Team Blog

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.

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