[Printer Friendly Version]

News for February 2008

28 February 2008

Ethan Zuckerman's Liveblogging of TED 2008

If, like me, you don't happen to be attending it this year, you might want to follow Ethan Zuckerman's liveblogging of TED 2008. Recent presentations include: Irwin Redlener on suitcase nukes, Philip Zimbardo on how people turn evil, Thomas Krens on how to make museums less boring, and many others with more to come. The TED Prize itself is interesting: each winner gets $100,000 and is granted one wish to change the world. Posted: 2/28/08; 4:36:23 PM #

A Stack of Problems: Five Ways Tech Projects Fail

Our seminar on Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills is coming up in a couple of weeks, so it seems like a good time to share some of the useful ideas from that workshop. In part 3, we explore how to prevent, compensate for, and mitigate the various problems that can come up in tech projects. In my new article: A Stack of Problems: Five Ways Tech Projects Fail, I describe five problem areas as a classic technology "stack" comprised of Business Models, Communication Maps, Interfaces, Requirements, and Architectures. Posted: 2/28/08; 2:07:19 PM #

27 February 2008

Extra Seminar: Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks

I was very pleasantly surprised at how much interest we got for our recent seminar on Organizational Restructuring in the Age of Networks. Maybe it's the release of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society or maybe this is just an issue whose time has come. At any rate, we have added new dates for additional sessions of this seminar, for those who we couldn't accommodate in the February sessions. The dates for the new sessions are: March 21 and 28, 2008. Posted: 2/27/08; 5:52:25 PM #

25 February 2008

Loss of Civil Liberties Since 9/11

The Center for Grassroots Oversight is running a very interesting project under the auspices of a project called Cooperative Research History Commons. They are documenting the Loss of Civil Liberties Since 9/11. They are inviting people to add to the timeline. Given how profoundly civil society is affected by this erosion of freedoms in the US and elsewhere, I recommend you take a look at this and consider whether your organization has experiences that might be relevant. Current topic areas for the timeline include: legal changes, freedoms, secrecy, and surveillance. Posted: 2/25/08; 12:51:26 PM #

Teaching as a Colleague

Asher Bey's most recent post is on the topic of Teaching as a Colleague and, appropriately, it's presented as a report of an exploration of this topic that he had with a colleague and friend. The authority issues that are often brought up by teaching are tricky in collegial situations where there may be a mismatch with the authorities of the workplace. Because we all face this fascinating challenge from time to time, I would like to encourage you to offer your experiences and tips in the comments at The Guru's Handbook. Posted: 2/25/08; 12:40:02 PM #

Adversity: Gets Our Attention
	Sue Mackey and Laura Tonkin have been blogging up a storm since the launch of Navigating Soft Skills just one month ago. Their most recent post is entitled Adversity: Gets Our Attention and I recommend recent posts on staff meetings and the social skills of leaders as well. Posted: 2/25/08; 12:29:21 PM #

22 February 2008

Good Fences: On Boundaries, Agency, and Wholeness in Work Life

In response to some wonderful comments about my recent critique of the idea of "work-life balance", I've just finished a followup article entitled Good Fences: On Boundaries, Agency, and Wholeness in Work Life. The basic idea here is that when people say they want balance, often what they mean is that they want healthy boundaries between different domains in their life. I dig into that a bit and look at why good boundaries and life integration are deeply compatible, if not essential to each other. Posted: 2/22/08; 12:34:04 PM #

20 February 2008

Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits

Although they have been with us for a long time, so called "social media" are all the rage these days. I'm delighted by the attention such forums and tools are getting, but worried that we will just apply our old top-down thinking to them. Fortunately, there are increasingly powerful ways to think about new media marketing that take networks and social connections into account. In our upcoming online workshop, entitled Light a Fire: Successful Social Marketing for Nonprofits, we take a look at the most important of these methods, leaving students with both strategies and tactics to take home. The workshop will be held on Friday, April 4th, 2008, starting at Noon Pacific Time. Posted: 2/20/08; 5:05:12 PM #

18 February 2008

A Guide to Measuring Advocacy and Policy

The Annie E. Casey Foundation's Guide to Measuring Advocacy and Policy (38 page PDF) is both accessible and smart. Evaluating any kind of social change work is tricky, but there are some definite methods available for projects that focus on policy change. As always, the key disciplines are to define the desired changes in terms that are possible to evaluate and to develop a clear theory of change that lays out the causal elements involved. They publish a Handbook of Data Collection Tools as a companion piece as well. Posted: 2/18/08; 5:58:13 PM #

The Bottom is Not Enough

In The Bottom is Not Enough, Kevin Kelly explores the interplay between emergent, bottom-up processes and hierarchical, top-down processes and suggests that timing is the key element that determines the right mix of the two in any given situation. Like other sectors, civil society is caught between the two extremes. I tend to think that, despite our values, we have leaned toward the top-down. But we also have our share of poorly thought out bottom-up projects as well. Kelly is on to an important aspect of working out the right mix. Posted: 2/18/08; 5:50:58 PM #

Six Principles for Making New Things

I continue to be a fan of Paul Graham. His recent Six Principles for Making New Things are as applicable to civil society as anywhere else: Find (1) simple solutions to (2) overlooked problems (3) that actually need to be solved, and (4) deliver them as informally as possible, (5) starting with a very crude version 1, then (6) iterating rapidly. The only thing I might change is the phrase "overlooked problems" but even there I would say he has a strong point. Some of the best social innovations are the ones that reframe the issues. Posted: 2/18/08; 5:34:59 PM #

14 February 2008

Connecting the Dots: Nine Recommendations for Practitioners

Eli Malinsky is one of the peer-reviewed contributers to the inaugural edition of The Journal of Networks and Civil Society. I was very glad when he agree to let us publish a practitioner's companion piece to his research paper on hub and spoke networks of nonprofit organizations. His Nine Recommendations for Practitioners include: Avoid Uniform Solutions and Expectations. Work with Pre-existing Characteristics. Deploy Flexible Technologies and Approaches. And Brand and Define your Products and Services. Posted: 2/14/08; 6:45:53 PM #

13 February 2008

Now Available On Demand - Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar

We've been working to make our seminars available to more people and one of the most important steps toward that has been making them available on demand. We take a high quality encoding of the most recent, up-to-date version of a seminar, edit it into a series of segments that you can watch as you please, punctuated with homework material that you can do on your own schedule. As with all our online seminars, they are delivered as full audio and video over the Internet, not the typical (and awkward) slide show plus conference call model. Today, we've finished preparing our third on-demand session, this one from our LifeWork series of programs. It's called Course Corrections: A Mid-Career LifeWork Seminar, delivered in two parts of three segments each. Because I'm not available to answer questions from students in the on-demand model, we include a personal coaching session at no extra charge. Check it out! Posted: 2/13/08; 8:03:39 PM #

11 February 2008

The Advocacy and Policy Change issue of The Evaluation Exchange

Lots of civil society missions are difficult to evaluate, but probably none more so than activism. The Advocacy and Policy Change issue of The Evaluation Exchange (32 page PDF) explores this very topic with a delightful array of articles, including some that we have previously mentioned at Nonprofit Online News. The topics include: What's Different About Evaluating Advocacy and Policy Change? Evaluations Based on Theories of the Policy Process. What does monitoring and evaluation look like for real-life advocates? Evaluating Advocates' Spheres of Influence With Domain Leaders. Posted: 2/11/08; 4:37:28 PM #

10 Principles Of Effective Web Design

There are hundreds of web design principles and tips out there online. I have even published a few myself. The recent 10 Principles Of Effective Web Design at Smashing Magazine stands out for several reasons: It's very relevant to the kinds of mistakes I see these days. It isn't afraid to contradict itself. It's very user centric. And it strongly advocates testing, something almost no nonprofit organizations bothers to do. Most of us could learn something from it. I know I could. Here are the principles in brief: (1) Don’t make users think. (2) Don’t squander users’ patience. (4) Strive for feature exposure. (5) Make use of effective writing. (6) Strive for simplicity. (7) Don’t be afraid of the white space. (8) Communicate effectively with a “visible language”. (9) Conventions are our friends. (10) Test early, test often. Posted: 2/11/08; 4:09:20 PM #

The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

I loved reading Steve Outing's 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism. He gets the nuances of openess and risk just right at each level and provides resources and examples as well. Though his piece is aimed at traditional news outlets, almost all of his analysis is of value to civil society organizations who are pursuing the power of networks: (1) The first step: Opening up to public comment. (2) Second step: The citizen add-on reporter. (3) Now we're getting serious: Open-source reporting. (4) The citizen bloghouse. (5) Newsroom citizen 'transparency' blogs. (6) The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Edited version. (7) The stand-alone citizen-journalism site: Unedited version. (8) Add a print edition. (9) The hybrid: Pro + citizen journalism. (10) Integrating citizen and pro journalism under one roof. (11) Wiki journalism: Where the readers are editors. Posted: 2/11/08; 3:55:14 PM #

7 February 2008

The End of the Organization?

For several years now, I have been asking this question: Do network centric patterns of civil society mean The End of the Organization? Obviously, that is to a large degree a matter of definition, but there is value in asking the question bluntly. In addition to the deepening of our understanding in this area, represented by The Journal of Networks and Civil Society and other efforts, we need serious initiatives in the field that are not themselves bound to the traditional form of the organization. In this short article (drawn from my introduction to the journal), I make the case, to those of us concerned with civil society, for shifting our emphasis from organizations to networks and for pursuing five specific areas of new practice. Posted: 2/7/08; 6:38:17 PM #

The Cost of War
	Think about your organization's annual budget and the good you accomplish in the world with that money. Then consider that a single day of the Iraq war costs $720 million. The American Friends Service Committee's Cost of War Campaign video invites us to make this comparison. Posted: 2/7/08; 8:08:22 AM #

6 February 2008

Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills Seminar on March 14, 2008

We have more consultants who take our online workshops than any other single group of nonprofit professionals. This is probably because one of the essential tensions in the field of nonprofit technology is the sense that technology consultants, in order to do their job responsibly, have to become communication and management consultants as well. So it's way past due for us to offer our dense and popular day-long seminar on Nonprofit Technology Consulting Skills. It will be offered live on March 14, 2008. Some of the things I cover include: tools for understanding the communication assets and needs of an organization, models for building requirements that are deeply rooted in the organization, effective means of technology promotion, and the major problem areas that plague nonprofit tech projects. Posted: 2/6/08; 6:25:22 PM #

4 February 2008

Seth Godin on Permission Marketing: Respect Earns Atttention
	The man who coined the phrase "permission marketing" has a new post on the topic that's well worth reading. Two of the key lessons that most nonprofits I know are ignoring include: (1) not asking for money on the first contact, and (2) not selling or renting lists. Respect earns attention. But it requires patience, which seems like a rare trait in any community. Posted: 2/4/08; 8:09:31 PM #

Blog for a Cause! The Global Voices Guide to Blog Advocacy

Global Voices has published the second edition of their civil society guide to blogging: Blog for a Cause! The Global Voices Guide to Blog Advocacy (colorful 21 page PDF). The solid advice includes: why you would use a blog for advocacy, crisis versus issue blogs, the basics that every blog needs, the steps toward launching an advoacy blog, and the relation of a blog to its community. Posted: 2/4/08; 8:05:00 PM #

Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?

We are in the midst of our own exploration of Science 2.0, in the context of the future of our journals. So it will be with great interest that I watch the development of Scientific American's exploration as well. In part, it takes the form of a fascinating draft of an article called Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?, which will be subject to community input for a couple of months prior to going to print. M. Mitchell Waldrop describes both the successes of online science and persistent skepticism, and he pays particular attention to "blogophobia" and the promise of collaboration. Posted: 2/4/08; 7:59:45 PM #

Confabb: The Conference Community

The last time I searched for a worldwide directory and calendar of conferences, nothing very useful popped up on my radar. But Confabb has a truly amazing number of conferences. There are two questions I haven't yet answered about this site: How well does it cover civil society? (None of the obvious keywords seem to aggregate the conferences I would want to look at.) How well does it play with others? (It still seems like a little bit of a lobster trap as far as data is concerned. for example, I don't see support for exportable standard xml formats for calendar events, but I might be wrong.) I would be curious to know if any of you are using this. Posted: 2/4/08; 7:56:02 PM #