island⁹⁴

I was really excited about this year’s Grassroot’s Use of Technology Conference because I had submitted and had accepted a great proposal entitled “Facebook to Phone Trees: Multi-Generational Outreach Strategies” that was to be co-presented with Angela Kelly of Mass Peace Action and Daniel Karp of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW). Unfortunately I was forced to call-off the session because I’ve been worked to the bone at my daytime job and ended up running out of preparation time.

So, despite the session’s ultimate non-existance, I thought it might be valuable to post my notes for it here.

The impetus for the sessions came from some of my frustration with many technology initiatives that seek to tap into social networks like MySpace and Facebook. I often hear these initiatives couched in terms of “keeping up with the joneses” (or just tech-fetishism) rather than a measured communications strategy. Sometimes tried-and-true tools are overlooked or even forgotten. The goal of the session was to move people from thinking of the newness of a tool, to thinking of their audience (i.e. constitutents, donors or members) and what tools would most effectively reach them. We were really hoping to get an age diverse audience who would remember what things were like before the internet. …read more

Notes from Rebecca below on managing nonprofit technology projects

http://aspirationtech.org/events/mntp-sf
http://mntp.aspirationtech.org/index.php/Event_Agenda

…maybe I’ll clean this up someday.

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!!!Basic Stages of a Project
1. Initiate
* define project
* talk about start and end points, budget, participants/roles, timeline
2. Plan
* defining scope, requirements, use cases
3. Implement

4. Monitor

5. Close
*how do you know when you’re done with the project you’re working on?

*upkeep/maintenance phase?

*in “waterfall” style projects, there is just one of each step
*in “agile” style projects, the plan -> implement -> monitor cycle repeats
*know which style project it is at the beginning!

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!!!Content inventories
For redesign processes, figure out what content and navigation is currently present and how it’s organized. Include things like creation dates and web statistics; talk about the value of old content to users. This can affect how much of the content is migrated, and can give organizations insight into how they intend to communicate vs. how they’re actually communicating. For example, one PM working on the ACLU site inventoried 15,000 pages; the ACLU decided to migrate 8,000 of those, and rethought their style of technical & legal language to a more personal approach.

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!!!Scope Creep
*postpone things to phase 2
*define project endpoints in the “initiate” phase
*specifications that include what ‘’won’t'’ be included …read more

Ran across a Slashdot comment that neatly summarizes my evolution of computer preference:

…read more

“We’re placing so many demands on bees we’re forgetting that they’re a living organism and that they have a seasonal life cycle,” Marla Spivak, a honeybee entomologist at the University of Minnesota, told The Chronicle. “We’re wanting them to function as a machine. . . . We’re expecting them to get off the truck and be fine.”

From a Michael Pollan article in the NY Times Magazine. Sounds very similar to these criticisms of a mobile workforce.

Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture has an amazingly pointed criticism of modern technocracy (my word) following what is an amazing outline of both Countercultural/Communal philosophy and modern cyberculture.

One book mentioned in this conclusion is Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine:

(page 258, paragraph breaks and emphasis mine)

[Ullman’s life is] flexible and mobile and it demands that she build small tribes around a shared mission and link them together with information and information technologies. To the extent that Ullman tries to change the world, she does so as Buckminster Fuller might suggest she should: by designing new technologies for the management of information and the transformation of society’s resources into knowledge on which others can act.

Yet Ullman’s turn toward technologies of consciousness and toward social and economic networks has hardly brought her into the community she seeks… Cut off from… membership in permanent corporate and civic communities… her power derives primarily from what knowledge of technological systems she can carry with her and secondarily from her networks of professional friends. Her personal links to her colleagues are tenuous and brief. She is lonely. And the situation is not likely to change anytime soon. …read more

I don’t know if it’s my empathy for the myriad of people I know stymied in technology quagmires for good causes or a desire to combine my love of good food with my job, but this is the result.

Download a printable PDF perfect for tacking to your wall or the wall of whomever makes technology decisions at your organization.

Update: The sandwich is on Unmediated.org

Update: The sandwich is on LOLnptech.org