Ian's blog

CivicActions is proud to sponsor the She's Geeky unconference scheduled to be held for three days in the San Francisco Bay Area starting on January 29th, starting at 9am.  

I'm really excited to share that two major client projects are having in-person Pod Sprints this month in New York. Part of our internal restructuring has been organizing into dedicated teams we call "Pods".  These teams work on one or two client projects at a time, which we think is going to hold innumerable benefits to clients, team members and our company as a whole. 

(I'm planning on migrating a lot of the content I/we generate for our team newsletter to the blog, so for the CivicActions team, you'll be getting more information about what we're up to on the blog than in our internal newsletter.  For the rest of the world, it'll mean a more transparent view into what we're doing at CivicActions and how we do it.  We were founded on, and value, the principles of openness and we intend to dive even deeper into expressing the values of transparency, collaboration and participation.)

Welcome to 2010! Couldn't get here soon enough, eh?

Thank you, everyone!  To our clients on the frontlines of social change, to the hundreds of thousands of organizations we've not yet met but who are also working to improve the planet, to the Drupal Community for showing the world (yet again) how Open Source can change it, to the "undocumented Drupalers" who are silently expanding the install base of our favorite CMS platform one website at a time, to the networks of geeks all around the world lending their talent for a be

This past year, CivicActions has undergone a transformation in the way that we organize project teams.  We've moved from a "matrix" model (people contributing to several projects) to what we call "Pods" (dedicated teams focused on one or two projects at a time). This transformation has yielded incredible results for clients and project team members. This model also means that we can more easily scale, which we are preparing to do in 2010.

 

One of the things that makes my job at CivicActions so incredibly awesome is how aligned it is with my intention to make a positive difference in the world.  In San Francisco, I'm part of a group of over a hundred men who are deeply engaged in the process of discovering and living our purpose.

Miley Cyrus closed her account and quit Twitter with an apparent DIY Youtube rap video called "Goodbye Twitter," wherein she oh-so-eloquently extolls the value of quality in-person time over endlessly updating a stream of personal trivia as the reason for leaving the service. Does Miley's move foreshadow the complete abandonment of social media for tweens and teens?

California voters recently resoundingly rejected budget measures that would have eased, but not solved, a disastrous budget deficit. As a result, services across the board from welfare to schools face significant cuts as administrators try to close massive budget gaps. Declining state tax revenues aren't helping, either. The result is going to be a multi-year fiscal catastrophe.

Vancouver is thinking open. A council meeting agenda calls for discussing "open data, open standards and open source software for all of its data and information resources," according to the ReadWriteWeb post linked above. The benefits of governments going open are immense and arguably fulfill the role of government in serving its people. Indeed, Open Source is, by its very nature, a form of digital democracy.