include: Social Problem Construction, Framing, Agenda Setting, Spiral of Silence, Social Capital, and Social Marketing. It's amazing how interesting this gets when you think about how much more affordable mass communication has become.
Posted: 9/1/06; 4:57:47 PM # |
| Syllabus - Open Source Seminar |
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The University of California at Berkeley has a course entitled "Open Source Development and Distribution of Digital Information: Technical, Economic, Social, and Legal Perspectives". They've made the superb syllabus for the course available and since much of the reading is online, you have access to a wealth of current material. The course topics include: Open Source as a Production Process, Economics of Open Source, Open Source and the General Public License, Open Source Business Models, Open Source and Competition in the Software Industry, Government Policy Toward Open Source, Open Access Journals and Publications, Open Source Biology, Wikipedia as an Open Source Project, Social Production of Music and Other Digital Content, and User-Created Value and Virtual Economies. The course is taught by Pamela Samuelson and Mitch Kapor.
Posted: 9/1/06; 4:53:14 PM # |
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