NPTech

A week or two ago at the 2012 Nonprofit Technology Conference I lead a Birds of a Feather about Using Agile Software Development Methodologies to Manage your Organization.

When I submitted the session proposal I thought it would be a small group of people over lunch, talking about how they are introducing and driving agility in their organizations. 

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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 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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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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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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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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Recently, I blogged about Drupal's plans to integrate HTML5 into its next release. However, version 8 of Drupal is at least a year away. What's a Drupal dev to do, if they want to start using HTML5 right now? There are a variety of tools and techniques. Let's look at them.

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