Integrity

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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One of the things I enjoy about working with CivicActions is the commitment to quality, and one of the best tools in our quality assurance arsenal is the Dev QA Live release process for staging and deploying Drupal sites. We don't just build you a website, we build it and test it and QA it over and over until we know we got it right. And it's not done until it's "done".

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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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Chicago's world-renowned architecture is literally the history of urban industrial growth in the last century. Our city has buildings in every style, starting with the Burnham and Root projects like the Rookery and Monadnock buildings and continuing through Mies van der Rohe (IBM Plaza, 330 N. Wabash) and his disciples at Skidmore Owings and Merrill (Willis Tower [originally Sears Tower], John Hancock Tower). However, there are architectural features of our city that are renowned and notorious, and their history can be a parable for our work as people who manufacture the web.

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Tonight is President Obama's second State of the Union address before Congress and the American People.  There has been no shortage of talk about civility (as signified by Republicans and Democrats intermingling on the House floor), and speculation about what the President will talk about (jobs), and in just a few hours we will see what it amounts to.

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I'm looking forward to attending the unconference at Compostmodern, where sustainability and design meet. As an urban farmer/user experience designer, I love this fertile ground where disciplines aren't so disciplined, and people aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.

I mean this literally – I'd rather meet people over compost than coffee.

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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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A question recently came up on our internal team list. One of our team members was looking for recommendations on where to move her money.  She was currently banking with Chase and was disturbed by learning of the connection between Chase and BP.  This being just one reason of many to move your money from a big bank like Chase, she decided it was time.  Many of us at CivicActions bank with local banks or credit unions and the responses to her query brought many stories of others who had either recently or long been banking with credit unions.

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