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Affinity Bridge's Katherine Bailey and Tom Nightingale gave an awesome introduction to the Search API module at the recent Vancouver Drupal User Group's meeting.

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As we've mentioned a number of times on this blog, CivicActions uses the Scrum framework.  To keep our skills up to date and to learn from the experiences of others we try to participate in the Scrum and Agile communities.

Last night at Agile Denver Charles Bradley (ScrumCrazy) talked about the major changes made to the 2011 Scrum Guide (PDF).

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As mentioned in the previous post, the recently announced Blackbaud acquisition of Convio - two giants in the closed-source world that provide web services primarily for non-profits - caused a stir not only in the non-profit world but also in the Free and Open Source software world.  Allen Gunn of Aspir

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With this week's announcement that Blackbaud will buy Convio there have been many questions whether this will be good or bad for the nonprofit organizations both companies count as their clients. We have often had clients and other nonprofit organizations we come into contact with us ask about the open source tools we specialize in, and how they compare with the proprietary tools or Software as a Service offerings that they've heard about. One very clear difference is that the open source tools don't get bought up and consolidated.

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[pic from Christian Hellman's “Reclaiming HTML5” talk at SuperVan JS mini con]

In my last post, HTML5 Canvas with Dave Shea, I mentioned the abundance of tech talent in Vancouver, and how all of us Vancouverites benefit from their presence. Here's a case in point: not two days after Dave's presentation, the VanJS Meetup group presented SuperVan JS: 5 speakers on a Saturday afternoon, on all things JS.

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At the end of 2009 when the Obama Administration came out with the Open Government Directive (which I wrote about at the time) I had some conversations with other consultants and thinkers in the nonprofit technology world about the idea of an "Open Nonprofit Directive" that would, in many ways, mirror the OGD.

Two years have passed, and in the prognostications for the year ahead I've seen a number of references to "opening up" and increasing transparency in the nonprofit sector. Once again I am left thinking it is time for an Open Nonprofit Directive.

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One of the great things about living in Vancouver is the abundance of tech talent.

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Why do so many organizations waste the opportunity to hook their email subscribers with the first line of the email message? I hadn't really noticed this sooner because of the way I consumed email: through a series of complicated email aliases and gmail filters.  Honestly, in Gmail, I was basically ignoring most solicited bulk email (organization email lists). But since I've been taking a first look at my email through my iPhone and iPad using the iOS mail app, I've begun to notice this shocking fact.

Here are some facts about viewing email via the iOS mail app:

• Approximately 35 to 40 characters of a subject are displayed
• Approximately 100 characters from the top of the email message are displayed

Two lines at 50 characters, and a subject of 35 to 40 characters. That's basically a Tweet.  And that (plus the "from" name) is all you have to get your reader's attention and convince them to open the email message and read on.

Why do so many emails waste this space with something like:

• "Click to view this email in a browser" (37 characters)
• "Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser." (64 characters)
• "If you're having trouble viewing this email, you may see it online." (68 characters)
• "Web version | Edit your subscription | Unsubscribe" (55 characters)

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[Left: logo of the Chaos Computer Club]

The German hacker club, Chaos Computer Club has recently been in the news for their annual end of the year Chaos Communication Congress at which well-known writer and BoingBoing editor, Cory Doctorow spoke on “the coming war on general computation.” In this post, I will introduce you to the club, their events, and other hacker organizations, events and affiliates worldwide. I will do this via a sort of travellog of the club's Chaos Communication Camp, which I had the good luck to attend this past August.

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Earlier this year I was tasked with migrating a 60K contact Kintera database to CiviCRM. To make matters more "interesting", the client also had a home-grown database with mixed information, some defining new contacts and some adding information to the Kintera contacts. As it was a custom database, I won't discuss the second database merge issue any further (perhaps I just want to put it all behind me) except where needed to fill in other points.

YouthBuild USA Website Migration to Drupal CMS & CiviCRM

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I think that most organizations are a little bit afraid of video. And if they are a little bit afraid of video they are even more afraid of live video.  Video, the conventional wisdom goes, is expensive and hard to produce. Your chances of doing it wrong are higher than of doing it right, and either way the cost and time involved is probably out of reach. Live video, well that is just crazy talk! Anything could happen!

As we all know, the cost of video cameras has come way down, the once much heralded inexpensive Flip camera is now obsolute because of smartphones with high quality video cameras! And editing technology has also become cheaper and easier. For years now every Mac has shipped with iMovie, but today you can edit video with a range of online services including YouTube.

Video engages people. How many times a day do you want a few minutes of video on the web? That clip from the Daily Show, a segment from the local news, something on YouTube (perhaps involving a cute animal) a friend posted to Facebook? Or maybe you were glued to live streaming of the #occupy demonstrations this fall?

How can nonprofit organizations make use of video easily, and without great expense, to connect with their audiences? My, perhaps counter intuitive answer, is through live streaming. Yes, jump in on the deep end.  With live streaming video there is no post production necessary, just a camera and an internet connection. UStream has garnered much press because of the #occupy movements and it is a great platform, scales well, offers some good tools, but it also requires a bit more setup than, say, Google+ Hangouts.  

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Every year our team pulls together a "short-list" of our favorite upcoming conferences and events. While it's not intended to be a complete list of all events in the non-profit/social-change space (for that, see Socialbrite's Superguide), it does represent a significant portion of organizations most aligned with CivicActions' social mission.

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I recently saw the wonderful documentary, Eames: The Architect & The Painter, and if you are a fan of the furniture, films or other design of Ray and Charles Eames like I am, you have to see this film when it comes to your town, or becomes available via DVD or some streaming service. Even if you are not obsessed with the work of the amazing couple, you have certainly been exposed to it, and I think we all can learn from the example they set.

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If you've been feeling like more people have smart phones than don't, you are pretty close to being right.

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Perhaps it is just the end of the year approaching, and we are all getting a bit reflective, and thinking ahead to New Year's Resolutions, or maybe something larger is happening.

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Yesterday I wrote about a recent study suggesting that millions of baby boomers want to start their own nonprofit organizations or social ventures. This morning I returned to a tab opened in my browser a day or two ago, an article on the Harvard Business Review blog, "Don't let What You Know Limit What You Imagine."  I'd highly encourage reading it, but for now I will draw some connections between it and my post yesterday.

The author, Bill Taylor, references a book by Cynthia Barton Rabe, The Innovation Killer, in which she talks about how experience in a field can become a detriment to innovation and success. Her answer is that organizations should hire "zero-gravity thinkers," innovators "who are not weighed down by the expertise of a team, its politics, or 'the way things have always been done.'"

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Today I was reminded of the Derek Sivers TED talk "How To Start A Movement" in which he analyzes a popular YouTube video of a guy dancing on a hillside at music festival. What reminded me of this video, and its lessons was an opinion piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy, "Calling All Boomers: Don't Start More Nonprofits". 

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We've recently implemented a new framework*/process inside of our operations at CivicActions that has had amazing results in our organization and we've been sharing this with our clients, too. It's so exciting I want to share with anyone leading teams of people to achieve something. That's a pretty broad audience, I know, but I'm pretty sure it'll be relevant whether you're running an international aid organization, a two person consultancy, or a marketing communications team. 

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We are excited to present a wide range of session proposals for the upcoming DrupalCon Denver. If you take a look at the proposals our team members you will see that there is a little something for everyone, from very technical sessions, to sessions on using Drupal for Mobile applications, nonprofit and nongovernmental organizations using Drupal, and how to use Agile not only to run your projects but also to run your organization.

These sessions are born out of our experience and expertise on these topics, as well as our passion to share what we know with the community.

Take a few minutes to look over the proposals and cast your vote. We hope to see you at DrupalCon Denver, and empower you and your organization with one of these excellent sessions.

• Occupy Drupal
• International NGOs Leveraging Drupal For Social Change
• Zen and The Art of Estimating
• How To Architect For Drupal
• Using Agile Software Development Methodologies To manage Your Organization
• Do It With Scrum
• Create Your Community: Social Archiving And Participatory Culture
• Drupal Base Your Next Mobile App
• A Very Large International NGO Case Study (the NGO will be announced soon!)

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Ten developers came to the Big Apple earlier this week to sit with primary CiviCRM developers @lobo and @dgg during a two-day Usability, Test and Code Sprint. Once again, Rayogram hosted the event, providing a central location in Manhattan and an excellent working environment.

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