Openness

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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Living and working in the Bay Area is extraordinary and full of contradictions. On one hand, many of our friends and the people we interact with day-to-day are largely defining society's primary technology systems. They work at Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, Amazon, Zynga and nearly every technology and service we regularly use. And, by way of serendipity or coincidence, we are also surrounded by some of the world's most renown teachers in mindfulfuness, yoga and spiritual practice. On any given day you can practice at more than a hundred local yoga studios or from an endless number of workshops and classes.

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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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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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[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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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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