in Ann Arbor, MI 48103
{ Tag archives }
George won the first annual Pizzigati Prize. That’s a cash prize, but more importantly, recognition of his work in public-interest open-source software. Congratulations, again!
See George’s acceptance blog post. I’d discussed this prize before, when both George and Lewis+Ethan were finalists.
del.icio.us/nptechjobs is a pretty cool use for del.icio.us: it’s an archive of job postings, organized by state or metro, from the Nonprofit Tech Jobs e-mail list.
Results from last weekend’s project were scarce but exciting:
I’m cataloging blogs written by Ann Arbor nonprofits at annarbor+npblog on del.icio.us. My criteria are simple: it gets tagged if it is
There’s a surplus of general nonprofit blogging links at del.icio.us tagset nptech+blogging by way of netsquared; I’m just looking for local nonprofit blogs. So who am I missing?
Notes on setting up a wiki for internal use in one of my favorite organizations. I get the sense that this is the first wiki for everybody in the group, so I wanted to make a smooth experience.
Turns out that slapping up OddMuse with FCKeditor rich text instead of wiki markup, page trails for navigation, and nice CSS was both quick and very impressive.
The FCKeditor works really well: you use its built-in link tool for regular hyperlinks, and WikiWords for wiki links. In practice, this is less confusing than the ordinary wiki experience, since the two kinds of links are visually differentiated for page editors as well as page readers. I also cleaned up the FCKeditor toolbars as follows:
FCKConfig.ToolbarSets["FCKWiki"] =
[['Cut','Copy','Paste','PasteText','PasteWord','-'],
['Image','Table','Smiley','SpecialChar',
'UniversalKey'],
['Undo','Redo','-','Find','Replace','-','SelectAll',
'RemoveFormat'],
['FontFormat','FontSize','Bold','Italic',
'Underline'],
['OrderedList','UnorderedList','-','Outdent',
'Indent', 'Rule'],
['Link','Unlink'],
['About']];
This was the laziest way I could find to allow for reasonable creation of document structure — headings, lists, block quotes, etc. — without crudding up the edit page too badly.
FCKeditor doesn’t work well with OddMuse previews, and visual diffs are even more ugly than normal. However, the overall result is good enough that I’ll probably use this again. As always, thanks to Alex Schröder and others who’ve built such a nice package.
Thought exercise: how does the open company test map onto your nonprofit project?
A loose fit is OK, since we need isomorphisms rather than dogma (especially as concerns the misguided #6) and the other adopters of this test — JotSpot, XWiki, and Holy Roman Empire Wikia — are all peddling the same sort of goods. Regardless, this may be an interesting perspective on the transparency issue.
The Tides Foundation is wrapping up a cool competition:
The Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, a new annual competition, offers a $10,000 award to a software developer who has made, in the spirit of open source computing, an outstanding contribution to the nonprofit world and the ongoing work of social change.
Among the six finalists for this prize are George Hotelling’s CitizenSpeak drupal module and the Grass Commons‘ WagN wiki++. Disclosure: George I know pretty well, and at RecentChangesCamp I met and was impressed by Lewis Hoffman and Ethan McCutchen, the folks behind WagN.
Technical and design chops of the various finalists aside, I think WagN has the greatest long-term potential for the nonprofit sector (which is, after all, this prize’s focus). Brandon CS Sanders pitches WagN as promising alternative to the challenge of structured data in collaborative work:
Shoe-string operations in start-up mode simply don’t have the resources to create data that is computer-meaningful. This impedance mismatch between computers and ordinary folks is an old story that many a large project has tried to address. Most of these projects that have been going on for decades are still esoteric and inaccessible to ordinary folks.
There’s a lot that WagN needs to do that it doesn’t (yet). For example, it should offer support for typed data: while it’s easy to structure text in WagN, it’s not as immediately useful for storing things such as addresses, phone numbers, etc. This will come, as the basics are already in place.
While most of the other prize finalists are projects addressing pressing issues in front of nonprofits, WagN is addressing issues they don’t know they have: those having to do with effective (distributed, asynchronous) collaboration, knowledge management and representation, and openness in communication.
Because of that longer-term, ambitious goal — and despite the fact that, unlike several of the other finalists, it’s not quite ready for prime time — I believe WagN merits the prize, and — more importantly — your attention.
(As an aside, WagN has also been fairly disruptive towards my own “Trellis Wiki” hobbyhorse. It’s really great to see people thinking and working in this space. The other project that comes to mind is Phil Mitchell’s experimental Reef wiki.)
Congratulations and good luck to George, Lewis, Ethan, and all the other finalists!
Update: Here’s my blurb of endorsement in the Pizzigati Prize’s peer review forum. I also forgot to link to Hooze, the first WagN-powered site.
