N-TEN
The latest dispatches from your nonprofit tech community
Updated: 57 min 34 sec ago
How Big Is Your Moat?
Flickr Photo: Lawrence OPA couple of years ago, I talked to Ed Granger-Happ about his philosophy for running the IT shop at Save the Children. He told me he was always trying to find the next innovation that would help make the field staff more efficient, or would deliver better services to the people they served. The work they do is life-saving, so he felt it was important to be always looking for better ways to get it done. He also recognized that innovation didn't have to be driven by him alone: the amount of innovation is directly related to distance from the home office. In other ...
The Web Is Dead? What Does that Mean (to Nonprofits)?
Wired has a fascinating series of articles up about the future of the Web. Everybody interested in the actual "technology" part of nonprofit technology -- as differentiated from what technology can help your organization accomplish -- should probably give it a read (and not just because Tim O'Reilly compares Steve Jobs to either Gollum or Frodo; I can't tell which).For everybody else, here are some highlights:The web browser may be in decline. The proportion of Internet traffic served through web browsers reached a peak of more than 50% in 2000, but has since declined to less ...
Crowdsourcing Events: The Citizen Gulf Project
Remember Live Aid? At the time, the most impressive thing about the concert was not how much money was raised, or how many musicians were involved, but how global it was. Concerts took place mainly in the UK and the US, but also in Australia, Japan, France, and a half a dozen other places around the world. If only for the sheer scale, it was epic, in the truest sense of the word.*Scale like that required a massive amount of centralized work, work to bring the periphery (France) into the larger whole. It was highliy orchestrated, from the content to the signage to Phil Collins' travel. How ...
NTEN Member Buzz Round-Up: August 16
Flickr Photo: Caro Wallis(Note: This is a weekly round-up of NTEN members doing and sharing their nptech awesome. Members are in bold. Tag your own news with "nten member" or "nptech" to help us find your awesome online, or contact Annaliese with your updates.) I didn't get a round-up posted last week, so I have an extra long one this week! Let's get started: Thanks, Nancy Scwhartz, for taking the recent Russian spy saga and turning it into a nonprofit marketing lesson. This article from Microsoft tries to tackle the IT "overhead" challenge nonprofits ...
Steven Slater & JetBlue Make a Great Case for Open Leadership
Flickr: mi..chaelIf you've engaged any news source this week, you've probably heard about Steven Slater. Slater is the (previously employed) JetBlue flight attendant who, upon allegedly being assaulted by a passenger, effectively quit his job with a tirade of expletives over the PA system before grabbing a beer and making a grand exit out the emergency chute (luggage in hand) at JFK airport. Slater was promptly arrested and the media blitz began. For many organizations and individuals, this would have been a disastrous situation. In the age of Charlene Li's Open Leadership, however, it ...
Net Neutrality Update: The Google/Verizon Proposal
When last we tuned in to the soap opera that IS the net neutrality debate, the fate of our Internet had been left in the hands of FCC Chairman Genachowski, who had architected a process he hoped would lead to some action. Things weren't moving quickly, but they were moving, and down a definable path. (Thanks to the nearly 500 NTEN community members who signed the nonprofit petition!) On August 4, the New York Times broke the bombshell that Verizon and Google were meeting about net neutrality to broker their own proposal. Then, on August 9, Google and Verizon took a left turn, and ...
NTEN Member Case Study: Rebranding the Accidental Techie
Flickr: kool_skatkatLast month, NTEN's Executive Director, Holly Ross, posted a provocative article on our blog: "Rebranding the Accidental Techie." In it, she admits that she loves the term "accidental techie" but that if we want to empower more nonprofit professionals to be the "tech leaders" that NTEN and others believe will help their organizations carry out their missions more effectively, then perhaps we need to ban the "accidental" label and embrace the "leader" label. I posed a question to our NTEN Members' LinkedIn Group about ...
