Freedom

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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[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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A community specifically for Drupal developers and users at universities is in the formative stages, see: Forming a Drupal in Higher Edu Consortium; (groups.drupal.org).

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Lots of buzz swirling around about Google+, Google's Facebook-like social networking site.  Much of the buzz surrounds trying to get invited into the test trial, especially as many have received "invites" but not been able to get in anyway.

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The 3rd Annual CLASSY Awards is the largest philanthropic awards ceremony in the country, recognizing outstanding philanthropic achievements by charities and individuals nationwide.

From now until June 19, America can visit www.classyawards.org to nominate in the following categories:

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Bitcoin is peer-to-peer digital currency. Like Napster or Limewire, it does not rely on a central trusted issuer, but upon a network. Currently, one bitcoin is worth about $0.90 US.

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One of the reasons I'm excited to vote this week is the introduction of Ranked Choice Voting in my hometown of Oakland, California. I like Ranked Choice Voting because it allows voters to express their preferences in a more complete way than if they could only vote for one candidate. And when you can only vote for one candidate, then you might be reasonably worried about the dreaded spoiler effect.

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On Sept 1, the FCC filed GN Docket No. 09-191 (Full PDF, Summary) which is a public notice opening a 30-day comment period on Preserving the Open Internet. This is a call for comments and proposals for policy changes that will affect what is commonly known as "Net Neutrality".

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Our friends at Code For America today announced the launch of CiviCommons, a place on the web for governments at every level to share the software they are building (or have built). As the Open Source ethic continues to drive itself into Government, there becomes an obvious need to share the fruits of the labor of people who'd otherwise not have such a forum.

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