Archives

2010 April

• Don't pitch me.

  There is a deeply manipulative and delusional culture at work [in Silicon Valley culture], and let's be clear there is absolutely no room for it in nonprofit and humanitarian technology.

2010 March

• Recent Meedan press

  Coverage of Meedan in international press, most of it focused on our Machine Translation engine and our approach to community contributions.

2010 January

• What could possibly go wrong?

  What could possibly go wrong? Thousands of volunteer hackers break ground on dozens of projects at a bunch of hastily organized unconferences promising to 'Save Haiti?'

2009 November

• 'Slashtags' for citizen editors

  I believe that there is an enormous potential to do citizen journalism better on the web, and that we need the leadership of people who are willing to help clean up the mess.

2009 September

• Bookmarks

  Here're my top tags from September 2009.

• How Much Do You Trust Your Own Network?

  We, as humans, are all multi-faceted. We speak to our parents differently than our coworkers. We lower our voices a bit in a crowded coffee shop. We stand up straighter when we give a presentation. And, again, these are not about secrecy or duplicity, but rather, indications of maturity, and a uniquely human sophistication.

• The "Special Case" of NEED Magazine

  During the collapse of the journalism industry, I have rarely been surprised and only occasionally truly saddend -- by a newspaper going out of business.

• ICCM 09, the Crisis Mapping Conference

  The conference is 'harnessing mobile platforms, computational linguistics, geospatial technologies, and visual analytics to power effective early warning for rapid response to complex humanitarian emergencies.'

2009 June

• OpenStreetMap Cambodia

  I am an OSM newbie myself so I was just happy that we managed to get everything working end to end...

• Sustainable Interaction Design in Cambodia

  So, I've spent almost a month now as a resident geek at the InSTEDD Innovation Lab in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

2009 May

• Swift

  Our goal with Swift is to provide a crowdsourcing platform for data triage. Imagine something like Mechanical Turk used only for tagging news, photos, microblogging and videos.

2008 December

• Trying to Quit

  But it's exhausting, distracting, and inseparable from the cult of efficiency. It takes you away from humans, mashes your nose into an LCD all night, and leaves you with a delusional sense of total control over your environment.

• Dealing Lightning with Both Hands

  The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking.

2008 November

• Eleventy Million New Flickr Posts

  Including lots of fun sketches for my new job. Working on a translation + foreign affairs + journalism + social project callled Meedan.

2008 October

• suspicious infoviz of the day

  The graphs are wonderful and straightforward.

• Kermit: bonafide-trueblue- guarantee- your- money- back visual thinker

  Somehow Kermit managed to skewer the woo-woo hippie hype surrounding visual thinking 40 years ago.

2008 September

• Ushahidi for the iPhone

  After a few months of work, we have gotten a new wireframe of the mobile app

2008 August

• Monday Night Telly

  The opening jingle made me shoot beer through my nose. 6 minutes. Just watch it.

• Build Your Own Search Experience: Yahoo BOSS is pretty amazing

  Turns out that, once you get beat badly by Google, you start to get really open. Nice.

• Mozilla, The AP Aurora Concepts, and Open Source UX Design

  The real importance of the videos is not specific to any of the UI details; it's about what's happening at Mozilla, and the new inclusive approach they are taking to visual and experience design.

2008 June

• Thursday Morning TV

  Actually this is better than Thursday morning TV, which, in my hometown at least, was pretty weak. This stuff is amazing.

• Visualizing Human Rights with the Google Charts API

  There are plenty of libraries for managing the requests to the API, and, in some simple cases you can even code it by hand, since all of the code is simply passed through a query tag on an image url.

• The Unevenly Distributed Future (of Mobile Application Design), Visualized

  This is really valuable data for thinking about how to influence the adoption of technology

2008 May

• Book of the Month Club for Interface & Design Geeks

  It's been a good book month for interface geeks and IXD/UX people.

• The Future is All Android, All Open Source. And Underpants. And Ice Cream.

  Android, (not the just-barely-open iPhone) is the future of mobile development for the masses.

• The Three Simplest and Most Effective Anti-Spam Hacks I Have Ever Seen

  The blocklists are just put it right there in that same block in main.cf. I typically use four of them.

• Agile Engineering vs. Interaction Design: Pissing money away and leaving scar tissue

  When an architect begins to define a building, he or she works very closely with the people who are buying the building to understand what the requirements are, and translate those requirements into a sketch of a solution.

• Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design

  Kent Beck is known as the father of 'extreme programming,' a process created to help developers design and build software that effectively meets user expectations. Alan Cooper is the prime proponent of interaction design, a process with similar goals but different methodology.

• On being "unixy"

  Most importantly, it means that you play well with others, as in the Unix concept of standard out: Whatever your application does, it is able (intended, really) to be used as the input to another application.

• Wherecamp 2008 Notes on Flickr

  Wherecamp, life-changing as always.

2008 April

• Poverty, Phones and User Experience Meetup

  Africa, Asia, mobile phones, sustainable change, environmental technologies, research methodologies, product design, application development, user experience ... lots of stuff.

• Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? (Readers' Digest Version)

  Understanding [stuff] requires forgetting for a moment about your own love-hate relationship with your cellphone, or iPhone, or BlackBerry. Something that's mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal: land-lines, Internet connections, TVs, cars �can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information.

• Command line metrics

  Speaking of personal metrics ...

• Personal metrics, infoviz porn & productivity obsession

  As an infoviz junkie, I have to say that I have always *adored* this stuff. But the tonight I heard a very smart person say that, prior to Nike+, collaborative running was impossible.

• Chipchase mobile phone talk tomorrow

  Street Hacks and Long Wows - An Evening with Chipchase, Burns, and Schauer

• Zimbabwe Election Watch Map

  aggregating media reports about the Zimbabwe elections and using Google Maps to present the results

• Favorite Rails tools

  Here's the stuff that makes me a happy programmer this weekend:

• Populi.net: a mobile phone-based research platform

  Low cost Nokia 2626 handsets were successfully used by field workers to conduct surveys. Several field workers had never even sent an SMS before.

• Two favorite artists

  he was at his best when he was wearing his bathrobe, hunched waaay to low, and doing incredible interpretations of Bach ... and doing this awful singing thing ...

• Education is the only permanent social change

  I've felt for a long time that education is the most important vehicle for social change. I mean, really how else does anything actually get done? You've got to have some kick ass teachers along the way, or you're gonna be a vegetable.

2008 March

• The Future of Money

  In this context, I don't care about iPhones, I don't care about web apps; I'm talking about paying your rent via SMS. I'm talking about currencies and payment methods that aren't defined by a government or even a bank!

2008 February

• Happy Hosting

  Their VPS plans are a reasonable deal, but, as always, the support is what is always most important when choosing a host unless it's a super small static site, in which case the big guys like mediatemple, dreamhost, bluehost are fine. (Oh and check wordpress.com if you need a free site.)

• Kestrel update.

  We'll be gathering feedback about the initial concept and looking at some first drafts of first drafts. Basically, we're gabbing on the phone for a bit and I'm taking some notes.

• In Praise of Shitty Programmers

  It's OK, most of us are pretty mediocre.

• Sunday Afternoon Telly

  Three videos for your Sunday afternoon enjoyment. (The first two are for the hippies, the last one is for the geeks.)

• Ode To Ethan

  When I was reading about that project in 2003 or 2004 I was totally turned on by the idea of writing scripts to create DIY datasets; I had no idea how to program at the time, but the stuff I have done with perl scrapers my whole new career in programming is directly attributable to Ethan's inspiration 2 years prior.

• Cellphones FTW

  My question is: where the hell are the tools for people who use cellphones in this way? (In particular, where are the banking tools and educational tools?) In the first world we've got $600 iphones that can read your freaking mind. But a simple flashcard application for learning a few of the 62 languages spoken in Kenya? It's not quite as sexy.

2008 January

• Kestrel: A Simple Web App for Community Supported Agriculture

  The basic idea a simple and user-centered web app that helps facilitate ordering, billing and member management for CSA's. Things are JUST getting started and I am soliciting help in doing some feasibility research as well as a basic evaluation of existing CSA management applications.

2007 December

• OK, Nevermind. Actually, The Future is in the Past

  What can you do with a fancy new photocopier that you couldn't do with one from 10 years ago? Not much. Once you've cleared the hurdle of cheap, pushbutton printing, you've launched yourself into a world of possibility greater than most people can deal with. You accomplish the most important part of the web just by being a great writer, and photocopying it.

• The Future of CSS is Here .... It's Just Not Evenly Distributed

  a teensy, non-brilliant-but-incredibly-useful DIY hack for stylesheets.

• svn up

  

• Stay Away From San Francisco (or: Sign of the Bubble #234094)

  We need someone ACE for this infrastructure cause we're planning on tens maybe HUNDREDS of thousands of users. Fast.

• Move to San Francisco. Now.

  Since this seems to be the advice that I've been giving to pretty much all of the geek + activisty folks that I know, I figured it bears repeating here: Move to San Francisco.

2007 June

• The Joy of e-waste

  Recently I've been really worked up about all these computers in the closet. It's a bunch of junk.

• Genocide vs. Gadgets

  I've never seen gadget hype reach the levels that have been achieved by the iPhone.

2007 May

• Wanted: An open-source, user-centered touchscreen platform

  Fundamentally I think that touch is intimate and intuitive, and clearly touchable interfaces have incredible potential, especially for the folks that haven't been brow-beaten into adapting to 20th-century conventions of computer interfaces like the QWERTY keyboard.

• Online banking = overdue leapfrogging technology

  Seems like Paypal is one of those 'leapfrogging' technologies that could help entire regions skip the process of developing a banking infrastructure, which apparently takes about 200 years of war (judging from how the West has done it).

2007 February

• Who's linking to our website? New tools.

  It is a pretty basic trick to get an idea of people that are linking to your site.

• Thinking About The Search for Jim Gray

2007 January

• The last mile wikipedia launches

  a 400,000+ article no-images version of the wikipedia

• Experimenting with IBM's "Many Eyes"

  I experimented with the nptech data last weekend

• The Panopticon. Now With An Improved Menu!

  The overtone of pervasive surveillance makes me feel a bit ill.

• The Culture of Open Networks, or: Watch What You Tag

  A reminder that we are trusting our attention data to the databases and algorithms of a corporation with no vested interest in the integrity or proper use of our data.

• A question for del.icio.us

  Are there 1000 of our entries missing?

• Understanding a community tag: the history of nptech

  Recently there has been a lot of discussion among the nonprofit technology geeks about the use (and usefulness) of the tag nptech.

• Great Blog

  This is such a fantastic blog that I had to point it out. His description of our role (as consumers) in a technological world (online) is just refreshing.

• The Linux Desktop in 2007

• Tux is dead-ish

  Alas, just before their 21st issue, they have just announced that they are closing down.

• Low-Bandwidth user experience

  I am thinking about how web developers can become more invested in the ultra-low-bandwidth user experience.

2006 December

• An Open Source Strike?

  Many Debian developers denounced the Dunc-Tank proposal.

• The Darfur Wall

  a beautifully executed charity project that fills a very simple, traditional purpose

• The tools we use

  appreciation to my favorite independent software artists

• Blood Diamonds in the News

  The bigger issue, Zuckerman points out, is that there are any number of products that the Rich Folks of the world are consuming that cause economic and social trauma in the same way that the diamond industry does

• Geekcorps Writeup on Newsforge

• The Foldaway Emergency House and Other "Afrigadgets"

  Rajan Harinarain, a South African entrepreneur and inventor has come up with a temporary foldaway house for use in emergency situations

• Ubuntu in Kurdish!

  Ubuntu Linux has been translated into Kurdish!

• Design for Maximum Constraints

  difficult conditions can lead to the same creative insight as design on a limitless budget.

• You Are The Enemy: "Information Rights" vs Open Source

  Ever since the introduction of Microsoft Office 2003 it has been possible to distribute documents that can only be used in the way that you want them to be used -- such as limiting who can copy, print or forward the information.

• Need Magazine Debuts

  NEED magazine is an artistic hope-filled publication focusing on life changing humanitarian efforts at home and abroad. ... We are not out to save the world, but to tell the stories of, and assist, those who are.

2006 July

• TED Reaches out to the Proles

  Featuring super-lovely production and a cast of all stars, TEDTalks emerges from its walled garden with a serious web presence.

2006 June

• Instant Live Support for Everything Geek

  I was able to connect to a geek in a few minutes and have, basically, a web-based IM chat.

• The Reality of the Open Source Desktop in Developing World

  Great, reveling post about the remaining difficulty of running Ubuntu (the 'sexiest' open source Windows-killer yet) in Ethopia by Andrew Heavens over at Meskel Square.

• Linux Overview

  If you are new to Linux, this may help to explain a lot of the confusion in your head about the numerous versions of the platform.

• Smart doctypes and other internet flora

  If you are interested in keeping up with the best practices of mime types, content types, character encoding and doctypes

• GNOME needs women

  Last I checked, only about 2 percent of developers were women.

• a sexist algorithm

  but anyway it just proves that beauty just makes everyone unhappy

• Hi, I'm alive

  I'm posting again after a couple months absence ...

• New Wi-Fi distance record: 279 km!

  They did it using a pair of Linksys WRT54Gs running DD-WRT and some recycled satellite dish antennas (no amplifiers!)

2006 March

• Temporarily Offline

  I have a wonderful new job (wrangling Linux servers) and am too busy learning to post at present. After I get through the stack of O'Reilly books on my desk I'll be back (and much better informed).

• Relatively Simple RSS Aggregation

  I needed something that was simple, cached hourly, displayed various encodings well and worked with RSS and Atom formats. Most importantly, I wanted something I could install on my own server, and it needed to be community oriented (not designed for a single reader).

• Getting Real: It's Not Just an 80's Catch Phrase

  I mean, I love campfire and all, but you could've at least published with lulu

2006 February

• ReliefWeb Maps for Humanitarian Crisis

  I have a love for maps because they can be the most rich, yet easy-to-understand communication tools.

• Power to the People: Free (as in Beer) O'Reilly Books and More

  Most of the books here are just distributed online for free because they are older editions. They aren't using an Open license, except in the case of the many online tutorials that are linked here (which are typically carefully chosen, I found).

• Combining RSS feeds and Displaying them on Your Page with Javascript and PHP

  Last night I was trying to do something that I thought would be pretty simple: display a bunch of recent weblog posts on one page.

• Online Focus Groups are Getting Simple, Cheap and Pretty

  Find a simple, stable, cheap platform for online nonprofit focus groups

• Brief Clip from a Great WorldChanging.com Post

  LinuxChix Africa manages to shatter two stereotypes at the same time: the idea that women aren't interested in free/open source software development; and the idea that women in Africa are bound to traditional cultural roles.

• On Teachers Moving from Web 0.5 to Web 3.0

  David Warlick posts insightfully about the uses of technology in education. Right now he seems like a pretty stressed out guy.

• NGO in a Box: FOSS Mixtapes for Change

  The Tactical Technology Collective is a nonprofit based in Amsterdam that has been doing great work distributing Free/Open Source technology to the global NGO sector.

• Visualizing Community News

  The trick of Newsvine is that it comes in a really well designed interface and allows community input, both by linking and commenting.

2006 January

• Truth in a Home Page

  Build it last, and work first on the details (the smallest, ubiquitous elements of your site).

• Networking Wirelessly, Freely

  A great new book about wireless networking in the developing world

• Rosetta Provides Collaborative Online FOSS Translation

  Rosetta is a web-based platform that does exactly what I thought needed to be done: it makes open source software translation really easy for lots of people, and it makes it easy to collaborate on a translation project.

• Biofuels Community with Google Maps

  Google maps offers the tools (an API) for creating maps using their interface, and this is an example of what I'm creating for the local Piedmont Biofuels community website.

• 1.) post to your blog 2.) post to del.ico.us and 3.) save all your links using spurl.com, all at the same time. This, I think will work well for a new biofuels ...

  !!! Missing excerpt metadata for content/posts/2006/1/make-blogging-part-of-your-workflow-otherwise-engaged.html

• ConsultantCommons Provides Free Nonprofit Technology Support

  A beta project from CompuMentor provides a platform to share and collaborate on resources around nonprofit technology consulting.

• Great Podcast: Jonathan Schwartz - The Participation Age

  The community behind free and open source software is changing the landscape of software development and moving the value away from traditional delivery of a piece of software.

• Technicolor Tools

  You enter a hex code value for a color, then another to mix it with, and out comes a beautiful png graphic of the color scheme.

• Where Does Your Favorite Organization Fit?

  Where does your nonprofit fit?

• The Internet is a War Weapon

  In these matters of revolution, we have to be wired to win

• Don't Make Me Think

  There are very few web design books that have any currency after about 2 years. Very few.

• "Decolonizing Cyberspace"

  For some reasons, most Kiswahili bloggers are either poets or poetry lovers.

• Google Rankings and "Canonical" URLs (technical)

  Finally some useful help from the 'celebrity engineer' Matt Cutts, one of the few people in the world that has had intimate relations with the Google Pagerank algorithm.

• RIP: The Committee to Protect Bloggers(?)

  The Committee to Protect Bloggers is shutting down!

• What a Relief: Google Maps for Mac

  Glad to see that little bit of criticism go so out of date so quickly. Now, Google, a Linux release, please.

• Mapping Bird Flu

  This is why the new breed of online maps are such wonderful tools for creating understanding: With a little technical work (and perhaps a lot of fact-checking), you can create simple yet information-rich presentation of a pandemic that is affecting millions.

• Web Developer's Handbook: developing web-sites, exploring own imagination | CSS, Color Tools, SEO, Usability etc.

  The reason I love web design so much is that anyone can do it.

• Just a few ICT4D Listservs

  Listservs are always so easy to miss. Sometimes they're a joy and sometimes they're dead, but they're always elusive, popping up just when you think you know every fold of your little online landscape.

• Sign Your Name for Open Maps

  All state-collected geographic information should be shared, for a myriad of reasons. Now you can add your name to a growing list of folks that agree.

• Web Developer Toolbar Reaches 1.0 Release

  This is the single most important tool any web developer can have.

• Community Mapping Network (CMN)

  The Community Mapping Network (CMN)provides an online mapping application that allows folks in British Columbia, Canada, to create and edit information about environmental resources in their areas.

2005 December

• Internationalizing you Web Site

  thoughtful article about preparing websites for an international audience

• Google's Librarian Newsletter Offers New Explanation of Pagerank

  Google has a new librarian's newsletter"

• Sino-Blogosphere is on the Map

  the Chinese language blogosphere appears to be exploding in popularity.

• Beautiful Maps of Africa

  Just discovered a beautiful resource of maps (mostly environmental info, especially soil) for most of the countries of Africa.

• Mobile Web Design: Tips & Techniques (Technical)

  Sometime about 5 years ago people began to realize the frustrating limits of web development

• Updated Tactics for Making Your Information Findable

  Here's a chance to brush-up, as the rules change slightly every day.

• Evaluating ICT Impact With An Eye on Gender

  a consideration of how to measure the impact of ICTs in women's lives

• The Digital Dashboard: Graphing ICT Change

  from a kind of ICT government consultancy

• Web Design: Learning to Problem Solve with Mezzoblue's CSS Crib Sheet

  Learning to use CSS can make you insane

• Beautiful Packaging, Ugly Statistics

• Cheap groupware for web-based project managment

  a lovely organizational tool for groups""

• Combatting Poverty (and ICT fads)

  the most effective ICTs used are typically basic ones‚ telephone and radio are most common, and when computers or the Internet are involved, they are for restricted, targeted uses.

• Developments - The International Development Magazine - Only connect

  respectable journalists writing informed pieces about new issues in international development

• PodcasterCon.org is coming up

  I love the idea of a unconference

2005 November

• Digital Libraries for Education

  Unlike some of the other educational websites I've seen (which typically distribute prepackaged course materials), the DLESE has a strong emphasis on community input.

• ICT4D Africa Scan: An Inventory of ICT Activity in Africa

  seeks to provide a reference of the major ICT development activities in Africa.

• eRiders Are Taking Off, I Hope

  The concept of eRiders is deceptively simple

• Windmills for Wi-Fi

  Woo Hoo! Wind-powered wireless!

• Free Nonprofit Webhosting

  If you need a free place to host your website

• Open Source Software in the Developing World

  This report details how budget-strapped organizations working in the developing world are able to use open source software to accomplish computing task that would otherwise just be too expensive.

• The Wireless Internet Opportunity For Developing Countries

  The greatest aspect of this document is that it represents how often the most successful cases of adoption is grassroots and local -- this type of development does not work well when it is imposed by some NGO or corporation.

• Fear and Loathing in Tunis

  It seems somehow appropriate that the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) is being held in Tunis.

• The Evolution of the Library: a Tool of Development

  Soon we'll have far fewer excuses for not distributing the worlds most valuable information resources: libraries.

• People Tagging with Tagalag

  If you like the idea of tagging you web pages and your books, how about tagging your people?

• Keeping Communications Equipment Powered in an Emergency

  An emergency power kit can help you keep important communications equipment running in the midst of a crisis.

• Hooray for Progressive Podcasting

  Podcasting is not complicated. It's just audio. The problem lies in finding something worth listening to.

• French Police Fear That Blogs Have Helped Incite Rioting

  The banners and bullhorns of protest are being replaced

• Location-aware en masse

  How do you make a regular cellphone location-aware? Apparently, you monitor the records indicating which tower the phone is on. Movement from one tower to the next can give highly accurate readouts on the movement of individuals and crowds.

• Google Earmarks $265 Million for Charity and Social Causes

  will devote a share of its lucrative public stock offering

• Study Says Software Makers Supply Tools to Censor Web

  The misuse of good technology. Or perhaps just the use of bad technology.

• Five fun facts from Broadband Wiki

  Here's this from global-minded site about broadband technologies

• Computers Twice Wasted

  computer recycling is also harder than it sounds.

• Triangle Blogger's Bash, Durham, November 15

  Looks to be a great night of the up-and-coming Triangle blogging

• More accounts of the 1-Laptop-Per-Child Laptop at MIT

  Here's another update on the laptop debate/idea from Ethan Zuckerman

• Welcome Back to WordPress

  Things are back in order here.

• Technical Difficulties

  switching to an elegant, open source platform based on php

2005 October

• Participatory Design

  The resulting ideas and workflows are, in my mind, incredibly powerful tools

2005 September

• ICT in Education

  The Scottish government has an excellent collection of resources regarding the use of Information Communication Technology in classrooms.

• Blogger Handbook Chat

• The "Dissident" Blogger Handbook

  The 84-page guide includes sections that discuss the basics of blogs and blogging terminology, and it moves quickly into a serious how-to guide for blogging anonymously and blogging successfully.

• Yahoo Participates in Chinese Censorship

  the mega search engine Yahoo! collaborated with Chinese authorities

• Raising International Awareness Through Innovative Cartography

  Being a great way to communicate quickly, maps can also be incredibly dense with information. When they are put to a wholesome use, maps, like apple pie and puppies, deserve to have a special place in every home.

• Geeks Responding to Katrina: Relief 2.0

  The Katrina Peoplefinder database (in record time, no less), which exceeded 100,000 entries in the first week of September

• What if the Flood Was in Washington?

  Andy Carvin, director of the Digital Divide Network, recently posted a fascinating, heartbreaking perspective

• Google Maps: Is My House Underwater?

  Kathyn Cramer, based in New York, is doing great disaster response work with Google maps.

• GIS and Humanitarian Crisis

  I am beginning research into ways in which mapping technologies like GIS are being used (and can potentially be used) to help avert or cope with humanitarian disasters.

2005 August

• Godcasting

  Ever since the first Vatican broadcast of a sermon on the radio in 1931, there has been little doubt about the power of broadcast media as a part of religious practice.

• Cellphones in Africa

  Today's New York Times carries a front-page article about the growth of the cell phone industry in Africa.

• This Island Blog. (Or, What the Hell is a Blog?)

  The people they interviewed (about 25 of them) were smart folks in a wealthy, highly industrialized country. They used the internet all the time. But when they came to a normal blog, they were stumped.

• Measuring ICT Literacy

  Test taking is boring. It's a boring subject. But you can't direct change in any environment without having some feedback. So this investment in ICT literacy evaluation is good to see.

• Online Resources for Evaluation Nonprofit Programs

  This is a super-unfortunate development; Google is the web's best hope for easy, inexpensive archiving of scholarly research.

2005 July

• Online Resources for Evaluation Nonprofit Programs

  Evaluation is a science of promoting nonprofit organizations. Do you need to measure the effectiveness of a specific program -- or your entire organization? Well, there's an entire discipline devoted to helping you do just that.

• Qualitative Analysis Software Reviews

  This page is from a university in the U.K., and would be useful if you're about to sink a few hundred dollars in some software (which will in turn play an important part in your research, of course.)

• A New Online Journal

  A new journal devoted to researching the (primarily sociological) aspects of Technology's influence

• Only 2% of Developers are Women

  next week in Portland OReilly is hosting a panel of women developers""

• Databases with Purpose

  This post from Tech Soup is a good, brief introduction to the use of databases in your organization.

• Exporting Technology, Exporting Ideas

  There is a new, exciting model for programs exporting technology to the developing world. But the real issue is about education, not just setting up a rural network.

• Technology for the Poor

  A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh.

• Researching Flies, and Colorblindness 101

  Drosphilia researchers have a leg up on web designers.

• Branding Advocacy

  Websites and emails, for example, need to reflect some kind of graphical relationship with the rest of your organization. But I think they should also reflect a tone of your organization and its role in the world.

• An Authoritarian "Third Way" on the Internet

  Worse, it appears that a rather large industry has grown up around the censorship, because all businesses realize they've got a lot to lose if their employees get busted for reading about human rights at work. So corporations, like individuals, are participating in their own punishment.

2005 June

• The Law and Blogging

  If your organization is getting into blogging as a way to advocate your cause (and give honest PR, retain donors, keep employees up-to-date, keep volunteers enthused etc. ...), this is something to keep around the office.

• How "Marketing" Can Help Eliminate Extreme Poverty

  When Nonprofit X goes to county Y and begins handing out seeds and fertilizer to farmers as part of an agricultural intervention during a famine, how does Nonprofit X know that they aren't causing a greater problem or ignoring a better solution?

• Community Informatics

  The Journal of Community Informatics, a new, academic approach to community technology, is now in its third issue.

2005 May

• (Nearly) Free Software for 501(c)3's

  Techsoup just announced that they have Symantec Antivirus with multiple user licenses for under $100.

• Audio Activism

  If you are completely new to podcasting, a quick shot in the arm

• What The Hell Is RSS?

  File Under: It's a blog subscription service. And a distribution service for your blog. And one of the S's stands for "Simple." And it's free. Which means, File Under: It rocks.

• Ranking Charities = Bad Science

  There is an interesting discussion going on (for some time now) over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review forum about charitable donations and the new ranking systems ...

• Let's Send More Emails!

  Here's a great resource for getting your email campaigns in a row

• Email Works. It Even Has A Manifesto.

  If you are investing money in a website with a social justice purpose (do, please), you of course need to be thinking about getting people to your site.

• For-Profit NTEN?

  I so much appreciate David Geilhufe's recent frustrations with the increasingly for-profit nature of N-TEN's national conference.

2005 April

• A Bug's-Eye View

  This is a good article for nonprofit-type folks who are thinking about getting a website.

• Ivory Tower Blogs

  striving for that loose-limbed, vernacular mode

• Your Nonprofit Needs A Blog

  Mission-Driven nonprofits have, I think, the most to gain from blogging than any other organization or type of individual. If your organization has a site, I think you really should have a blog. There are a number of clear reasons.

• The Wonder That is Script.aculo.us

  An excellent new collection of advanced javascript

• A Few Words Against Drivel and Detritus

  The visual aspects of the internet are all distractions without quality content. And that means content that is useful and clear.

2005 March

• Stock Photos Anyone?

  Stock photography is pretty essential for web developers and designers.

• RTPNet Conference in NC, USA

  RTPNet is North Carolina's only annual statewide conference that focuses specifically on nonprofit technology

• Some Web Design Books Are Dangerous

  using named vs. hex color values

• Hey Buddy, Can You Spare A Secure Socket Layer?

  Online fundraising: what's the best way to do it?

• Learning internet-think in Uzbekistan

  thoughtful article on the use of the internet and computers in Uzbekistan

2005 February

• Growing Your Nonprofit: and Alternative Model

  How do nonprofits grow?

• Add A Simple Slideshow To Your Webpage

  If you need to easily display slideshows online

• Evaluation Software

  a chart of evaluation software packages

• Stop Making Crappy Ads

  People are drawn to imagery and emotions that inspire them to work for a cause.

2005 January

• NetCorps

  I have't worked directly with them but they do good work

• JavaScript Goodies

  Even if you're new to web design and Javascript spooks you, you'd do well to look into some of the techniques that are described in the attached article.

• Using Del.icio.us

  The Linc project (based in NY) has an interesting article on their use of del.icio.us

• The Google Game

  There is no shortage of webmasters desperate to get their hard-won site noticed.

• Accessibility Is Important

  If you or your nonprofit is concerned about your pages being readable to people with limited sight or non-graphical browsers

• Branding a Nonprofit

  If you like to think about branding ...

• What is ICT?

  ICT is at the core of a movement that seeks to provide access to technology for people who would normally not have access to it

2004 December

• Is Open Source Software Ready?

  With a little bit of online research, there is often an open-source alternative to expensive programs that are needed for programs in rural/poor/developing areas.

• ONE/NW on Using Bloglines and del.icio.us

  There are some very sophisticated techniques emerging into the semi-mainstream this year. You may not have noticed, and you may not care. But if you can get the hang of it managing the blogosphere, there's a lot to be learned.

2004 July

• Hacking Internet Explorer, the Definitive Guide

  Well, this is perhaps not a definitive guide, but a good one nonetheless.

• The United Nations Report on Technology And Human Development

  Here's a great PDF version of a slightly dated -- but far-seeing -- report from the UN on the uses of emerging technologies in human development.

2004 May

• Atlas.Ti: Four Star Research Software

  Do you work with interviews or documents in which you have to make meaningful correlations between themes?

2004 February

• Paul Farmer: A (Deserving) Nonprofit Celebrity

  Paul Farmer is an amazing member of the nonprofit community, famous in his own circles of public health and international development.

• Some Rights Reserved: A Guide to the Creative Commons License

  If you're putting content on the web, you may want to look into the idea of creative commons licensing.