Empowering the agents of Social Change

From the Drupal developer's list:

Drupal does not empower the majority of the public, it's too hard to
use. It empowers programmers and systems integrators.

In the nonprofit sector, folks I talk to are sitting on the fence about open source solutions like CivicSpace and CiviCRM because it's too hard... there's no vendor to solve my problem. At the same time, hundred of individual organizations are attracted to the platform and beginning to adopt it at an accelerating rate.

The programmers and system administrators that were empowered by Drupal and CiviCRM went out and built CivicSpace-- it works, but it still doesn't empower the majority of the public.

The next stage of the evolution will be creating the hosters and strengthening the integrators [Three Pillars of Social Source]. We have the house framed and now we need the hosters and the integrators need to help us put up a roof and some walls.

If you offer database and web services to nonprofits, you should look at CivicSpace and it's underlying technologies, CiviCRM and Drupal. It will help you help your customers more thoroughly and more cheaply than any of the alternatives.

There is a pretty clear roadmap for where we need to go, it's unclear if the rest of the nonprofit sector is yet listening, understanding, or standing ready to help. Invest in the CivicSpace ecosystem... use the software, support the vendors, fund the integrators and hosters. And lets see how much social change Internet technologies can power.

Social Source Symbiosis

When I'm not actually accomplishing things, I can write about 3 paragraphs of deep thoughts before I get bored and have to actually accomplish something.

Awhile back I wrote a post on Social Source Symbiosis (some deep thoughts).

This is what it looks like in the real world:

I wish I had known about it...

In nonprofit technology we have a knowledge problem. Britt Bravo is the community organizer for Techsoup's Netsquared project. She pulled together an email list of "builders" for the Netsquared community with a Yahoo Group.

My first reaction was why didn't they use NPOGroups? Britt hadn't even realized the service exists.

This highlights the basic question of capacity building. Technology is just a tool... so pick the tool that works... why worry about whether it builds the capacity of the nonprofit technology sector?

BUT as we imagine a world of web services and central databases of constitutents, the question becomes will Yahoo respond to nonprofit needs? Probably not... they don't represent a powerful customer base. Compumentor will not be able to use the information on Netsquared builders for future initiatives without some fancy import/export work.

In reality, we have a definition problem... what does capacity in nonprofit technology mean? The ecosystem that supports the nonprofit community as a matter of mission isn't particularly strong. In the nonprofit technology arena, it is almost exclusively vendors driven by profit as a primary motivator. In no way am I suggesting that nonprofit technology vendors aren't good folks, but they certainly aren't comitted to universal technology access for any nonprofit that wants to use technology tools.

I like to call the general negative reaction I get when I propose there should be more mission-focused nonprofit technology players the "sounds like socialism"problem. It's pretty clear that funders aren't going to bankroll the mission-driven nonprofit technology ecosystem, but there is no reason the sector itself can't fund a more grassroots, micro-enterprise, open sourcey community of companies, nonprofits and intermediaries.

Why support Yahoo when you can support three guys at Electric Embers that work every day for nonprofits to have better access to technology? Not sure there is a clear answer, but it's a good question.

[1/27 update]
Not that this happens alot at Yahoo Groups, but Nancy White highlights one groups the lost their yahoo group. Wouldn't it be better if you knew and trusted the actual humans with names providing your technology?

Technorati Tags: net2, nptech, nonprofit

Small Nonprofits and Technology Planning

Michael Gilbert makes a solid point... we ask the wrong questions of nonprofits in the technology planning process. We ask technology-centric questions, rather than asking mission centric questions and then connecting them to appropriate technologies. As an illustration, he looks at TechAtlas and Techsoup.

Laura Adler defends TechAltas and Techsoup a little, arguing "Providing these folks with a means to less-than-horrible technology decisions is a worthwhile and even honorable goal."

I think there is another point in here. When I buy a car, I ask how far am I going to drive, what saftey rating do I need, am I going to spend a lot of time in the snow? These are the consumer equivalent of mission questions. But the end-point are "pre-packaged" solutions-- a truck, a car, etc.

What we haven't done in nonprofit technology is focus on assembling, building and providing the prepackaged solutions. Once those are in place, you can ask mission-focused questions and realistically connect them to technologies that will meet nonprofits' needs.

Laura says, "But in looking at the possibilities, we need to be sure to account for the nonprofits who can’t afford to hire us." If everyone has to assemble unique solutions from component building blocks to meet mission-needs, then nonprofits who can't afford to hire people to assemble these solutions are simply out of luck.

tags technorati : nptech civicrm net2

CiviCRM 1.3 Released

CiviCRM 1.3 is has been released including CiviContribute (Donor management and accepting online donations) and CiviMail (improved developer release of broadcast mailer with open and click tracking). 1.4 is around the corner. What do you think needs to be in 1.5?

Read the release announcement.

Where is the nonprofit API traffic?

Salesforce.com reports:

And from our modest beginnings with Sforce 1.0, we've seen the Sforce Web service API grow to account for over 40% of all of salesforce.com's total traffic. Think about that for a minute - the API is almost as heavily used as the salesforce.com Web application.

In the nonprofit sector, where is the API traffic? Do you access Convio, Kintera & Get Active via API? Can you build simple connectors to web applications like Steve Anderson does for the ONE/Northwest database consulting practice?

The issue, I think, is that we have yet to establish valid business reasons in the nonprofit sector for heavy use of APIs. Steve's use of APIs is primarily to get around the inherent limitations of the Salesforce.com salesforce automation software when used as a nonprofit database.

The big reasons for APIs are:
(1) Connect best of breed solutions. This tends to be at odds with most nonprofit software vendors' approach of being a "one stop shop".
(2) Create custom, technology-enabled business processes. Not sure the nonprofit sector is doing quite as much innovation to serve the homeless more effectively or run food banks more effectively as it perhaps should.
(3) Central data repository. Not sure the broad nonprofit sector really "gets" this basic concept of CRM.

What does the future look like?
(1) Vendors will be pushed to opening up their functionality. Nonprofits should be comfortable demanding that they be able to knit together a Kintera feature with a Get Active feature and have it all backed by a CiviCRM database (or any other combination that meets their needs).
(2) Nonprofits will become educated about what CRM can do for them.
(3) Smaller nonprofits will get access to affordable consulting and software services. (cause the APIs are really for the consultants)

Surmounting the barriers to using Technology to support Social Change

Jim Fruchterman of Benetech writes about four barriers that prevent web-based technology from producing social change. We think that the CiviCRM/ Social Source Foundation approach, based on the lessons of open source communities, is the best strategy for surmounting all four barriers.

What’s the great barrier to producing social change in general? Funding availability, especially to the most capable and dynamic groups. The web-based modifier doesn’t change that fact.

In a social source ecosystem, the vast majority of the money is generated in a commercial market. Firms and individuals selling services related to CiviCRM can generate sufficient resources to fix bugs, innovate, market the platform and generally "keep the lights on" in the community. Sure there are issues... free riders, commercial interests at odds with social change, but we believe they are surmountable.

A second issue is the difficulty in designing effective software for the social sector. The sector is reasonably balkanized, and market incentives don’t provide enough push to make better software, with a few exceptions (i.e., fund raising software). Plus, the users are not developers, and so it’s hard to understand what mission-critical tasks the software can effectively assist with.

In a social source ecosystem, users, intermediaries and developers are part of a community. They communicate through mailing lists, forums, events, and consultants. By increasing the number and frequency of communication channels, users can have access to ideas of "what is possible" in a language they understand, developers are specialized and focused on meeting nonprofit needs (and have a slightly better chance at understanding mission critical tasks), but the intermediaries are the key. That is why we spend a lot of time recruiting intermediaries into our ecosystem.

Distribution in the broadest sense is the third big barrier. Building it doesn’t make them come, generally. Marketing doesn’t come naturally to most social change groups.

Again, bring in the folks with the incentive to market. Small progressive organizations, for example, are often served by small consultants. Make ir easy for them to do their job and let them so the marketing for the ecosystem. Larger consulting firms spread the word to larger players. Here again, intermediaries are critical.

IP rights are the fourth significant barrier. When the money is not there, owners of intellectual property believe they cannot afford to go after socially oriented applications.

Which begs the question, why would anyone license software for social change under ANYTHING but an open source license (an aguement I've made before), preferably a viral one that actively ensures that innovations are shared with the community. It has yet to be demonstrated that innovation is stifled by open source licenses. In fact, as long as people can sell services, open source is a way to grow markets at the same time one reduces the cost of the item. Software becomes a commodity. Its cheap and there is an aweful lot of it... keep in mind there is big business in sand, lumber, coal, and other comodities. But buying some coal to heat your home is not particularly expensive.

The risks of Web 2.0

There is always a downside.

I like to talk about ecosystems, open APIs and how collaboration in technology can yield big benefits for the nonprofit sector.

del.icio.us, the social networking site recently acquired by Yahoo, went down this weekend. Lots and lots of website that depend on the del.icio.us API can't get access to data and are also down. Folks who display del.icio.us links on their web pages instead display a "we are down" message. Even companies like Flock, which to a certain extent build their business around del.icio.us, feel the pain with large parts of this product's functionality down.

The ecosystem of open APIs is just as susceptible to disaster as a natural ecosystem. The thing to remember is that an ecosystem is often not as fragile as we might think.

Both Flock and CiviCRM use a very simple strategy to address dependence on resources we have no control over: redundancy. In Flock, they have support for other social bookmarking tools. In CiviCRM, our dependency is on map providers like Google. We build in redundancy by supporting Yahoo maps.

The issue is not that dependency is bad. Leveraging other peoples' investment can make your offering more powerful. How you deal with dependency, how flexible your systems are. and whether you have redundency are all factors that make a Web 2.0 technology like CiviCRM better or worse.

technorati tags: del.icio.us, web20, net2, civicrm

Google and AOL: Flexible definition of evil?

[updated 12/17]

From the NY Times:

Google, which prides itself on the purity of its search results, agreed to give favored placement to content from AOL throughout its site, something it has never done before.

From the Wall Street Journal:

As part of the deal, AOL would be able to sell advertising among the search results provided by Google on AOL Web properties. AOL's sales staff would also sell display ads across Google's network of Web publishers.

From the Washington Post:

Google's search results, based on equations that rank them according to relevancy, will not be changed as a result of the new partnership with AOL, sources said.

Clearly somebody got it wrong. I like John Battelle's idea of a trial balloon.

So, preferential ranking of AOL content in Google search results. Google seems to be careening toword a standard corporate path of profits over people/values. For those who watched the film The Corporation, you might remember they made the arguement that corporations could be clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. Psychopaths might have a different definition of evil than you or I.

As much as I love mash-ups and open APIs, I think it is time for the nonprofit technology sector to seriously look at providing their own technology services. Anyone want to contribute a little open source coding to write an integration between Dataplace and CiviCRM for a non-corporate mapping solution?

Social Source: Web 2.0 Collaboration

[repost from August]

I wrote this in reaction to some conversation that has been happening regarding NTAP collaboration.

NTAP Collaboration in a Web 2.0 World

Collaboration among nonprofits is a well-studied subject with fairly well defined best practices. The modern technological, Internet-enabled “Web 2.0” world changes the logic of collaboration.

In community development, collaboration can best be described as a process in which personal relationships are built, trust is established, and collaboration begins. In a Web 2.0 world, collaboration and trust is the starting point rather than the ending point.

Traditional Collaboration

One of the key best practices in collaboration is to recognize that the relationship between two organizations goes through a natural evolution that is anchored in trust, communication and personal relationships.

The initial stage is a competitive relationship between organizations, competing for funding, publicity or other resources, generally perceiving the relationship as a zero-sum game.

As organizations start forming personal relationships, getting to know one another, they can begin to cooperate…neither organization changing their actions or plans, but getting together when their interests coincide.

Coordination begins the process changing organizational behavior to accommodate ones partner and begin achieving more together than could be achieved individually, even through cooperation. Enough trust has been established that a phone call about a coordination opportunity is warmly received and seriously considered.

Finally, once communication and trust are strong, organizations can plan together, coordinate their activities, and form the basis for long term collaboration.

Web 2.0 Collaboration

In a Web 2.0 world, collaboration is the default world view.

Technology is often critiqued for depersonalizing human activities. In Web 2.0 collaboration, the depersonalization of the process of collaboration generates unique opportunities and significant benefits.

Web 2.0 Collaboration begins with a single organization offering collaborative opportunities to anyone off the street. The default posture is trust of potential collaborative partners, rather than the expectation that trust is built over time through personal relationships.

The Google Maps API is a good example. Google offers any individual or organization the ability to collaborate by creating a mashup of their data and a Google map. People have displayed everything from Chicago crime data to Craigslist listings of apartments for rent via the Google maps interface.

Google offers the collaboration opportunity openly, trusting collaborative partners first, before creating personal relationships. If people misuse the API, the personal relationship kicks in that allows Google to pull out of the collaboration.

The characteristics of collaboration in a Web 2.0 world include:

• On-demand. Any organization can have on-demand collaboration with a partner.
• Highly scalable. Traditional collaboration is bounded by the limits of human-to-human relationships, machine-to-machine relationships are much more scalable.
• Independent of personal relationships. Since technology (APIs) rather than humans (phones) handle the collaboration, one-to-many and many-to-many collaborations can form and grow at a much higher rate.

Web 2.0 Collaboration Opportunities

The primary opportunity is for funders to support the “opening” of organizations’ proprietary outlook and systems.

Compumentor and VolunteerMatch have CRM systems with 50,000 and 30,000 nonprofits respectively. How can they open up their proprietary systems to provide a Web 2.0 collaboration opportunity?

Perhaps a partnership with Google or Yahoo enables adwords-like functionality on their websites. Compumentor and VolunteerMatch might derive revenue from such an arrangement, or require reciprocal arrangements with organizations, driving traffic into software sales or volunteer opportunities, respectively.

Technology producers like Compumentor, NTEN and Social Source Foundation can be supported in producing open technologies. Funders making key contributions… bringing a tool like Techfinder to a website run by an organization that neither NTEN nor Compumentor have relationships with… can jump start the sharing of technology.

CRM software built by the Social Source Foundation can be integrated with VolunteerMatch’s volunteer systems, providing seamless volunteer management or with Network for Good’s donation services, to provide seamless donation management.

All of these collaboration opportunities revolve around internal decisions at participating organizations to “open up” and put technology in place that facilitates and helps to manage openness.

Culture: The Only Significant Barrier

Most of the major technology nonprofits emerged during the dot com boom and are locked into proprietary “portal” business models that companies like Yahoo have long since abandoned.

Moving to a culture where the first question is “how can others leverage what I’m doing” rather than “how can I protect myself from other leveraging what I am doing” is a prerequisite for collaboration in a Web 2.0 world.

Take 15 Minutes to Help Nonprofit Technology

Compumentor has put together the NetSquared project which is an interactive online effort to

• share stories about how web-based technologies are impacting people’s lives
• build toolkits for nonprofits around the globe to help extend their good work

They need some more content. Contribute a case study of a sucessfull example of how nonprofits have used emerging technologies (eCRM, web, email, wikis). Case studies can be contributed on their website (you'll need to log in first).

More interesting to me, they are asking folks to answer four questions about nonprofit technology. You can submit your answers on the NetSquared Website.

• What's *really* new on the Web, as opposed to buzzwords and soundbites?
• Which tools best embody the new opportunities from your point of view and why?
• Who's doing the best work with the new tools (technically or in terms of social benefit or both)?
• What's the bad news? What are the greatest barriers preventing web-based technology from producing social change?

Very interesting to see the different views of the nonprofit, nonprofit technology, and technology communities.

When Technology Decisions aren't Technology Decisions

The guys over at Greenpeace have launched a big advocacy project called Melt. They have decided to "roll their own" technology platform for the effort. In the comments, I think there is a more compelling case for what why they rolled their own... the price of what appears to be a very high quality development shop (Thoughtworks) was the same/ less than proposals for folks using technologies like Drupal/CivicSpace.

In nonprofit land we have been making the case for years that technology decisions are "neutral." You develop your requirements, get vendors to bid on the project, and make a decision about what best matches your requirements. And over the past 10 years the sector has invested millions of dollars of donor money in building the same systems over and over again.

Now that open source has entered the conciousness, projects are being created under open source licenses, but the basic technology decision is still: (1) How much? (2) Quality of the people delivering and (3) Are the requirements met?

Around CiviCRM we are trying to meet these three questions head-on for customers. We are recruiting high quality shops that can deliver low cost solutions that meet customer requirements.

But we what we really care about, is leveraging the kinds of investments that Greenpeace is making into software that benefits the entire sector. Greenpeace is going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. By participating in existing ecosystems, that investment could be leveraged to help the broader environmental movement, disaster relief, and small grassroots groups accross the world.

Greenpeace made a rational choice for them. They might even have plans for spending the million dollars or so it would take to create a sustainable community of technology firms, customers, and users around Melt.

But it is expensive and risky to go down this path. When ecosystems of nonprofits (CivicSpace Labs, the Social Source Foundation), firms (twenty plus consulting firms that operate in the ecosystem), and users (500+ installed sites) already exist, we hope major players like Greenpeace would also factor in how their investment could impact the "public good."

[P.S. Greenpeace has had lots of challenges with vendors who have made similar arguements in the past so I undertand their desire to work with a high caliber vendor. I would simply hope other major efforts in the future factor in the opportunity to leverage their technology investments to the benefit of the broader nonprofit sector.]

"Betting against FLOSS is like betting against gravity"

Gotta love Sun. Jonathan Schwartz on open source Solaris:

Betting against FOSS is like betting against gravity. And free software doesn't mean no revenue, it means no barriers to revenue. Just ask your carrier.

He draws the comparison between Cellular companies giving away free handsets (and the customer busing the service and support) and companies giving away software (and the customer buying the service and support).

Now how do we start explaining this to the nonprofit community? There is still a vendor involved, we're just reducing the cost of technology by creating licensing software under an open source license. http://www.openngo.org/

Katrina PeopleFinder Project Metrics Part II

The PeopleFinder project mobilized over 3,000 volunteers to accomplish these goals:

1. Enter unstructured data on refugees from forums across the web to the highest data quality standards possible with volunteers giving a little as one hour of their time.
2. Enter data from databases across the web into the central database via the PeopleFinder Interchange Format
3. Minimize duplicate records
4. Support other organizations in implementing the PeopleFinder Interchange Format
5. Make the central database avaliable to be searched
6. Use the Salesforce API to implement innovative technology solutions to the missing persons problem

What we accomplished:

The project started on September 1, 2005 with the Social Source Foundation, CivicSpace Labs and the Salesforce.com Foundation kicking off the community.
By September 5, we had finalized the Peoplefinder Interchange Format (PFIF), a technical standard for storing and exchanging refugee data.
By September 6, virtually every message board post was hand-entered by volunteers into the PeopleFinder database (100,000 records).
By September 10, almost every missing and found person record on the web was searchable at www.katrinalist.net (350,000 records).
By September 19, over 620,000 records are searchable.
In its first two weeks, the site processed over 500,000 searches
By October 2, the site had processed over one million searches and 649,015 records were searchable.

Even a month after the disaster, we received anecdotal stories of our impact:

> Dear David,
>
> I live in Burbank, ca, got home from work tonight (6pm PST)and had
> a phone messge from a friend here in LA. She lives on skid row but
> was born and raised in New Orleans.
>
> Her elderly mother and son and sister were in the katrina affected
> area, and she had tried to find them via phone calls and the
> internet, but could not. The desperation was thick in her voice
> message, she said she was very worried.
>
> I plugged in my WAN, and went to work. In 5 minutes, i kid you
> not, 5 DAMN MINUTES, i found her son, with a contact email and
> phone number. I set her up a hotmail email account, sent an email
> to him for her, then called her with the phone number. He is in
> Jacksonville NC.
>
> She said it was "only" midnight in Jacksonville and she is going to
> try and call !! I just hung up and her entire tone was happy and
> excited!
>
> I Wanted to send my deepest thanks to you and your crew (all 3000+)
> for giving me the tools to help my friend. You guys should run
> for office.
>
> Anyway, i cant thank you enough for all your hard work and
> sleepless nights. Acts of compassion and generosity like this give
> me hope for the human race. May God rest his rising star on all of
> you and bless you all the rest of your days on this earth.
>
> Peace,
> Sandy

Katrina PeopleFinder Project Makes Discover Magazine

A gentleman, Dion Hinchcliffe, put together a very nice graphic of the Katrina PeopleFinder Project and an interesting take on a Discover Magazine article on our efforts.

Technology is a tool, not an answer.

CiviCRM serves four very big communities, the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, advocacy, and political spaces. I love the advocacy & political guys because they are way ahead in their thinking. Aldon Hynes offered a great thought today:

Too many of the neo-techno-utopians fall into the same old thinking that technology is the panacea. Really, I suspect that in politics, as with so many of the social issues the world faces, the solution is getting more people to connect with one another, to share their thoughts, hopes, dreams and ideals. To the extent that technology helps get people to connect it can help address social issues. To the extent that it is even perceived as preventing real social connections, it is part of the problem.

In nonprofit technology, especially constitutent relationship management (fundrasing, case management, advocacy, etc.), technology needs to be evaluated to the extent it connects human beings to be more effective.

When we were thinking through our marketing pitch for the Social Source Foundation, we really struggled with efficiency vs. effectiveness. Human relationships lead to effectiveness. Efficiency is the realm of widgits and 4% reductions in operating expenses.

If the technology is really about the people, perhaps the language and message needs to reflect that.

CiviCRM serves three very big communities, the nonprofit, nongovernmental organization, advocacy, and political spaces. I love the advocacy & political guys because they are way ahead in their thinking.

Too many of theneo-techno-utopians fall into the same old thinking that technology in their thinking.

Announcing CiviCRM 1.2

The development teams keep putting out pretty amazing stuff. Probably the best feature in CiviCRM is you can define custom fields and have registered web site users maintain their own information about themselves (CiviCRM Profiles). But it does soo much more...


We are pleased to announce the latest release of CiviCRM, version 1.2! CiviCRM is a web-based, open source, internationalized, constituent relationship management (CRM) application, designed specifically to meet the needs of advocacy, non-profit and non-governmental organizations. As an open source solution, any company, organization or individual can download it, adapt it, modify it and use it without paying license fees.

CiviCRM is currently intended for qualified consultants who are considering deployment of a CRM solution for small to medium-sized non-profits. Organizations considering CiviCRM to meet specific needs should carefully evaluate CiviCRM.

Some Key Benefits of Deploying CiviCRM

• Unified view of every constituent. Store information about individuals, organizations and households and your interactions with them.
  
• Designed for Advocacy/NPO/NGOs. CiviCRM was designed for organizations that engage in advocacy, community and political organizing, and non-profit work.
  
• Seamless integration with web sites. CiviCRM integrates directly into popular open source CMS packages, including Drupal and Mambo. Registration and visitor interactions are logged directly into the system, including end-user maintenance of their own addresses and custom fields.
  
• Internationalized & Localized. CiviCRM was built from the ground up as a product intended to be used globally. It can store data in many localized formats and supports most languages globally.
  
• Open source & open standards. Licensed under the AGPL, users can make any modification to the software, can benefit from modifications made by others and can effectively interoperate with other applications.
  
• Affordable and cost effective. CiviCRM is available without a license fee and is supported by a community of nonprofit-focused consultants.

What’s new with 1.2?

• Improved Data Import/Export. Import and export virtually any CiviCRM data field or set with an easy-to-use interface.
  
• Improved “Profile” handling. We’ve optimized the display performance of our search. You can now search contacts quickly and efficiently. You can also now search on and display any CiviCRM field.
  
• Improved API. We’ve implemented additional API calls including search, group membership, custom fields and more. Remote access via SOAP is now supported.
  
• CiviMail. High volume mass emailing capabilities with the ability to track click-thrus and open rates. (Developer Release)

Demo, Downloads and Documentation

• Test drive CiviCRM 1.2 on our demo site
  
• Download CiviCRM here
  
• Installation instructions can be found here
  
• Documentation, including a Quick Start Guide and a detailed Administrator Guide can be found here
  

CiviCRM in a Nutshell

CiviCRM is a web-based CRM application that can be downloaded and installed either locally on a server, or in a hosted environment. It can be used as a powerful contact database application that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. Keep track of conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

Technical Requirements:

Runs on any platform that supports:

• PHP 4.3+
  
• MySQL 4.0 or 4.1
  
• Drupal 4.6.3+ or Joomla 1.0.3+/Mambo4.5.3+
  
• Joomla/Mambo version of CiviCRM only supports PHP4 at this time

Key Features in Detail:

• Segmentation Tools. Use groups, simple and searchable tags, and/or relationships to segment constituents.
  
• Extensive Configurability. CiviCRM is highly configurable, allowing you, in most cases, to configure it to work with your existing business processes. Unlimited locations, addresses, phone numbers, emails and custom data fields allow most unique needs to be met.
  
• Internationalization & Localization. CiviCRM can store CRM data in many localized formats and supports most languages, currently including Brazilian Portuguese, German, Polish and Spanish.
  
• Contacts. Store common nonprofit contact data (individuals, organizations, and households) that support donor management, case management, voter, and advocacy applications.
  
• Relationships. Understand the relationships between any two contacts with standard (volunteer, employer, head of household) relationships or create your own unique custom relationship types.
  
• Activities. Record standard activities (phone call, meeting, email) for any contact or create your own custom activities that meet your needs. External software can use the CiviCRM Application Programming Interface (API) to register activities with any contact, providing a comprehensive central repository of CRM information.
  
• Smart Groups. Create smart groups based on any search criteria or create standard groups that are simply lists of contacts. The membership of a smart group changes automatically according to that moment’s search results.
  
• Custom Data. Create unlimited custom data fields in virtually any format, including radio buttons, drop-down menus, etc. All custom fields are searchable and can define a smart group.
  
• Support Multi-site Organizations and Networks. Centrally store data across multiple organizations or web sites.
  
• Import and Export Functionality with De-duping. Import functionality intelligently maps CiviCRM fields to imported data and checks for duplicates based on user-defined criteria.
  
• Robust Permissions. With Drupal integration, access to certain groups of contacts can be limited to specific users, offering a way for volunteers to manage small portions of a larger CiviCRM database.
  
• Website Integration. CiviCRM is integrated with both Drupal and Joomla/Mambo. Web site registrations automatically become CiviCRM records and individuals can maintain their own CRM record. Offerings like CivicSpace 0.8.2 integrate e-mail blasts, event, volunteer and petition functionality with CiviCRM.
  
• Application Programming Interface (API). A fully documented API exposing all major functionality of CiviCRM. For instance, you can search the database, register interactions with constituents, create or update contact information, etc. This allows CiviCRM to realistically be a central repository of virtually any nonprofit’s CRM information.
  

Future Releases

CiviCRM is in active development and is constantly improving. Some key features to look for are:

• CiviMail is available in 1.2 as a developer release. In future releases, we will update this high-capacity email broadcast tool with more user-friendly access.
  
• CiviCRM 1.3 will include CiviDonate, a donor management module and online donations solution.

About the Social Source Foundation

The Social Source Foundation is a 501-c-3 nonprofit creating internationalized, open source software of uncompromising quality for the nonprofit and nongovernmental sectors. Social Source Foundation is one of many partners in the creation of the CiviCRM platform, providing primary engineering support for the software.

How Do I Participate in the CiviCRM Project?

Interested parties are encouraged to participate in the development of CiviCRM. This can take the form of providing use cases, feedback on existing functionality, feature suggestions, code contributions, documentation contributions and beta testing. More info...

Open Source & ICT & Values

I am a member of the bytesforall email list, a fairly academic discussion of ICT for developing countries. There was a recent debate about open source vs. Proprietary software that offered a couple interesting thoughts.

First, I've never seen a moderator like Frederick Noronha, who wrote a fantastic synthesis of the debate. Makes me happy to be on the list.

Second, he had nice things to say about me. :)

Most importantly, Richard Stallman has a quote I think we need to think seriously about in the nonprofit sector.

"The choice between free (freedom-respecting) and proprietary
(user-subjugating) software is not a technical choice. It is
an ethical and political issue about people's freedom. To be
neutral on issues that merely concern technology is fine. To
be neutral on ethical and political issues about freedom is
nothing to be proud of."

In the commercial world, software leads to efficiency, which leads to profits. Profits are kind of like software (IMHO)... they have no moral or ethical basis. It is neither moral or immoral to earn a profit.

In the nonprofit world, software leads to efficiency, which leads to organizations capable of doing more good. Doing good is in and of itself a moral and ethical issue.

When we look at open source in the nonprofit sector, I think it is important to at least acknowledge the values issue... why would I support proprietary software solutions that limit the number of nonprofits that can increase their efficiency and do good?

NetSquared: Web 2.0 Collaboration in Nonprofit Technology

Love Compumentor, their people and the whole basic idea behind NetSquared (http://www.netsquared.org). Netsquared is basically a Web 2.0 nonprofit technology community process that leads up to a conference/ gala event that will happen 196 days from now.

I would like to pose a challenge: conferences and "Gala events" are to often about thinking rather than doing. I challenge the folks in this community to spend the next 196 days doing. And spend the conference and gala celebrating what has been done.

I wrote a paper a bit ago talking about Web 2.0 Collaboration for Nonprofits. The basic thesis is that Web 2.0 Collaboration is about "Moving to a culture where the first question is “how can others leverage what I’m doing” rather than “how can I protect myself from other leveraging what I am doing.”

At the Social Source Foundation, we built the CiviCRM software to provide nonprofit-specific constitutent relationship management functionality. We answered the question "how can others leverage what we're doing", by integrating it with Drupal/CivicSpace, the software that runs the NetSquared website. We also published an open API that allows people to develop new software using the core CRM functionality of CiviCRM.

We would like to spend the next 196 days working with folks to deliver some "doing." What might be good doing? We might work with volunteer match to use APIs to integrate their wonderful volunteer recruitment system with CiviCRM, allowing a nonprofit to "automagically" store CRM information about VolunteerMatch volunteers.

We're already working with LINC (Low Income Networking and Communications Project of the Welfare Law Center) to build a robust, free and open source CRM solution specifically designed for grassroots organizing groups.

We'd like to work with you on radically improving constitutent relationship mangement in the nonprofit sector. We've taken the first step by publishing our documentation, specifications, APIs and code under an open source license. Now we'd like to actively help others leverage what we're doing. Visit http://www.openngo.org/ for more information and drop me a line if you'd like to join us in celebrating Web 2.0 achievements in 196 days.

Katrina PeopleFinder Project Metrics

For a loose coalition of 3,000 volunteers, we seem to be doing pretty well.

As of October 2, 2005, the www.katrinalist.net database has 649,015 missing and found persons records. Over 1 million searches have been performed since it went live on 9/6/05, including 16,702 searches since Monday, 9/26/05.

We have a number of anecdotal stories of matches through the katrinalist.net website and are currently working to make sure the PeopleFinder approach and infrastructure are avaliable for the next disaster.