Google Maps Mashup
Change.org has a wonderful mashup of 501 c 3 nonprofits arranged on a Google Map, as an example of a Good Idea (tm) for Google Maps usage. You can start at Exhibit to begin creating your own mashup code!
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December 31, 2007
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Stumble It!December 28, 2007
Web 2.0 Guide for NonProfits
A quick rundown of my recent posts looking at the value of using Open Source in combination with Web 2.0 tools for non-profits / NGOs and the like:
The Power of Open - an introduction to the economic background knowledge important to discuss how Web 2.0 and Open Source work (also discusses what Web 2.0 and Open Source mean).
Twitter - A sidetrack to peek at a new Web 2.0 service.
Web 2.0 101 - How Web 2.0 can work for you.
Popular Web 2.0 Sites - a quick overview of the current landscape of Web 2.0 sites useful to nonprofits.
Open Source Software - Desktop software that's created by global teams of volunteers.
A Better Browser - The fantastic marriage of Open Source and Web 2.0
A Better Browser II - Even more cool things you can do
Write Once, Post Everywhere - A close look at how Open Source and Web 2.0 can drastically reduce workload.
Open Source and Web 2.0 - How you can use Open Source software to run your website with built-in Web 2.0 goodness.
December 26, 2007
OSS and Web 2.0: The Natural Partnership of Peer Production
In an earlier post I took you through some of my favorite desktop F/LOSS projects, and I've blathered on about the Flock browser separately. If you really want to embrace the social web, though, you should bring some of it home to your organization. Hosting your own blogs is a start, be it a stream of current news and events or as a discussion or soapbox for your CEO or media relations people. Wikis are powerful collaborative tools for both your internal staff projects as well as collaborative, evolving documents you work on with your constituents. Wikipedia runs on open source software called MediaWiki, which you can download for free and get running in under an hour (less on Linux systems, it can be a bit tricky with Windows servers). There are more open source blog options than I'd care to even begin to list, and which one you chose in the end will depend on how you plan to use it.
Before jumping head on and installing all these pieces individually (and without some customization, requiring separate logins for each separate piece), you should also consider a more fundamental change in your website -- moving to a Content Management System, or CMS. There are two very popular F/LOSS CMS systems out there today, Joomla and Drupal. Drupal constantly amazes me with its ease of use, but Joomla seems to be easier to conform to your existing web design, whereas Drupal is hard-headed about its concept-based layout. I've seen many amazing Drupal sites, and since they're both a breeze to get running with install wizards that will have you playing in the CMS in seconds (really), why not try both? If you don't want to install both, you can also look at OpenSourceCMS.com, which runs these and many many more, giving anyone access to go in and fool around (they automatically reset every hour).
These CMS systems can integrate many popular tools, and/or have versions of them built in, allowing you to have a single-sign-on for all of your various web 2.0 applications. Drupal and Joomla especially are designed with sharing and integration in mind, so they naturally work well with other web 2.0 sites by sending out and importing RSS feeds, plugging in at the API level with Google Maps, Flickr, and so on, often by downloading freely available plugin tools, created by a global team of volunteers working together to share their tools. As an extra bonus, most of the geek types working on these systems are also obsessed by following best practices and web standards, giving you cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility, even with mobile/cell phone browsers with a little work, and accessibility built in.
CMS systems also empower your staff to edit their own web pages instead of having to go through IT for each forgotten comma. They include easy to use editors, ranging from simple text to foll-on WYSIWYG interfaces. The degree of design freedom varies among the different CMSes, but remember that more freedom risks less cohesiveness in the overall site design.
Here's a few sites done using Joomla and/or Drupal, to give you a taste of the power built in to the systems -- these aren't hodgepodges of tinkerer code, but enterprise-class systems:
Of course, you can shell out the big bucks for custom software or commercial CMS tools, but you run the risk of that company going under and taking their software with them. With FLOSS, you will always have the source available -- this means never getting locked out or left behind, and always being able to go your own way and hire a different firm to modify the code, but you don't have one big company to call to add a new feature in (kinda). FLOSS is created by a global network of interested volunteers and requires additions to also be freely shared, so you can often find other people working on the same problems you might be encountering.
Remember, It's not good because it's free, it's free because it's good!
December 20, 2007
Immigrants take all the best jobs
For example, I bet there's a long line of good ol' american workers who would love to have solid, agriculture jobs in Florida, like the one described in this article:
Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about US$200 a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of the US's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid US45c for every 14.5kg bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly 2 1/2 tonnes of tomatoes - a near impossibility - in order to reach minimum wage.
And if the sub-minimum-wage salary isn't enough to make your mouth water, check out the housing and board benefits!
Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man's hands were being chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.
The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them US$5 ($6.60). [...]
The complaint shows the men were forced to pay rent of US$20 a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay US$50 a week for meals - mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky.
If immigration is to be a "hot topic" for this election cycle, I really hope someone brings a hint of reality to it.
Write Once, Post Everywhere
I've been dancing around how open source software, strong standards, and the various web 2.0 technologies actually help your organization out. So let me show a few examples. This blog entry, and in fact all joncamfield.com/blog entries get written once, here at this website. From there, my blog software (Movable Type, tho any good blogging tool or CMS site will do this automagically) creates multiple views of the entry -- as part of a monthly archive, a topic-based archive, and the current blogs on the home page of JonCamfield.com. But that's just the beginning. It also publishes an RSS feed of the story, which itself is read ~2000 times each month through dedicated RSS readers embedded in web browsers, Google's "Reader" and Google Desktop, Thunderbird's RSS reader, and who knows what other feed-readers. I intentionally have stuck it into different places on the Internet. It pipes straight into my Facebook Notes and appears on my profile's news feed to my friends. Using an intermediate site called TwitterFeed, I import it into my Twitter account, and using an embedded RSS reader, it also shows up in my profile on servenet.org.
That's a lot of exposure for a one-time cost to write each article and an initial cost in time to set up the connections. It's this kind of multiplier effect that strategic, appropriate application of information and communication technologies can have, and indeed is one of the best, lowest-cost promises of "web 2.0"
Teens and Social Media
Pew Internet and American Life Project has a new report out on Teens and Social Media; finding that girls are the leading content creators (excepting video posts), and:
There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators -- teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.
It's interesting to think about this through the lens of Mark Granovetter's Strenth of Weak Ties lens. The Internet, and the increasingly social nature of it, is so blatantly a fantastic tool at supporting and expanding "weak" ties.
Good thoughts on code bloat
Steve Yegge writes on code bloat:
I recently had the opportunity to watch a self-professed Java programmer give a presentation in which one slide listed Problems (with his current Java system) and the next slide listed Requirements (for the wonderful new vaporware system). The #1 problem he listed was code size: his system has millions of lines of code. [...]So I was really glad to see that this guy had listed code size as his #1 problem.
Then I got my surprise. He went on to his Requirements slide, on which he listed "must scale to millions of lines of code" as a requirement. Everyone in the room except me just nodded and accepted this requirement. I was floored.
Why on earth would you list your #1 problem as a requirement for the new system? I mean, when you're spelling out requirements, generally you try to solve problems rather than assume they're going to be created again. So I stopped the speaker and asked him what the heck he was thinking.
His answer was: well, his system has lots of features, and more features means more code, so millions of lines are Simply Inevitable. "It's not that Java is verbose!" he added – which is pretty funny, all things considered, since I hadn't said anything about Java or verbosity in my question.
The thing is, if you're just staring in shock at this story and thinking "how could that Java guy be so blind", you are officially a minority in the programming world. An unwelcome one, at that.
December 19, 2007
iPod shuffle, gtkpod, and winamp
I just don't like doing things the right way, OK? The right way is boring. You don't learn anything. It's... it's just too easy. So I refuse to use iTunes with my new iPod shuffle (a Chronicka gift) (Chronicka is my new Christmas-Hanukkah Portmanteau). I also dislike iTunes' harsh treatment of my carefully named and organized files (I have a huge "electronica" directory -- in a perfect world, my music would all have quality idv3 tags and I wouldn't need that, but seriously).
So I'm using gtkpod on Linux and winamp on Windows. gtkpod works perfectly, but doesn't seem to automatically transcode my ogg files (not that winamp is doing that well, but I think once I get the LAME mp3 encoder working it should be better), and while it manages the Shuffle's playlist correctly, the interface is a bit kludgy for moving whole groups of songs around on the playlist. Even with multi-select, it only moves one song at a time.
So back to Winamp, both for my larger media collection (though that's transferable, at least temporarily, using my external HDD), as well as for a slightly less grumpy interface.
Winamp's built-in portable media plugin, however, is limited in what it can do. I mean, it's powerful, has an autofill based on playcounts/ratings, syncing, and so on .... but it can't create a customized playlist order -- everything goes in in alphabetical order by file name. Uh.... Not ideal at all.
Replacing the built-in iPod support with ml_ipod, an open source, higher-functionality version, basically just fixes this.
Who's to blame for a bad loan?
A good friend of mine has condensed a lot of good, critical thoughts on lending -- from the subprime market to the World Bank, into one good blog post, riffing off of an exploration of the subprime disaster at salon.com. After my friend reminds us that the central function of the World Bank is as a bank - lending money and recouping interest from those loans (which are development projects so wonderful that the governments involved will be able to pay the loans back from the benefits of the project), he goes on to make some specific points (warning:some curse words to make a point follow):
First, whenever you hear someone say that the Bank or other such institutions should switch to providing for basic human needs--building schools, vaccinating, empowering women--there's nothing wrong with those goals per se, but do you want to take out a loan to advocate for them? When do you think you're going to see the payoff that let's you pay off the loan?Second, Remember that the Bank and IMF also have encouraged governments to cut taxes, among other neoliberal policies. Given that the governments are supposed to be taxing to inter alia pay off the loans they took from those institutions in the past, this advice should strike you a bit like a credit-card company telling you to take a pay cut, and just to give them smaller payments over a longer period of time. Who does that help?
So there was a debt crisis, right? Poor countries had shitloads of debt that they couldn't pay back--that they would probably never be able to pay back, because the entire premise of the loans had often been faulty. [...] I have no doubt--zero--that governments mis-used some of the money they received. [...] the more damning this next question becomes: why did creditors keep lending them all that fucking money?
I mean, remember: some asshole at the World Bank lent the government of Zaire, under Desiree fucking Mobutu, billions of dollars. Shouldn't that asshole be fired? Shouldn't his bank, which made such stupid decisions, be closed down? After all, no matter how irresponsible a borrower is, he can only become a risk of default if somebody lends to him. It takes TWO parties to make a loan, good, bad or otherwise.
In short, with both the subprime lending crisis and World Bank loans, we have the same problem; there are structural reasons protecting lenders from their bad decisions. With the Bank, they have such a stranglehold on all international funds for a country that no one can dare to default on a loan. With the subprime market, there's the last resort of a government bailout and reform that comes too late. For the lendees, they're just strapped with increasing debt, external forces guiding on their finances (bankruptcy limitations or structural adjustments), and no one sticking up for their side. My friend frames it thusly:
Lending crises usually involve large numbers of debtors risking default. But our unequal society never recognizes massive debtor default and the negative effects on debtors, in and of itself, as a crisis. Such default only becomes a "crisis" when the default is so large that it threatens to take down creditors--the rich people with the money.
HIPC (debt forgiveness for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) was a good step, but it got bogged down in further required structural adjustments and a Charlie Brown - and - Lucy game of football with increasing requirements and decreasing relief. In short, it remains a huge mess, with only one of the parties guilty of participating in a bad loan - the least able to defend itself or recover - paying the price.
A Better Browser II
Hopefully you're enjoying Flock now. If you already had accounts on Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, and/or del.icio.us, you've seen how amazingly easy it is to integrate those tools so that your friends updates just pop up automagically in the "People" sidebar (you can also update your Twitter/Facebook status, and check to see if you have any special notifications from these sites at the same time!). If you write for or have a blog, did you check out the feather-pen button which lets you set up multiple blogs so that you can submit stories straight from your browser? The Web Clipboard is the tool that got me to switch from Firefox to Flock (they're based off the same code, Flock just has some optimizations for web 2.0 tools). The Clipboard lets you drag and drop web images from sites to blogs to emails and more. Mac users may be less impressed with a lot of these tools, as Mac does a better job at integrating these tools already, but Windows users may need to make sure they're not drooling into their keyboards to much.
Did you notice the inline spellchecking? The ability to surf using tabbed browsing? And don't forget, you can also use addons that expand your power - sort tables inside your browser, block *all* advertisements, and more. I created a list of great firefox / flock extensions you can start with.
Do your part - use the flock buttons to promote Flock and tell your friends about it!
December 18, 2007
Vista Loses 2007
All I can say is ouch:
It's just that Vista isn't all that good. Many of the innovations the operating system was supposed to bring--like more efficient file and communications systems--got tossed overboard as Microsoft struggled to get the OS out the door, some three years after it was first promised. Despite its hefty hardware requirements, Vista is slower than XP. ... We have no doubt Vista will come to dominate the PC landscape, if only because it will become increasingly hard to buy a new machine that doesn't have it pre-installed. And that's disappointing in its own right.
PC world certainly gives a bleak outlook for Vista. Can I recommend people jump ship and consider Ubuntu Linux or Mac OSX?
Actually, the entire article on the top 15 tech disasters of 07 is enlightening, tho a few are there just to incite debate (the iPhone? Not a disaster). PCWorld seems to be of the opinion (which I share) that Facebook and the social networking crowd are getting long in the tooth and in need of some low-level, seachanging improvements:
We got it. Making connections between friends is cool. Sharing photos and videos, even cooler. But it's all so... 2006. Haven't you got anything new to show us?Here's a safe bet: Two years from now, 90 percent of these networks will be gone and their founders will be back working at Starbucks. I'll have a double mocha frappucino, please.
A Better Browser
The problem I face most often when trying to show someone a new powerful open source tool is that they just can't believe that the things I tell them are possible. Microsoft has had such a vice grip on the everyday computer experience that it's akin to telling someone that while they've been walking their whole life, it's actually possible for them -- for anyone -- to leap up and start flying like Superman. At the end of the day, it's just not within our conceptual limits to get that that's possible without seeing it and experiencing it.
That's why I implore you to take a moment and go download Flock right now, go through the installation process (you'll need administrative privileges, but they're working on fixing that!), and give it a twirl. Come back later, once you've learned to fly.
December 17, 2007
Twitter Account
In case you hadn't noticed, I now have a Twitter account which you can follow, have SMSed to your cell phone, and so on. I wrote a longer entry talking about what Twitter is and can be. It's basically microblogging providing interoperability between IM, cell phones, and the web - which, if you think about it, is ridiculously powerful.
Open Source Software: By volunteers, for volunteers.
If you think back to the opening Econ 101 entry, I ran through network effects, transaction costs, rivalrous and excludable goods, and their inverse, anti-rival goods, which combine the efforts of many in an ever-building and evolving structure where rule is the more the merrier - something, while not new to the world, but dramatically facilitated by modern information and communication technology. The promise of current projects is that nothing good is ever lost, and everything suboptimal or counter-productive will in time get smoothed over and fixed. It's something that only the growing body of scientific knowledge has historically been able to achieve with its standards on sharing and reproducable experimentation forcing honesty on the system.
So far we've been talking about this sharing in terms of websites and tools non-profits (or really, anyone with a good cause) can use, but many of these tools are themselves built with programs that were themselves created by volunteers over time, and indeed are still in the process of evolution. Software that is built (often by volunteers) in order to be shared freely is called Open Source. This is a simplification of the wealth of different "flavors" that open source can take; I might as well be saying "ice cream is great" -- but is chocolate better that moose tracks? Blue Bell brand or Ben and Jerry's? As with ice cream, there are different concepts and theories leading to different styles and licensing of open source software. In general, however, the open source licenses grant you as a user increased rights, as opposed to traditional licenses which act to restrict your freedom. If you want to know more about open source flavors, I recommend starting by reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which compares the development techniques of open source to the more commonly encountered closed source, and then checking out OpenSource.org for an overview.
It's initially hard to wrap your head around, but with thousands upon thousands of dedicated geeks, combined with the long-term evolutionary power of sharing, some amazing open source products are available. Not one but two fully functional office suites, providing word processing, spreadsheets, presentation software and more (custom diagrams, clip art, ....) have been produced, one, OpenOffice which runs on Windows and Mac as well as Linux. Linux is an entire operating system, as capable as (really, moreso than) Windows or Linux, which is open source. It's popular as a server software, running strongly on less powerful machines with higher stability and security, but is also available customized for the desktop.
You can have it look like Windows or Mac, but it also supports a wide variety of different visual interfaces -- and you get to pick which one you like, or even switch between them, whenever you want. Beyond this basic familiarity level, the more you interact with Linux, the more powerful you realize it is. Things you can't even dream of in Windows are available at your fingertips in Linux -- instant synchronized backup over a secured Internet connection? Mounting remote hard drives? Remote desktop connections? Text-only interfaces with full power over your system? It's all there and built in for you to use. For a quick comparison of existing Linux interface "eye-candy" and Microsoft's newest, super-expensive Vista, which requires a powerful new computer, check out this video:Even if you're not yet ready to jump into the deep end, there are many open source tools which work on the unfortunately all-to-commonly encountered Windows desktop. You can escape the trap of Internet Explorer (IE), whose latest version has cribbed all its improvements from the Mozilla line of browsers (Firefox being the most well known) -- tabbed browsing, good pop up blocking and more have been available to Firefox users since the late 90s, and only now in 2007 has IE gotten around to implementing it. Firefox and it's cousin, Flock, deserve their own full post to explore their incredible potential at marrying web 2.0 technologies and improving their functionality.
Have friends on multiple Internet Messenger programs? Have to run MSN, Yahoo, gChat, and AIM all at the same time? There's a program called pidgin which can combine all of those memory-intensive and computer-hogging programs into one simple and functional IM client.
Upgrading to the latest Microsoft Office too expensive for too little benefit? OpenOffice lets you read and write Microsoft Office files, as well as the Open Document Format, a format that's gaining steam as a standard for many government agencies tired of being locked into Microsoft's proprietary format.
You can fly through the universe with Celestia, edit photos with the gnu Image Manipulation Program, or create 3D images and movies with Blender3D.
This is quite literally only the tip of the iceberg. I highly recommend checking out the OpenDisc for a greater sampling of open source projects. While you're at it, breeze by PortableApps.com to download an entire desktop suite to your USB thumbdrive so you can always carry around your new favorite Firefox browser to random seedy international cybercafes and never worry about having some insecure IE toolbar stealing your private information!
The next big entry will move from your desktop to your web server, and talk about how you can use OSS software to install blogs, wikis, photo galleries, entire soup-to-nuts content management systems and more for your organization.
Off Topic: Torture
Salon.com has an exclusive article detailing the detainment of an innocent Yemeni citizen in CIA's black site prisons:
The guards wore black masks and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment. Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.It was enough to drive anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent" in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.
So Bashmilah stopped eating. But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in.
Mark Twain once said; "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." I haven't supported my government for a long time, and I've almost lost all support for even my country when things like this come to light on a weekly basis and fall on deaf ears.
December 16, 2007
An Overview of Popular Web 2.0 sites
So far we've really been pushing the underlying concepts, with a few tips to actual websites, examples, and tools. Without further ado, I'd now like to jump in to a snapshot of the current cloudscape of tools. As I mentioned in my first post in this series, I want to be an almanac giving general advice on weather patterns more than a tour guide pointing out landscape features. The landscape changes so rapidly in the world of web 2.0 technologies that describing the landscape might as well be seeing shapes in clouds, the fickle winds of funding and popularity changes the scenery just too rapidly.
That caveat being beaten to a pulp, here's a quick list of popular websites providing web 2.0 features and tools. This is as close to a "dummies' guide" as you'll get.
- Wikipedia
- Does your cause have a page on Wikipedia? If not, create one (check out the editing guidelines and play in the "sandbox" if you're new to Wikipedia). If it does, who's maintaining it? Is there anything you can contribute? Remember that Wikipedia is an informational resource, not an advertising media.
- Blogger / blogspot...
- These (and other) sites provide an easy on-ramp to creating a blog. They can be hosted at these sites or embedded into your own website with a little elbow-grease. They're a great starting place to see if your organization has the bandwidth to write blog entries at a reasonable rate.
- Flickr / Picasa Web
- Flickr is a hugely popular tool to upload and share photos. It integrates with popular blog software, provides RSS streams of your latest photos, and much more. Picasa is a Google-supported site which is connected to their photo management tool by the same name. You can encourage your contacts to upload their photos of your events to create a community around the event, which creates a living advertisement for the quality and interesting aspects for future events.
- YouTube
- Youtube is like Flickr for videos, with many of the same features and promises. You can even send videos from your mobile phone straight to YouTube, which you could use to report human rights abuses, protest events, or share your service project in almost real time with viewers from around the world without setting up fancy video-conferencing and high-speed Internet access. YouTube gives you a free and easy way to have streamnig videos of up to 10 minutes appear in your blog on on your website -- no need to pay for expensive media streaming servers, even if you're expecting thousands of users viewing your video simultaneously.
- Social Networking sites - Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn...
- The popularity of social networking sites is in constant flux. A few years ago, Friendster and Orkut were all the rage. Today, MySpace has the largest active following, with Facebook in a rapidly rising trajectory now that they've opened up their membership beyond the education crowds. LinkedIn is a business networking site that focuses more on resumes and job recommendations. Having a presence on these sites is important to be connected with their users, and can be a key part of your strategy. Facebook has a Causes app which allows you to create a donation funnel to any 501c3 organization in minutes, as well as providing great group communication tools focused around causes and issues.
- Twitter is "micro blogging" -- messages you can get down to 160 letters, spaces, and punctuation or less. It's integrated with mobile phones and Facebook's status updates, and has the ability to be a great communications tool, as I discussed in a previous post
- Google Maps / Documents / Calendar / iCalShare
- Google provides an amazing toolkit available to you a la carte or as a complete suite of web-hosted programs available to non-profits and similar small organizations free of charge, called "Google Apps". Google Apps as a suite can be a virtual office for small or geographically disconnected groups, providing real-time collaborative word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, email and calendaring, all connected with Google's amazing search and information management tools. You can also pick and choose, using just their online word processing program (which automatically and smoothly tracks changes, allows reversion to earlier copies, and lets multiple users edit the same document at the same time (you can even chat on the side about the document using Google Chat). Google Calendar offers a great way to create a central calendar where you can permit users to view free/busy times, event details, and even create and edit events on a shared calendar. These calendars can then be embedded in web pages, streamed through RSS, imported into Outlook, or syncronized with other more flexible calendar programs such as Mozilla's Sunbird project or Apple's iCal software. Just as a footnote, iCalShare is a website where you can upload a calendar of popular events, such as a collection of US Holidays or a list of service and volunteer events throughout the year. You can naturally import and export calendars between all these systems using the iCal and vCal standards, and in some cases even synchronize them such that updates to one calendar automatically spreads to the synchronized ones.
- del.icio.us / mag.nolia, and digg / reddit
- These are "social bookmarking" systems. Instead of having a list of favorites at home, one at work, one on your travel laptop, and so on; you store all your bookmarks (and protect some as private) at these websites and organize them using tags, so you can search your favorites on any browser, anywhere. Further, you can see what other users are bookmarking and reading, and easily forward links to friends with accounts. In terms of its use in non-profit organizations, again you can focus on using a tag (servicelearning, fairtrade, socialjustice, and so on) to create a network of sites your organization recommends and focuses on to help promote these causes. As with all web 2.0, you can receive a constant feed of new links tagged with your favorite keywords, see a "tag cloud" of popular terms, and so on. Digg and reddit are more focused sites that track more active events; blog entries and news stories more than static websites. It can be really hard to break in to digg, reddit, and similar sites, so watch them and save up your efforts to use those for when you have a huge, widely-appealing news story. Also, be prepared for the consequences of getting popular - a huge surge of website hits can drag your website down to a standstill with the so-called "slashdot effect" (named for a popular geek news site with a history of bogging down and crashing sites)
This is naturally an incomplete list. Even if I included every single web 2.0-ish site available today, there'd be a new one tomorrow. Worse, the tidal changes from day to day in web 2.0 websites can be vast, and it's really difficult to guess what'll be big tomorrow. One great way to keep up with technology is to create (if you don't already have one) and work with, listen to, and give ownership to a youth council for your organization, no matter how big or small you are.
The next post will take this to the next step, looking at what tools are driving these websites, and how you can place them on your own website and/or your personal computer, and a discussion of something exciting called Open Source.
December 14, 2007
Web 2.0 101: Speaking the Language
The last entry was the theoretical underpinnings of how this whole web 2.0 thing can work, so today let's get into some of the more common terms you've heard thrown around, what they mean and how they work. We'll start talking about blogs (like this), wikis, social networks, and other crazy web 2.0 tools themselves.
We'll start with crowd-sourcing/peer production/user generated content -- all aspects of, if not straight up copies of the same thing. Peer production is what you generally think of when you think web 2.0; wikipedia is an encyclopedia produced not by an editorial board and professional writers, but by you and me, and thousands of others like us, each shepherding their own causes and topics, with enough critics to keep us honest. Again, a lot of this is just summarizing what Benkler has gone over in greater detail in The Wealth of Networks; I highly recommend flipping/page-downing through that if you're at all going to move into web 2.0 projects. He has a wealth of case studies and good hard data on the power of random website users coming by your site and contributing time and effort to improve your content. Even NASA, a bureaucratic and overworked government agency, has tapped into the power of website users to help identify and label craters on Mars with higher accuracy -- and a whole lot cheaper -- than programs have been able to manage. Properly empowered through low transaction costs and the promise of adding to something larger and greater than they are, users can power your entire website -- just look at craigslist -- a huge, profitable site where people post classified ads. It's nothing pretty, which in turn is part of its popularity; it's quick and down to business, empowering users to add information, flag abuse, and export their specific search requests as RSS streams to their own systems (more, lots more, on RSS later).
Beyond mere content, empowered users can also help create structure; they'll tag (a form of categorization) blogs/articles, photos and videos while they're browsing through them, rate content as good (or bad!), organize bookmarks using del.icio.us or mag.nolia... the possibilities are endless if you can provide the right basic set of tools, and the users have the expectation that they are contributing to something that will continue to grow and flourish.
A good counter-example is the story of cddb. cddb was a public database that let people copying their music CDs to their computers to automatically get the artist name and track titles -- something that iTunes now does automatically, but this hasn't always been such a painless process. cddb got sold and turned into gracenote, which then changed the license to increasingly strict standards, changed the way cddb worked, and eventually blocked out any program that wasn't licensed with the new company using their new format. The users fled and recreated a new free cd database, called freedb, which is still very active and built into many cd ripping softwares, such as CDex. Gracenote is still around, but without any volunteer support now. This extended side-note serves to remind us that if we're going to jump in to using web 2.0 systems, it's best to do it strategically and emphatically. Strategically because not all of your materials, brochures, and news releases should be interactive and peer-produced, (ok, so sure, you can go there, but you should be comfortable with your users and the technologies before opening yourself up so completely). Emphatically because the quickest way to disengage your potential contributors is to only go halfway with a web 2.0 system -- micro-managing, moderating too closely, limiting their access, and so on. If you have a blog, have a full blog, engage in communicating with your readers, let them comment -- and reply to their comments. If you provide some of your content as a wiki, encourage and enable your users to add their own viewpoints, tips, and full articles.
This leads into the next point -- not only do you want to look at web 2.0 projects strategically and emphatically, you want to keep it freely available (unlike the cddb story above) so all your consituents can benefit from the work you and your active users are doing. Keep archives of blogs to create a long-term, ongoing discussion -- don't be afraid to change over time and have "out of date" and "off-message" blog entries, it shows your history and growth. Maintain your web 2.0 projects by responding to comments, tidying up wikis, and making sure your facebook pages, twitter "tweets", and flickr photos are getting constantly updates.
Going beyond maintaining your web 2.0 projects is pro-actively sharing your work with others. This almost always come as a freebie if you're using any of the popular website management tools to create your site, but regardless it's good to look into it and think about where and how you're using and promoting it. RSS provides the current standard of streaming news in and out. RSS can be a quick and easy way to add headline content to your site from your partners. More importantly, RSS can send your headlines out to subscribers, partner sites, Twitter, Facebook, and more. Even better, it's not just news or blog entries; RSS can be a stream of your most recent Flickr photos, YouTube videos, Twitter updates -- any chunk of data that gets generated linearly. Going deeper than RSS feeds, many tools have APIs, which provide a tightly integrated way to embed and interact with complex websites. Google Maps is a great example of this; anyone with a website can embed the full power of Google Maps in their site and link it with their own data. People have combined this with the concept of web 2.0 user-generated content to allow people to add data to the map -- coffeeshops with free wireless Internet, good spots to wind-surf, or even a visual display of craigslist apartment listings. This combination of different web 2.0 technologies is what's often called a mashup, and an increasing number of tools exist to help people combine tools from across the web with your own data and website, such as Yahoo Pipes
A lot of these sharing tools can be thought of a way to replace "copy and paste" -- instead of having visitors to your website who see some fantastic piece of information copy it and paste it somewhere else, you can enable them to pull that resource as an RSS stream from your website, which in turn will bring their readers back to your site. Through this magic of non-rival, non-excludable open sharing, the more you share and give away, the more you get back,; in website hits, spread of your message, engaged users coming back to your site to make comments.
After the end of all of this tech discussion, it's important to remember that it’s about people and communities. Enabling and engaging your website visitors, staff, volunteer, and random-website-visitor content creators, beneficiaries, friends, coworkers, and all of their own networks of contacts. Creation of a community of users who support and encourage each other should be the ultimate goal of any web 2.0 project, as this community creates a sustainable, constantly evolving system. The community by merit of communications technology can and should be globally distributed, organized not by geographic luck but by interest and dedication to a cause or topic. Web 2.0 projects engage users and create a space for communication and communal building and creation, it is not (at least primarily) a platform for traditional, one-way communication -- talking with, not talking to.
This should come later in the F/LOSS and Web 2.0 101 series, but Twitter is a fun and simple tool with huge potential. I've begun using Twitter, and have it updating my Facebook account as well. MIT's Technology Review has a great article on Twitter and where it came from (Use bugmenot.com's database of login username/passwords to free sites to read the article without registering). Twitter is a simple, one-trick site - you update your status and everyone who's "following" you sees that status update pop up - on the web, on Facebook, and even, most importantly, on your cell phone. Naturally, you can also update your Twitter "microblog" from your phone, facebook, or the web - you can even direct an RSS feed from it. At Youth Service America, we send our grants RSS feed into Twitter, so anyone following that feed gets a buzz on their cell phone anytime we post a new grant.
As a Peace Corps volunteer in Jamaica, I created an intranet for our volunteers. It was free for our cell phones to receive SMS text messages, but costly to send them. The intranet organized volunteers by city, sector and Peace Corps group number, and interacted with SMS messaging. Any volunteer could send a text to kingston-cell@our intranet.org and it would redirect to all the volunteers in Kingston, Jamaica. Or, HIV-cell@, or group73@... You get the idea. Volunteers on the intranet could also subscribe to specific news updates lists, weather/hurricane alerts, and were somewhat forcibly subscribed to a security situation update list.
What does this have to do with Twitter? Well, it means I did a lot of work that I didn't really need to do. Had Twitter been around then, we could have simply created a few Twitter accounts for the various important lists and gone from there.
A Mobile Strategy already built for you
What does this mean? Well, in a global world where phones with SMS text messaging are more prominent communications devices than wifi internet access, or simply going to the communications medium that your constituents are using, Twitter is a fast and free way to have a mobile strategy overnight, and even better, to have it automagically integrated with your website's RSS feed, a blog, your facebook page... the integration options are limitless!
The Power of Open
I presented and later ran a roundtable discussion on using web 2.0 and open source software for service/volunteer organizations. I kept getting requests for a "dummies guide" introduction to what's out there, and I'm going to just start here in my blog and see where that goes. Two caveats -- I don't believe in "dummies" guides, as I don't really believe in dummies (current White House residents excepted). Second, the landscape is more like a weather system, not a static landscape that can be described; so I'm going to be more like an almanac, trying to give you some general guidance rather than specific directions.
Let's start out with some basic underlying terms and theory from economics:
Network Effects describe situations where the number of people involved exponentially increases the value of getting involved - for example, if you're the only person with a phone, it's pretty useless, but each additional person who joins the phone network has a multiplicative effect on the number of connections available. By the same token, if you're the last chump still using a social network that's fallen out of favor (Friendster, Orkut, looking your way), it's equally useless. You can read lots more about the power of network effects by reading Watt's Six Degrees, and more on all of the stuff I'm about to talk about by checking out Benkler's The Wealth of Networks, which is available for free online as well as on Amazon, and you can of course contribute to the ongoing discussion at Benkler's wiki, linked above.
Rival goods are goods whose consumption by one consumer prevents simultaneous consumption by other consumers -- If I'm sitting in a chair, you can't sit in it, but if I'm reading a website, you can also read it at the same time.
Excludability is whether or not it is possible to exclude people who have not paid for a good or service from consuming it. Lighthouses are the traditional example of a non-excludable good; everyone can benefit from a lighthouse's warning. Excludable goods include anything you can protect or fence off.
Finally, Transaction Costs measure how hard it is to do something else; time, research, transport, etc. -- the costs of doing something beyond the cost of that thing itself.
By mixing these together, you can move from the tragedy of the commons to an evolving and increasing self-sustaining ecosystem.
Tux, the Linux Mascot
So go and ponder the balancing act between rivalrous non-rivalrous, and anti-rivalrous goods, the impact of excludability and its limiting factors on the spread of information (your cause, your vision, and so on). A complicating factor here is how open and free can your organization be - are you willing to let people comment on your blog entries? Edit a wiki resource you're providing (lesson plans, resource guides...)? Write blogs, uncensored, on your website? You don't have to go all-in, but the quickest way to kill a web 2.0 strategy is to strangle it by increasing the transaction costs of it; moderating comments, slowing and impeding the natural tendencies of your constituents to work with you to improve your products to the benefit of your organization, and their fellow constituents.
December 10, 2007
Nicaraguan Artesania for Giftmas!
Esperanza en Accion, a fair-trade, social justice organization working with Nicaraguan artisans, has a huge selection of items in their online eBay store, just in time for that last hard-to-find gift!
Buying Fair-trade of course is one of the best ways you can support global development and solidarity movements.
